The Flemings of Belgium are remnants of the original Franks who retained their own language. Most of these invaders, like the Franks, Visigoths, Lombards, and Normans, adopted the Latin language of their subject peoples when they settled within the confines of the Roman Empire.
Except in eastern England and northern France the numbers of the conquering Nordics were not sufficient entirely to evict and replace the conquered populations, but they everywhere formed the upper classes and land-owning aristocracy and to this day these same classes in all European nations continue to show, in more or less purity, the physical characters of the Nordic race.
During the Middle Ages, the dominating and war-like Nordics paused long enough from fighting each other to carry on the Crusades and to beat back the onrush of the Saracens at Tours in 732 A.D. They saved Europe from the Mongols in 1241 A.D. at the Battle of Liegnitz (now Wahlstatt) in Silesia where the Duke of Liegnitz and the Nordic nobility, outnumbered five to one, lay dead upon the field of battle; but checked the advance of the Asiatic hordes and saved the budding civilization of Europe from the fate of Asia.
This race supplied the navigators of the expansion period, when the world was for the first time opened up in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and since then they have formed the fighting men, soldiers, sailors, explorers, hunters, adventurers, and frontiersmen of Europe and her colonies.
After mastering the north of France, the Franks subjugated the remnants of the Burgundians and destroyed the Visigothic kingdom which still flourished in the south of Gaul. They also conquered the country on the east bank of the Rhine known as Franconia, and under Charlemagne seized northern Italy. In 800 A.D. Charlemagne revived the Western Roman Empire, which under various guises lasted down to 1807.
Charlemagne's greatest and most difficult conquest, however, was that of the Saxons, who were pure Nordics. They occupied the districts of northwest Germany, centering in Hanover, and even today this part of Germany is still the most Nordic portion of that country.
When Charlemagne reached the Elbe in his conquests he found beyond it the heathen Alpine Wends and from his day down to the World War, the history of Central Europe has been the pushing back of the frontier of Alpine Asia from the Elbe eastward toward the Urals.
These eastern lands were conquered and little by little Christianized and civilized from the west. This process went on as far as the Vistula, where it met the culture, and Greek Orthodox religion, of the Byzantine Empire, which had followed up the rivers of Russia from the Black Sea and had given to Moscovia and to the Ukraine their religion, alphabet, and art.
The Northmen were the last of the Nordic barbarians to appear on the scene. In the ninth and tenth centuries they raided the coasts of Europe from England to Greece. They established themselves as permanent settlers on all the Scottish islands and on many parts of the Scottish coast. In Caithness, the northernmost corner of Scotland, Norse was spoken as late as the seventeenth century. They formed settlements and left place names all around the coasts of Wales and England. In the tenth century as Danes they subjugated northeastern England and imposed their rule east of the line of Watling Street, which runs from London to Chester. These Danes had barely been overcome by the Saxons when a new group of Nordics arrived as Normans from France and conquered England in 1066.
Ireland was attacked by the Norse who came in from the north and by the Danes who entered from the south. The island was overrun by these two peoples who have left many traces in the place names and in the blood of Ireland.