A History of Germany from the Earliest Times to the Present DayTaylor, Bayard
History
A History of Germany from the Earliest Times to the Present Day
Taylor, Bayard
Germany -- History
He made use of this time to intimidate the Franks and Saxons. Starting
from Lutetia (now Paris) early in the summer of 358, he drove the Franks
beyond the Schelde, received their submission, and then marched a second
time against the Alemanni. He laid waste their well-settled and
cultivated land between the Rhine, the Main and the Neckar, crossed
their territory to the frontiers of the Burgundians (in what is now
Franconia, or Northern Bavaria), liberated 20,000 Roman captives, and
made the entire Alemannic people tributary to the Empire. His accession
to the imperial throne, in 360, delivered the Germans from the most
dangerous and dreaded enemy they had known since the time of Germanicus.
[Sidenote: 375. TERRITORY OF THE GOTHS.]
Not many years elapsed before the Franks and Alemanni again overran the
old boundaries, and the Saxons landed on the shores of England. The
Emperor Valentinian employed both diplomacy and force, and succeeded in
establishing a temporary peace; but after his death, in the year 375,
the Roman Empire, the capital of which had been removed to
Constantinople in 330, was never again in a condition to maintain its
supremacy in Gaul, or to prevent the Germans from crossing the Rhine.
We now return to the Goths, who already occupied the broad territory
included in Poland, Southern Russia, and Roumania. The river Dniester
may be taken as the probable boundary between the two kingdoms into
which they had separated. The Ostrogoths, under their aged king,
Hermanric, extended from that river eastward nearly to the Caspian Sea:
on the north they had no fixed boundary, but they must have reached to
the latitude of Moscow. The Visigoths stretched westward from the
Dniester to the Danube, and northward from Hungary to the Baltic Sea.
The Vandals were for some generations allied with the latter, but war
having arisen between them, the Emperor Constantine interposed. He
succeeded in effecting a separation of the two, and in settling the
Vandals in Hungary, where they remained for forty years under the
protection of the Roman Empire.
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