A Short History of Spain

rough, strong races from the north menace, and at last rudely dominate more highly civilized but less hardy ra

at vigorous strain without which the history of Greece might have been a very tame affair. In the British Isles it was the Picts and Scots, who would have done the same thing with England, perhaps, if the Angles and Saxons had not come to the rescue, while Spain ha

espoused Christianity, did it become obvious that its foundations were undermined by this flood of barbarians. In 410 A.D., when the West-Goths, under Alaric, entered and sacked Rome,

but the Suevi and the Vandals-the latter a companion tribe of the Goths-had found an easier entrance by the sea on the east. They flowed down toward the south, and from thence across to the northern coast of Africa, which they colonized, leaving a memorial in Spain, in

ellectual superiority; and even strove to acquire some of the arts and accomplishments of the race they were invading. They were not yet acknowledged entire masters of Gaul and northern S

e told than in the words of Ataulf himself (or Ataulfus, or Ado

e barbarism of the Goths would not suffer them to live under the sway of law, and that the abolition of the institutions on which the state rested would involve the ruin of the state itself, I cho

ly nobles in Rome he was considered one; but no doubt he towered far abov

ic, and succeeded that great leader i

uspect, for we learn of her great devotion to her brave, strong wooer, with blond hair and blue eyes. Ataulf took his fair prize to the city of Narbonne in southern France, and made her his Queen. But when Constant

people that he was becoming effeminate and Romanized; and, finally, so jealous did they become of her influence that Ataulf was assassinate

l widow, who married him and became the mother of Valentinian III., who succeeded his uncl

n for many years remained only an outlying province of the Gothic kingdom; her turbulent northern tribes refusing to accept or to mingle with the strange intruders. When driven by the Romans fro

e an army of demons than men,-destroying city after city, and driving the people before them, until they came to Orléans. There they met the combined Roman and Gothic

panish Peninsula, and with him really commences the line of Visigoth kings in Spain,

trogoths had their own kingdom in northern Italy and southern Gaul (Burgundy). So, with the Visigoths ruling in Spain, the "northern deluge"

nt, after the fusing was complete, was to be the Teutonic; in the other, the Roman. Herein lies the difference between these two great divisions of the human family, and this is

it clean of Roman laws, literature, and civilization. Untamed pagan barbarians though they were, they had fine

s of Ataulf-"to renew and maintain by Gothic strength the fame of Rome." So they built upon the ruins of decaying institutions of a corrupt civi

versed in strategic arts, and with a savor of archaic wickedness which belongs to a corrupt old age. In the American we see the child of the sim

ic code established by him still lin