The Western Empire, we have to realise, was no {66} longer Roman; it was Frankish. Rome itself was included within the Empire of which the Emperor was Charlemagne. It was the Pope, you may remember, who had called in the aid of the Frankish, or French, kings--first Pepin and then Charlemagne--to aid him against the Lombards. They had given such effectual aid that the Lombard kingdom was overthrown and Charlemagne himself was crowned with the Iron Crown which was the sign of the Lombard monarchy. The name of Lombardy remained, and remains to this day, as that of a part of Northern Italy. It remains also in our Lombard Street, in London. This was so called from the Lombard merchants and goldsmiths and bankers who came thither from Lombardy. The arms of Lombardy were three balls, and you may sometimes see three balls now as a sign over the door of a pawnbroker's shop. The first banking operations of the Lombards in London were very like modern pawnbroking; for they would lend money to people who gave them security for its repayment by handing over jewels or golden chains or ornaments. Thus curiously is the richest street, as it has been reckoned, in the richest city in the world, called after those long-bearded barbarians, of unusually savage manners, who came away from somewhere near where the Elbe goes out into the sea and who founded a kingdom for a while in Italy. A strange story which you may recall whenever you see that sign of the three golden balls. After the fall of Lombardy the Empire of Charlemagne included not only all Gaul, which had come to him by succession from Pepin, but also what we may describe as all Germany, and Italy as far down as the Tiber and southward of it again. The Pyrenees had for years formed the boundary between the Frankish Empire and the Visigoths' kingdoms. The {67} Emperor would have had no authority over the Goths, had they still been there in 800 or so; but in the early half of the eighth century, beginning as early in that century as 710, that Visigothic kingdom had begun to go to pieces under the attacks of the fierce Arabs, inspired by the fighting religion of Mahomet, who in course of the previous century had fought their way to the mastery of Asia Minor and of Egypt. [Sidenote: The Saracens]