A.D. 1029, Aversa was founded; a fact common to the history of both Sicily and Southern Italy; from which the rule of the Normans in Sicily, Apulia, and Calabria dates. Its details are those of a romance; the deeds of a small but unscrupulous body of adventurers, too few to impress any new character on the stock with which they came in contact. Still they require mention, though but a handful of men. They were of mixed blood themselves; Scandinavian on the fathers’, French on the mothers’, side; French, too, in speech. They were recruited by heterogeneous accessions from Southern Italy. “Si vicinorum quis perniciosus ad illos Confugiebat, eum gratanter suscipiebant: _Moribus et linguâ_ quoscunque venire videbant Informant propriâ, gens efficiatur ut una.”[10] [Sidenote: A.D. 1204.] The beginning of the thirteenth century sees the break-up of the Norman power, and Sicily transferred to the empire; one of the more notable facts of this transfer being the removal of sixty thousand Saracens to Nocera, in the south of Italy. _Saracen_, however, though it means Mahometan, by no means, necessarily, means Arab. Then we have the dominion of the French, ending with the Sicilian Vespers, and the death of eight thousand of them. Catalonians, Genoese, Modern Greeks, and Albanians (?) complete the list of the elements of intermixture in Sicily; notwithstanding which, and notwithstanding all the previous immigrations, I believe the basis of the stock to be Sikel chiefly, and next to Sikel, Greek. [Sidenote: A.D. 400.] [Sidenote: A.D. 406.] [Sidenote: A.D. 476-490.] With continental Italy the elements of admixture, until the time of Odoacer, were due to the barbarian legions in the service of Rome, rather than to the inroads of any barbarian conquerors; since Alaric, with his Visigoths, Radagaisus, with his medley of Slavono-Germans, Genseric with his Vandals, and Attila with his Huns, made but ephemeral impressions. Of the army, however, of Radagaisus, a large proportion was sold as slaves. Odoacer’s conquest was somewhat more permanent; whilst the elements he introduced are uncertain. Reasons, however, may be given for referring the Skiri, at least, and possibly the Heruli and Rugii to the same stock as the Huns and Bulgarians--the Turk, a stock from which few grafts were transplanted to Italy; though a Bulgarian colony in Samnium was existing in the time of the Lombards, and possibly a few other similar offsets besides. [Sidenote: A.D. 490-553.]