Gathering his innumerable peoples upon the borders of the Danube, Attila divided his armies into two parts. The first army was to march to the Rhine by the right or southern bank of the Danube, by the great Roman military way, past all the Roman fortresses of the frontier of the Empire, each of which was to be destroyed as it advanced. The second army was to march by the left or northern bank of the Danube, and to meet the first near the sources of that river where, in the great forests of Germany, the two armies were to provide themselves with the materials necessary for their transport into Gaul. There, while they hewed down the trees in thousands, they were met by the Franks who had deserted or killed their young king the protégé of Aetius, and now flocked to his brother under the standard of Attila; certain of the Thuringians and the Burgundians also made common cause with them. The chief business immediately before Attila was the passage of the Rhine, and it was in order to furnish material for bridges for this purpose that his armies had hewn down the trees by thousands in the ancient “Hercynian” forest. That passage would perhaps have been impossible and certainly very difficult if it had been contested. It was not contested, and to understand the reason why, we must understand the political condition of Gaul. In the course of the last half-century the great province of Gaul had suffered grievously, though not so grievously as Britain, which had almost lost its identity, nor so hopelessly as Africa, which was completely lost to civilisation. What had happened was this: all the further parts of Gaul had fallen into the occupation of the Barbarians as well as that violated corner enclosed on the west by the Jura, where the Burgundians had established themselves. In northern Gaul, in what we now call Picardy, Belgium and Luxembourg, the Franks were settled, the Salian Franks to the west about the cities of Tongres, Tournay, Arras, Cambrai, Amiens; the Ripuarian Franks to the east on either side the Rhine about Cologne, Mentz, Coblenz and Treves. To the south of the Salian Franks the Saxons held the coast and the lower reaches of the Seine, to the south of them lay Armorica, as far as the Loire, an isolated province of Bretons to the south of them as far as the Pyrenees, occupying all Aquitaine were the Visigoths under Theodoric. Central Gaul, however, with its cities of Metz, Strasburg, Troyes, Langres, Orleans, Lyons, Vienne, Arles, Narbonne, and the town of Lutetia or Paris, remained within the Roman power and administration which though in decay and very largely clericalised, as we shall see, was still a reality.