In a geographical aspect the map of Europe has seldom been so completely changed within a single generation as it was during the reign of Justinian. At his accession his dominion was bounded to the west by the Hadriatic, and he was far from possessing the whole of the Hadriatic coast. Under his reign the power of the Roman arms and the Roman law were again extended to the Ocean. The Roman dominion was indeed no longer spread round the whole shore of the Mediterranean; the Imperial territories were no longer continuous as of old: but, if the Empire was not still, as it had once been, the only power in the Mediterranean lands, it had again become beyond all comparison the greatest power. ♦Effects of Justinian’s conquests.♦ Moreover, by the recovery of so large an extent of Latin-speaking territory, the tendency of the Empire to change into a Greek or Oriental state was checked for several centuries. We are here concerned only with the geographical, not with the political or moral aspect of the conquests of Justinian. Some of those conquests, like those of Trajan, were hardly more than momentary. But the changes which they made for the time were some of the most remarkable on record, and the effect of those changes remained, both in history and geography, long after their immediate results were again undone. § 2. _Settlement of the Lombards in Italy._ The conquests of Justinian hindered the growth of a national Teutonic kingdom in Italy, such as grew up in Gaul and Spain, and they practically made the cradle of the Empire, Rome herself, an outlying dependency of her great colony by the Bosporos. But the reunion of all Italy with the Empire lasted only for a moment. The conquest was only just over when a new set of Teutonic conquerors appeared in Italy. ♦Pannonian kingdom of the Lombards.♦ These were the _Lombards_, who, in the great wandering, had made their way into the ancient Pannonia about the time that the East Goths passed into Italy. They were thus settled within the ancient boundaries of the Western Empire. But the Roman power had now quite passed away from those regions, and the Lombard kingdom in Pannonia was practically altogether beyond the Imperial borders; it had not even that Roman tinge which affected the Frankish and Gothic kingdoms. ♦Gepidæ.♦ To the east of the Lombards, in the ancient Dacia, another Teutonic kingdom had arisen; that of the _Gepidæ_, a people seemingly closely akin to the Goths. ♦Avars.♦ The process of wandering had brought the Turanian _Avars_ into those parts, and their presence seriously affected all later history and geography. ♦Teutonic powers on the Lower Danube.♦ With the Gepidæ in Dacia and the Lombards in Pannonia, there was a chance of two Teutonic states growing up on the borders of East and West. These might possibly have played the same part in the East which the Franks and Goths played in the West, and they might thus have altogether changed the later course of history.