In the following centuries Gaul was overrun with tribes from the east, Goths and Visigoths, Alemnanni and Huns, Burgundians and Franks. The last-named broke down the Roman defences all over the land and seized upon Paris. A new era now began for the city. Under Clovis, the first Frank king, it became the official capital of the State in 508, and from this time forward takes its place as one of the great cities of France. After the conversion of Clovis, abbeys and churches were built, great bishops and great saints preached and wrote their message, and indeed the ecclesiastical fabric of the city seems to have grown up more quickly than the civil fabric, until the time of Charlemagne, when craftsmen’s guilds were established, Jewish capitalists admitted within the walls, and a mercantile reputation founded. Then a second time the work of the conquerors seemed to be undone. The Northmen, more terrible invaders than Goths or Franks, plundered the coast-lands and presently swept up the Seine past Rouen to Paris, where they worked such havoc as the town had never before known. The streets were set in flames, the monasteries were sacked and burnt, the priests and monks were massacred without mercy; yet all this evil was to end in better things. The very persistency of the Normans in besieging and pillaging a town four and five times, argued that the town itself must be worth the trouble, and the “lords” of Paris speedily began to look to its safety. Weak, foolish Charles the Fat could devise no better plan than the cowardly one of bribing the invaders to retreat; but Eudes, Count of Paris, knew that this would only be an inducement to them to come again, and determined once and for all to rid his city, at least, of this scourge. This he did with such effect that the crown of France was given to him and the inefficient Charles deposed. It was his nephew, Hugh the Great, who ruled at Paris in Rolf’s day, and waged constant war with Neustria and Charles the Simple, the last of the Carlovingian kings, on the hill-crest at Lâon. Then, at the end of the tenth century, began the feudal monarchy under the Capetian dynasty. The first of the line was the eldest son of Hugh the Great, and the connections which he brought with him promised well for the prestige of his new kingdom. On the one side, he was brother-in-law to the Norman Duke, Richard the Fearless; on the other, his own brother Odo was Duke of Burgundy; in his own right he was lord of Picardy, of Maine, of Chartres, of Tours, of Blois, and of Orléans; and his bond with the Church was further strengthened by the fact that he held the lay abbacies of Saint Martin, near Tours, and Saint Denis, near Paris. Thus the kingdom with which Hugh Capet began his reign was a fairly compact strip of land, having as boundaries Flanders to the north, Aquitaine to the south, Champagne to the east, and Normandy to the west. Of this kingdom Paris was nearly the actual