Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/428

 412 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

The kingdom of the Ostrogoths extended over the whole of Italy as far as the Alps on the west, and the Danube on the north and the east, and included Noricum, Pannonia, and Dalmatia as far as Cattaro on the Adriatic. The Roman Empire no longer included anything but the peninsula south of the Danube, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, and the two Libyas. The rest of the north coast of Africa was held by the Vandals, with the Balearics, Corsica, and Sardinia. Where in all this are the natural fron- tiers ? When the frontier chances to be represented by mountains and rivers, it is always temporarily, just as if it were a matter of simple guide-boards. And yet it will not occur to any sensible person to say that it is the guide-board which makes the frontier. Moreover, the boundaries of these newly constituted kingdoms, like those of the empire, were changing continually. In 526, at the death of Theodoric, the kingdom of the Visigoths was over- thrown in Spain, but it continued to occupy Provencial Septi- mania, on the other side of the Pyrenees in Gaul. In Spain itself the kingdom of the Suevi extended the length of the mountains among the Cantabri and the Basques. The kingdom of Bur- gundy was slightly modified, but that of the Franks extended now from the Pyrenees northward, embracing, besides its former basins, those of the Garonne, the Dordogne and the Vienne. That of the Ostrogoths continued. All that one may conclude is the tendency in the West toward the establishment of three great states : Italy, Spain, and France ; but neither mountains nor rivers formed their a priori boundaries. Spain retained, in geo- graphical Gaul, Septimania, while Italy possessed, beyond the Alps, the lower valley of the Rhone, and also Raetia, Noricum, Pannonia, and Dalmatia ; the Franks also held Alemannia.

This situation was an unstable one, by reason of the internal social constitution as well as of intersocial relations and conflicts. Thus, in the kingdom of the Franks, the German custom of divi- sion of the sovereignty among the sons of the king, either at or before his death, tended constantly to the destruction of political unity, without taking account of other peoples that would continue to disturb the map of the West a map which was destined to be modified, independently of this consideration, by the fact that all