At the head of the Visigoths rode Athaulf, brother-in-law of Alaric, unanimously chosen king by the tribe on the death of that mighty warrior.[1] Instead of continuing the campaign in South Italy, Athaulf had made peace with the Emperor Honorius and married his sister, thus gaining a semi-royal position in the eyes of Roman citizens. ‘I once aspired,’ he said frankly, ‘to obliterate the name of Rome and to erect on its ruins the dominion of the Goths, but ... I was gradually convinced that laws are essentially necessary to maintain and regulate a well-constituted state.... From that moment, I proposed to myself a different object of glory and ambition; and it is now my sincere wish that the gratitude of future ages should acknowledge the merits of a stranger, who employed the sword of the Goths, not to subvert, but to restore and maintain the prosperity of the Roman Empire.’ Fortified by such sentiments and the benediction of the Emperor, who was glad to free Italy from his brother-in-law’s presence, Athaulf succeeded, after a short struggle, in establishing a Visigothic kingdom in southern Gaul, stretching from the Mediterranean to the Bay of Biscay. This, under his successors, was enlarged until it embraced the whole of the province of Aquitania, with Toulouse as its capital, as well as both slopes of the Pyrenees. The Burgundians, another German tribe, had, in the meanwhile, built up a middle kingdom along the banks of the Rhone. Years of intercourse with the Romans had done much to civilize both their manners and thoughts, and they were quite prepared to respect the laws and customs that they found in Gaul so long as they met with no serious opposition to their rule. The fact that both Burgundians and Visigoths were Arians raised, however, a fatal barrier between conquerors and conquered, and did more than anything else to determine that ultimate dominion over the whole of Gaul should be the prize of neither of these races, but of a third Teutonic tribe, the Salian Franks, whom good fortune placed beyond the influence of heresy. [Sidenote: The Franks] The Franks were a tall, fair-haired, loose-limbed people, who, emerging from Germany, had settled for a time in the country we now call Belgium. Like their ancestors, they worshipped Woden and other heathen gods of the Teutons, while in their Salic law we see much to recall the German customs described by Tacitus five centuries before.