Now a great part of the reason why the Vandals in Spain were so very ready to respond to the invitation of the Count of Africa was that the Visigoths with some allied tribes were pressing upon them there very much more severely than was pleasant. Spain is a country, as you should know, very much cut up and divided by mountain ranges, so that it was difficult for any conqueror to conquer the whole of the country, because those who were defeated could retreat into the mountainous places from which it was hard to hunt them out. You will find this happening again and again in the story of what we now call Spain. It is not certain, but it seems likely, that the people called Basques, living along the Pyrenees, are descendants of those Celts whom we saw moving westward and settling as Brythons in Britain and in Brittany. If that is so, they have maintained their language and their national character to this day, in spite of the many conquerors that have, at one time or other in the great story, had possession of the greater part of Spain.
I write sometimes of "Spain" and sometimes of "Italy," and so forth, because it seems the natural and easy way of indicating the lands which we now speak of by those names; but they were not so known at the time of which I am telling you. And I would warn you against a mistake into which we are only too ready to fall—the mistake of supposing that this Spain and this Italy, for example, have certain natural boundaries—that there is any particular reason, apart from the arrangements, the treaties and so on, which nations, in the course of the story, have made with each other, why they should have the bounds which are set to them to-day. It is true that these arrangements about the territory allotted to each are determined in some measure by the natural features, as we call them—by mountain ranges and by big rivers—but if it were not for these arrangements there is no reason in nature why the countries should be divided out among mankind as they are, and the divisions are continually being changed all through the story.
Now the Visigoths, as soon as they were free of the Vandals, extended their Kingdom of Toulouse, as it was called, towards the west until they were masters of nearly all Spain; but that was not until, in conjunction with the Romans, they had attended to another business further north—that is to the invasion of Gaul by Attila, King of the Huns. That Hunnish invasion was checked and pushed back by a great battle fought near Chalons in 451; and, curiously enough, it was almost exactly at the same place that the advance of the Eastern power, the Germans, was checked and repelled in the Great War of a few years ago. In this battle against the Huns, which was one of the battles that has made a great difference in the story of the world, there were fighting together, Romans, Visigoths and also Franks.
The Franks
The Franks, as we saw before, were perhaps the first of the Germanic tribes to break through the Roman wall. But on that first incursion they were repulsed and made a treaty with the Empire. Then they came again in the year 429 and, though defeated once, gradually fought their way south beyond the Somme River, and eventually right down to the Loire. South of that region they fought as allies of the Romans as late as 460.
The battle at, or near, Chalons counted for a great deal in our story. The Huns were a far more savage and uncultured people than any of the former invading tribes, and it really was a battle fought on behalf of civilisation, as civilisation was then understood, between the Romans, Goths, and Franks on the one side and the Huns and savagery on the other. And with these Huns were some of the Ostrogoths, whom we thus find fighting against their own kinsmen. One of the results of the battle was that the Ostrogoths now shook off the yoke of the Huns and became again an independent people.
And not only was the battle of Chalons a battle on behalf of civilisation; it was a battle on behalf of Christianity too, for the Huns—probably one and all—and the Ostrogoths, for the most part, were pagans, and the Goths and Franks and Romans nearly all Christians.
Therefore you see that Romans and barbarians had come together and made common cause, as we say, by the middle of the fifth century. Let us see what was happening in Britain in the meantime, now that the Roman soldiers had been withdrawn from it.