Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/152

 Ho THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES ing Teutons neither exterminated nor drove out the earlier Latinised population; they settled down among them as masters, but coalesced with them, and were absorbed by them instead of absorbing them. Beyond the Rhine and the Danube, where the migrating Teutons had met with no organised civilisa- tion, they exterminated, swallowed up, or drove out before them, all the peoples they met, and they remained Teutonic with very slight modification. We may see that the rule applies also to Britain, which was not taken into the Roman Empire until the reign of Claudius. . Britain was a Roman outpost, but it never acquired more than a veneer of Latinity. The Roman legions had been withdrawn from it for half a century before the Teutonic invasion began in earnest; hence the Celtic inhabitants were either exterminated by the invaders, or absorbed into their slave population, or driven into the fast- nesses of the north and west. In Britain, as in the lands east of the Rhine, the Teutons remained Teutonic and were never Latinised. Before the break up of the Roman Empire, the fierce tribes of the Vandals had swept through Gaul into Spain. In the Vandals fifth century they were followed by the stronger in Africa. tribes of the Visigoths, who withdrew from Italy to found a dominion in the west. Before them the Vandals retired into Africa, where they ruled and tyrannised for a hundred years, till they were wiped out by Belisarius. So ended the brief Teutonic supremacy in Africa, giving place to a restoration of the Byzantine supremacy. During the seventh century that supremacy was wrested from the eastern empire by the advance of the Saracens, who extended their conquests to the Atlantic. In the meanwhile the Visigoths had conquered the south of France and the whole of Spain, where the Vandals left their The Goths trace on ^Y i n the name of the great province of in Spain. Andalusia. The Gothic conquest of Spain was not on the whole destructive. They were the least bloodthirsty of the Teutonic tribes, and comparatively speaking at least their treatment of conquered races was generous. But they did not develop a high political organisation.