Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/91

Rh beginning of the second century. The Goths thereupon spread into this abandoned province, and henceforth were I found along the Danube as well as to the north of the Black Sea. They divided into two peoples, the East and West Goths, or Ostrogoths and Visigoths.

In the fourth century a.d. we see signs of the conversion of the Goths to Christianity. Those in what we call the Crimea were represented by a bishop at the [Ulfilas and the conversion of the Goths] Council of Nicsea in 325. The chief missionary was Ulfilas (311-381), an Arian or unorthodox Christian who worked among the West Goths in Dacia. His ancestors had been carried off by the Goths, and he himself was "in heart and by speech a Goth." He had his troubles, however, with the heathen king, Athanaric, and most of his converts moved with him into Roman territory. He is famous for his translation of the Bible into the Gothic vernacular, which gives us our earliest example of writing in a Germanic language. Three hundred years elapse before we have another specimen. The manuscripts of Ulfilas's Bible which have come down to us comprise a few chapters of the Old Testament and a large part of the Gospels and Epistles. The story goes that he refrained from translating such books as First and Second Kings and First and Second Samuel on the ground that the Goths were too fond of fighting already. Since the Goths as yet had neither books nor writing of their own, he had to invent an alphabet, using the Greek letters.

We have spoken of the Pontus Steppe — in other words, the Russian plain to the north of the Black Sea — as lying open to inroads from western Asia. We must [The mounted nomads of Turkestan] now go on to describe the people who inhabited the basin of the Caspian and Aral Seas and the deserts of Turkestan. Here lived the mounted nomads of Altaian race. These Asiatics were of short stature, with small hands and feet, but strong bones, a comparatively long trunk, and a decided tendency to corpulence. Incessant horseback riding made their legs bowed and their gait waddling. Their faces were broad, especially their noses,