It is not quite perfect, because some of them came and came again at different times. I believe that the Franks were really the first of all to break through the Roman wall of Empire; but on the whole it roughly represents the order of their coming. It is easily remembered and is a great help. Let us see now what it was that these latest comers, the Lombards, did, and who they were. They were a tribe that lived up north of the {52} Visigoths and east of the Saxons and they were called Longo-bardi, long beards. They came last of all the Germanic tribes, for it is not till 568 that we hear of them in Italy, though they had drifted southward and had settled along the North of the Danube long before. But though the latest, they seem also to have been the rudest and least advanced of these tribes. They never became Romanised, as the others did, never learned any civilisation from the civilised people whom they conquered. But they came in great force and made their conquering way right down to the Tiber. They settled then and formed a kingdom in the North of Italy, more or less where Lombardy now is. They were still so powerful some two centuries later that we find them taking Ravenna, which was within the boundaries of the Eastern Empire and was a place of great importance with a fine harbour. It was the increasing power and savage rapacity of the Lombards which led to an incident that was of the very greatest importance in the story. The Pope--and notice this particularly, for it is the very first time that we have had occasion to name him in our story--the Pope begged for help, against the Lombards, of the King of the Franks. And this assistance was given him, at first by Pepin and afterwards by Charlemagne--the greatest of all the Frankish kings--and the result of that assistance was that Charlemagne was triumphantly victorious and in 774 took to himself the title of King of the Lombards. The real result was that the Kingdom of Lombardy, in any independent sense, was at an end. So now we may sum up these invasions of the various barbarian tribes and see what they amounted to and what effect they had on our story. The Visigoths continued on in Spain until the Saracens and the Moors came to overthrow their Spanish kingdom in 710. {53} The Huns ceased, for some centuries, to be a danger to the West about 450, though at least a hundred years later they were a menace to Constantinople and the East, and even as late as 900 they were again threatening Northern Italy. The Vandals went out of the story, in the curious way that we have seen, in 533. About 550 the Ostrogothic kingdom in North Italy was likewise ended. [Sidenote: Belisarius]