Page:The age of Justinian and Theodora (Volume 1).djvu/190

 the globe, engendered a teeming population, nomads for the most part, without fixed abodes, who threatened continually to overflow their boundaries and bring destruction on every settled state lying in their path. Among such races the army and the nation were equivalent terms; the whole people moved together, and inhabited for the time being whatever lands they had gained by right of conquest. But their career was brought to a close when they subdued nations much more numerous than themselves, with fixed habitations and engaged in the arts of peace; and they then possessed the country as a dominant minority, which, whilst giving a peculiar tincture to the greater mass, was gradually assimilated by it. In classical and modern times conquest usually signifies merely annexation, but in the Middle Ages it implied actual occupation by the victors. Such was the fate of the Western Empire, when Italy, Africa, Spain, Gaul, and Britain were dissevered from each other by various inroads; and those countries at the time I am writing of are found to be in such a transitional state. Nor can Thrace and Illyricum, though forming a main portion of the Eastern Empire, be properly omitted from this list; for, exposed to barbarian incursions during more than two centuries, they enjoyed a merely nominal settlement under the Imperial government; and if we contemplate the Long Wall of