VII. The Germans In Gaul - The Franks And Clovis

"Order ye, therefore, according to your custom, prayers of thanksgiving, for we have slain four thousand of the enemy; we have had offered to us sixteen thousand men ready armed; and we have wrested from the enemy the seventy most important towns. The Gauls, in fact, are completely delivered. The crowns offered to me by all the cities of Gaul I have submitted, Conscript Fathers, to your grace; dedicate ye them with your own hands to Jupiter, all-bountiful, all-powerful, and to the other immortal gods and goddesses. All the booty is re-taken, and, further, we have made fresh captures, more considerable than our first losses; the fields of Gaul are tilled by the oxen of the barbarians, and German teams bend their necks in slavery to our husbandmen; divers nations raise cattle for our consumption, and horses to remount our cavalry; our stores are full of the corn of the barbarians—in one word, we have left to the vanquished nought but the soil; all their other possessions are ours. We had at first thought it necessary, Conscript Fathers, to appoint a new Governor of Germany; but we have put off this measure to the time when our ambition shall be more completely satisfied, which will be, as it seems to us, when it shall have pleased Divine Providence to increase and multiply the forces of our armies."

Probus had good reason to wish that "Divine Providence might be pleased to increase the forces of the Roman armies," for even after his victories, exaggerated as they probably were, they did not suffice for their task, and it was not long before the vanquished recommenced war. He had dispersed over the territory of the Empire the majority of the prisoners he had taken. A band of Franks, who had been transported and established as a military colony on the European shore of the Black Sea, could not make up their minds to remain there. They obtained possession of some vessels, traversed the Propontis, the Hellespont, and the Archipelago, ravaged the coasts of Greece, Asia Minor, and Africa, plundered Syracuse, scoured the whole of the Mediterranean, entered the ocean by the Straits of Gibraltar, and, making their way up again along the coasts of Gaul, arrived at last at the mouths of the Rhine, where they once more found themselves at home amongst the vines which Probus, in his victorious progress, had been the first to have planted, and with probably their old taste for adventure and plunder.

After the commencement of the fifth century, from A.D. 406 to 409, it was no longer by incursions limited to certain points, and sometimes repelled with success, that the Germans harassed the Roman provinces: a veritable deluge of divers nations, forced one upon another, from Asia into Europe, by wars and migration in mass, inundated the Empire and gave the decisive signal for its fall. St. Jerome did not exaggerate when he wrote to Ageruchia, "Nations, countless in number and exceeding fierce, have occupied all the Gauls; Quadians, Vandals, Sarmatians, Alans, Gepidians, Herulians, Saxons, Burgundians, Allemannians, Pannonians, and even Assyrians have laid waste all that there is between the Alps and the Pyrenees, the ocean and the Rhine. Sad destiny of the commonwealth! Mayence, once a noble city, hath been taken and destroyed; thousands of men were slaughtered in the church. Worms hath fallen after a long siege. The inhabitants of Rheims, a powerful city, and those of Amiens, Arras, Terouanne, at the extremity of Gaul, Tournay, Spires, and Strasburg have been carried away to Germany. All hath been ravaged in Aquitania (Novempopulania), Lyonness, and Narbonness; the towns, save a few, are dispeopled; the sword pursueth them abroad and famine at home. I cannot speak without tears of Toulouse; if she be not reduced to equal ruin, it is to the merits of her holy Bishop Exuperus that she oweth it."

Contents