Then arose great fighting between the heathen, under Penda, King of Mercia and of the "Middle English," as you will read of their being called, and Christians under Oswi, King of Northumbria. Oswi utterly defeated Penda in A.D. 655 and from that victory followed the establishment of Christianity as the accepted religion over the British islands. All this story of England under the rule of the Anglo-Saxons is separate and quite apart, for very many years, from the rest of the great story, which is, at this time, chiefly concerned with the destruction by the barbarians of the Western Roman Empire. It will come very closely into the great story again before many centuries are past, and you will see that it is closely involved in it by the time we reach the end of this volume; but until 600 or so, England is rather out of the main current of European history. {43} CHAPTER VII THE PASSING OF THE BARBARIAN We left the Vandals in 450 established in possession of all the African shore that had belonged to the Western Empire. The place of chief importance that fell into their hands was Carthage, that city from which so much trouble had come to Rome several centuries before. And just as had happened before, so it happened again now. The Carthaginian, descendants of those famous sea-rovers, the Phœnicians, had made Carthage, with its fine harbour, the headquarters of a fleet which went raiding and marauding all over the Mediterranean Sea. So too, now, the king of the Vandals assembled a great fleet which acted in just the same piratical way. Its first act was to defeat, so completely as practically to destroy it, the fleet of the Western Empire, and thereafter it became the terror of the Mediterranean, and its act of final and most unbearable insolence was when it came into the Tiber and the Vandals attacked and sacked Rome itself. This was in 455. It is only a few years before, that we heard of the Goths "sacking" Rome. We may begin to ask ourselves what exactly is meant by this "sacking"; for we may wonder that there was very much left, after a while, to sack.