When the Visigoths, distressed by the Huns, besought the Eastern Emperor Valens for permission to cross the Danube, one of the conditions imposed upon them was that they should all be baptized in the Christian faith (see p. 336). This seems to have crowned the work that had been going on among them for some time, and thereafter they were called Christians. What happened to the Goths happened also to most of the barbarian tribes that participated in the overthrow of the Roman empire in the West. By the time of the fall of Rome, the Goths, the Vandals, the Suevi, the Burgundians, had all become proselytes to Christianity. The greater part of them, however, professed the Arian creed, which had been condemned by the great council of the church held at Nicæa during the reign of Constantine the Great (see p. 332). Hence they were regarded as heretics by the Roman Church, and all had to be reconverted to the orthodox creed, which was gradually effected. The remaining Teutonic tribes of whose conversion we shall speak,--the Franks, the Anglo Saxons, the Scandinavians, and the chief tribes of Germany,--embraced at the outset the Catholic faith. CONVERSION OF THE FRANKS.--The Franks, when they entered the empire, like the Angles and Saxons when they landed in Britain, were still pagans. Christianity gained way very slowly among them until a supposed interposition by the Christian God in their behalf led the king and nation to adopt the new religion in place of their old faith. The circumstances were these. In the year 496 of our era, the Alemanni crossed the Rhine and fell upon the Franks. A desperate battle ensued. In the midst of it, Clovis, falling upon his knees, called upon the God of the Christians, and solemnly vowed that if He would give victory to his arms, he would become his faithful follower. The battle turned in favor of the Franks, and Clovis, faithful to his vow, was baptized, and with him several thousand of his warriors. This incident illustrates how the very superstitions of the barbarians, their belief in omens and divine interpositions, contributed to their conversion. AUGUSTINE'S MISSION TO THE ANGLES AND SAXONS IN BRITAIN.--In the year 596 Pope Gregory I. sent the monk Augustine with a band of forty companions to teach the Christian faith in Britain. Gregory had become interested in the inhabitants of that remote region in the following way. One day, some years before his elevation to the papal chair, he was passing through the slave-market at Rome, and noticed there some English captives, whose fair features awakened his curiosity respecting them. Inquiring of what nation they were, he was told that they were called Angles. "Right," said he, "for they have an angelic face, and it becomes such to become co-heirs with the angels in heaven." A little while afterwards he was elected Pope, and still mindful of the incident of the slave-market, he sent to the Angles the embassy to which we have alluded.