ably restored to her brother; six hundred thousand measures of wheat were delivered to the hungry Goths; 169 and Wallia engaged to draw his sword in the service of the empire. A bloody war was instantly excited among the Barbarians of Spain; and the contending princes are said to have addressed their letters, their ambassadors, and their hostages, to the throne of the Western emperor, exhorting him to remain a tranquil spectator of their contest; the events of which must be favourable to the Romans, by the mutual slaughter of their common enemies.170 The Spanish war was obstinately supported, during three campaigns, with desperate valour and various success; and the martial achievements of Wallia diffused through the empire the superior renown of the Gothic hero. He exterminated the Silingi, who had irretrievably ruined the elegant plenty of the province of Bætica. He slew, in battle, the king of the Alani; and the remains of those Scythian wanderers who escaped from the field, instead of choosing a new leader, humbly sought a refuge under the standard of the Vandals, with whom they were ever afterwards confounded. The Vandals themselves and the Suevi yielded to the efforts of the invincible Goths. The promiscuous multitude of Barbarians, whose retreat had been intercepted, were driven into the mountains of Gallicia; where they still continued, in a narrow compass and on a barren soil, to exercise their domestic and implacable hostilities. In the pride of victory, Wallia was faithful to his engagements: he restored his Spanish conquests to the obedience of Honorius; and the tyranny of the Imperial officers soon reduced an oppressed people to regret the time of their Barbarian servitude. While the event of the war was still doubtful, the first advantages obtained by the arms of Wallia had encouraged the court of Ravenna to decree the honours of a triumph to their feeble sovereign. He entered Rome like the ancient conquerors of nations; and, if the monuments of servile corruption had not long since met with 169 This supply was very acceptable: the Goths were insulted by the Vandals of Spain with the epithet of Truli, because, in their extreme distress, they had given a piece of gold for a trula, or about half a pound of flour. Olympiod. apud Phot. p. 189. [A trula held somewhat less than rd of a pint.] 170 Orosius inserts a copy of these pretended letters. Tu cum omnibus pacem habe, omniumque obsides accipe; nos nobis confligimus, nobis perimus, tibi vincimus; immortalis vero quæstus erit Reipublicæ tuæ, si utrique pereamus. The idea is just; but I cannot persuade myself that it was entertained, or expressed, by the Barbarians. the fate which they deserved, we should probably find that a crowd of poets and orators, of magistrates and bishops, applauded the fortune, the wisdom, and the invincible courage, of the emperor Honorius, 171 tablish Aquitain. Such a triumph might have been justly claimed by the ally of Their esRome, if Wallia, before he repassed the Pyrenees, had extirpated ment in the seeds of the Spanish war. His victorious Goths, forty-three A.D. 419 years after they had passed the Danube, were established, according to the faith of treaties, in the possession of the second Aquitain: a maritime province between the Garonne and the Loire, under the civil and ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Bourdeaux. That metropolis, advantageously situated for the trade of the ocean, was built in a regular and elegant form; and its numerous inhabitants were distinguished among the Gauls by their wealth, their learning, and the politeness of their manners. The adjacent province, which has been fondly compared to the garden of Eden, is blessed with a fruitful soil and a temperate climate: the face of the country displayed the arts and the rewards of industry; and the Goths, after their martial toils, luxuriously exhausted the rich vineyards of Aquitain.172 The Gothic limits were enlarged by the additional gift of some neighbouring dioceses; and the successors of Alaric fixed their royal residence at Toulouse, which included five populous quarters, or cities, within the spacious circuit of its walls. About the same time, in the last years of the reign of Honorius, the GOTHS, the BURGUNDIANS, and the The BurFRANKS obtained a permanent seat and dominion in the provinces of Gaul. The liberal grant of the usurper Jovinus to his Burgundian allies was confirmed by the lawful emperor; the lands of the First, or Upper, Germany were ceded to those formidable Barbarians; and they gradually occupied, either by conquest or treaty, the two provinces which still retain, with the titles of Duchy and of County, the national appellation of Burgundy.17 The Franks, the valiant and faithful allies of the 171 Romam triumphans ingreditur, is the formal expression of Prosper's Chronicle. The facts which relate to the death of Adolphus, and the exploits of Wallia, are related from Olympiodorus (apud Phot. p. 188 [26]), Orosius (1. vii. c. 43, p. 584587), Jornandes (de Rebus Geticis, c. 31, 32), and the Chronicles of Idatius and Isidore. 172 Ausonius (de Claris Urbibus, p. 257-262) celebrates Bourdeaux with the partial affection of a native. See in Salvian (de Gubern. Dei, p. 228, Paris, 1608) a florid description of the provinces of Aquitain and Novem populania. 173 Orosius (I. vii. c. 32, p. 550) commends the mildness and modesty of these Burgundians who treated their subjects of Gaul as their Christian brethren. Mascou VOL. III.-24 gundians Treveror = Trèves] Roman republic, were soon tempted to imitate the invaders, [Augusta whom they had so bravely resisted. Treves, the capital of um Trier Gaul, was pillaged by their lawless bands; and the humble colony, which they so long maintained in the district of Toxandria, in Brabant, insensibly multiplied along the banks of the Meuse and Scheld, till their independent power filled the whole extent of the Second or Lower Germany. These facts may be sufficiently justified by historic evidence; but the foundation of the French monarchy by Pharamond, the conquests, the laws, and even the existence, of that hero, have been justly arraigned by the impartial severity of modern criticism.174 State of the Barbarians in Gaul. A.D. 420, &c. The ruin of the opulent provinces of Gaul may be dated from the establishment of these Barbarians, whose alliance was dangerous and oppressive, and who were capriciously impelled, by interest or passion, to violate the public peace. A heavy and partial ransom was imposed on the surviving provincials, who had escaped the calamities of war; the fairest and most fertile lands were assigned to the rapacious strangers, for the use of their families, their slaves, and their cattle; and the trembling natives relinquished with a sigh the inheritance of their fathers. Yet these domestic misfortunes, which are seldom the lot of a vanquished people, had been felt and inflicted by the Romans themselves, not only in the insolence of foreign conquest, but in the madness of civil discord. The Triumvirs proscribed eighteen of the most flourishing colonies of Italy; and distributed their lands and houses to the veterans who revenged the death of Cæsar and oppressed the liberty of their country. Two poets, of unequal fame, have deplored, in similar circumstances, the loss of their patrimony; but the legionaries of Augustus appeared to have surpassed, in violence and injustice, the Barbarians who invaded Gaul under the reign of Honorius. It was not without the utmost difficulty that Virgil escaped from the sword of the has illustrated the origin of their kingdom in the four first annotations at the end of his laborious History of the ancient Germans, vol. ii. p. 555-572, of the English translation. [For the ten Burgundies, see Appendix 1 of Bryce's Holy Roman Empire.] 174 See Mascou, 1. viii. c. 43, 44, 45. Except in a short and suspicious line of the Chronicle of Prosper (in tom. i. p. 638 [pseudo-Prosper; see Mommsen, Chron. Min. i. p. 656]) the name of Pharamond is never mentioned before the seventh [8th] century. The author of the Gesta Francorum (in tom. ii. p. 543) suggests, probably enough, that the choice of Pharamond, or at least of a king, was recommended to the Franks by his father Marcomir, who was an exile in Tuscany. centurion who had usurped his farm in the neighbourhood of Britain Armorica. Whilst Italy was ravaged by the Goths and a succession of Revolt of feeble tyrants oppressed the provinces beyond the Alps, the and British island separated itself from the body of the Roman em- A.D. 409 pire. The regular forces, which guarded that remote province, had been gradually withdrawn; and Britain was abandoned, without defence, to the Saxon pirates and the savages of Ireland and Caledonia. The Britons, reduced to this extremity, no longer relied on the tardy and doubtful aid of a declining monarch. They assembled in arms, repelled the invaders, and 175 O Lycida, vivi pervenimus: advena nostri See the whole of the ninth Eclogue, with the useful Commentary of Servius. Fifteen 176 See the remarkable passage of the Eucharisticon of Paulinus, 575, apud Mascou, 1. viii. c. 42. [See Appendix 1.] 177 This important truth is established by the accuracy of Tillemont (Hist. des Emp. tom. v. p. 641) and by the ingenuity of the Abbé Dubos (Hist. de l'Etablissement de la Monarchie Françoise dans les Gaules, tom. i. p. 259). rejoiced in the important discovery of their own strength.178 Afflicted by similar calamities and actuated by the same spirit, the Armorican provinces (a name which comprehended the maritime countries of Gaul between the Seine and the Loire 179) resolved to imitate the example of the neighbouring island. They expelled the Roman magistrates who acted under the authority of the usurper Constantine; and a free government was established among a people who had so long been subject to the arbitrary will of a master. The independence of Britain and Armorica was soon confirmed by Honorius himself, the lawful emperor of the West; and the letters, by which he committed to the new states the care of their own safety, might be interpreted as an absolute and perpetual abdication of the exercise and rights of sovereignty. This interpretation was, in some measure, justified by the event. After the usurpers of Gaul had successively fallen, the maritime provinces were restored to the empire. Yet their obedience was imperfect and precarious: the vain, inconstant, rebellious disposition of the people was incompatible either with freedom or servitude,180 and Armorica, though it could not long maintain the form of a republic,181 was agitated by frequent and destructive revolts. Britain was irrecoverably lost. 182 But, as the emperors wisely acquiesced in the independ 178 Zosimus (1. vi. p. 376, 383 [5 and 10]) relates in a few words the revolt of Britain and Armorica. Our antiquarians, even the great Cambden himself, have been betrayed into many gross errors by their imperfect knowledge of the history of the continent. 179 The limits of Armorica are defined by two national geographers, Messieurs de Valois and d'Anville, in their Notitias of Ancient Gaul. The word had been used in a more extensive, and was afterwards contracted to a much narrower, signification. 180 Gens inter geminos notissima clauditur amnes, Erricus Monach. in Vit. St. Germani, l. v. apud Vales. Notit. Galliarum, p. 43. Valesius alleges several testimonies to confirm this character; to which I shall add the evidence of the presbyter Constantine (A.D. 488), who, in the life of St. Germain, calls the Armorican rebels mobilem et indisciplinatum populum. See the Historians of France, tom. i. p. 643. 181 I thought it necessary to enter my protest against this part of the system of the Abbé Dubos, which Montesquieu has so vigorously opposed. See Esprit des Loix, 1. xxx. c. 24. 182 Βρεταννίαν μέντοι Ῥωμαῖοι ἀνασώσασθαι οὔκετι εἶχον are the words of Procopius (de Bell. Vandal. 1. i. c. 2, p. 181, Louvre edition) in a very important passage which has been too much neglected. Even Bede (Hist. Gent. Anglican. I. i. c. 12, p. 50, edit. Smith) acknowledges that the Romans finally left Britain in |