The greatest story in the world, period 2 (of 3)

by Horace G. Hutchinson

So now we may sum up these invasions of the various barbarian tribes and see what they amounted to and what effect they had on our story.

The Visigoths continued on in Spain until the Saracens and the Moors came to overthrow their Spanish kingdom in 710.

The Huns ceased, for some centuries, to be a danger to the West about 450, though at least a hundred years later they were a menace to Constantinople and the East, and even as late as 900 they were again threatening Northern Italy. The Vandals went out of the story, in the curious way that we have seen, in 533.

About 550 the Ostrogothic kingdom in North Italy was likewise ended.

Belisarius

Incidentally, we note that it was by the great Byzantine general Belisarius, that these last three were defeated and sent out of the story. None of the three left a very lasting impression on it, but that cannot be said of the Visigoths, who altered the way in which people lived both in Gaul and Spain very considerably. The Lombards' kingdom was swallowed up, as we saw, by Charlemagne, in 744. They, too, left little mark on the story.

There remain, however (and their kingdom does not, like that of the others, come to an end), the Franks. The others go, but the Franks stay. Charlemagne absorbs into his own domains many others besides those Lombards. He absorbs the Burgundians, the Saxons (this name had by now been transferred from those Northern Saxons who were sea-pirates and came to Britain, to a people occupying part of that territory in south-west Germany which is still called Saxony) and many besides.

With Charlemagne we come to the beginnings of Europe such as we know Europe now. But in order to see how Europe began at that time to seem something like the Europe that we know we must go back again to "the Eternal City," as it has been called—to Rome—and see what has been happening there, and especially what it is that has happened which has brought into being and into his great importance in the story that personage of whom we made our first mention only a page or two back—the Pope.