From the accession of Honorius the Roman Empire existed only by sufferance. The fierce hordes of northern Europe now prepared to inundate the fertile provinces of the south, and the more powerful local governors to secure themselves an independent sovereignty. Spain was soon agitated by the spirit which spontaneously burst forth from Britain to Thrace. While Constantine, who had assumed the purple, raised England and the Gauls against the feeble successor of the Cæsars, his son Constans passed the Pyrenees to gain over the natives of the peninsula. The youth found or made adherents, and was for a time successful; but in the sequel he was compelled to return to Gaul for reinforcements. The appearance of another candidate for empire (Jovinus) distracted the attention and weakened the efforts of the kindred adventurers; and ultimately all these became successively the victims of imperial vengeance, chiefly by means of the warlike tribes whom the minister of Honorius had marched from the shores of the Baltic, to crush the new insurrections. But the policy of that minister was, if not perfidious, at least short-sighted. [Sidenote: [395-415 A.D.]] The barbarians whom he had thus introduced into the heart, and to whom he thus betrayed the weakness of the empire, from allies soon became masters. They looked with longing eyes on the rich plains of southern France and of Spain. At length, finding the Pyrenean barrier but negligently guarded, the Suevi, under their king Hermeric, the Alans under Atace, and the Vandals or Silingi, under Gunderic, burst through it, and poured the tide of destruction over the peninsula (409 A.D.). The ravages of these barbarians, we are told, were dreadful. Towns pillaged and burned, the country laid waste, the inhabitants massacred without distinction of age and sex, were but the beginning of evils. Famine and pestilence made awful havoc; the wild beasts, finding nothing to subsist on in their usual haunts, made war on the human species; and the latter consumed the very corpses of the dead. Nay, mothers are said to have killed their children to feed on their flesh.[4] The conquerors at length ceased from their wantonness of desolation. They found that to turn the country into a wilderness was not the best policy in men who designed it for a permanent abode. They divided it by lot: Bætica fell to the Vandals, Lusitania to the Alans, and Galicia, with a great portion of Leon and Castile, to the Suevi. _The Goths Arrive (411 A.D.)_