Page:A Short History of the World.djvu/211

 Between Rome and China 191 of division and confusion began from which China did not fairly recover until the seventh century a.d. with the coming of the great Tang dynasty. The infection spread through Asia to Europe. It raged throughout the Roman Empire from a.d. 164 to 180. It evidently weakened the Roman imperial fabric very seriously. We begin to hear of depopulation in the Roman provinces after this, and there was a marked deterioration in the vigour and efficiency of government. At any rate we presently find the frontier no longer invulnerable, but giving way first in this place and then in that. A new Nordic people, the Goths, coming originally from Gothland in Sweden, had migrated across Russia to the Volga region and the shores of the Black Sea and taken to the sea and piracy. By the end of the second century they may have begun to feel the westward thrust of the Huns. In 247 they crossed the Danube in a great land raid, and defeated and killed the Emperor Decius in a battle in what is now Serbia. In 236 another Germanic people, the Franks, had broken bounds upon the Lower Rhine, and the Alemaimi had poured into Alsace. The legions in Gaul beat back their invaders, but the Goths in the Balkan peninsula raided again and again. The province of Dacia vanished from Roman history. A chill had come to the pride and confidence of Rome. In 270- 275 Rome, which had been an open and secure city for three centuries, was fortified by the Emperor Aurelian.