[8] While I was revising this chapter, I became acquainted with C. J. Jireček’s _Geschichte der Bulgaren_ (Prag, 1876), the third chapter of which is devoted to an examination of the early settlements of the Slaves in the Eastern peninsula. He makes it probable that they were there earlier than is generally thought. They seem, exactly like the Teutons, to have first entered the Empire as captives and colonists, a process which may have begun as early as the second and third centuries. He shows also that the march of Theodoric into Italy had the effect of laying a large region open to their settlements. But he leaves my general propositions untouched. It is not till the sixth century that those Slavonic movements began which are of real importance to historical geography. CHAPTER VI. THE BEGINNING OF THE MODERN EUROPEAN STATES. § 1. _The Division of the Frankish Empire._ ♦Dissolution of the Frankish dominion.♦ The great dominion of the Franks, the German kingdom which had so strangely grown into a new Western Roman Empire, did not last long. In the course of the ninth century it altogether fell to pieces. ♦The chief states of modern Europe spring out of it.♦ But the process by which it fell to pieces must be carefully traced, because it was out of its dismemberment that the chief states of Western Europe arose. Speaking roughly, the Carolingian Empire took in Germany, so far as Germany had yet spread to the East, all Gaul, a great part of Italy, and a small part of Spain. ♦National kingdoms not yet formed.♦ Of these, it was only Italy, and sometimes Aquitaine, which showed any approach to the character of a separate or national kingdom. ♦Extent of _Francia_.♦ Northern Gaul and central Germany were still alike _Francia_; and, though the Romance speech prevailed in one, and the Teutonic speech in the other, no national distinction was drawn between them during the time of Charles the Great. Among the proposed divisions of his Empire, none proposed to separate _Neustria_ and _Austria_, the Western and the Eastern _Francia_. ♦Separate being of Italy and Aquitaine.♦ But Italy did form a separate kingdom under the superiority of the Emperor; and so for a while there was an under-kingdom of Aquitaine, answering roughly to Gaul south of the Loire. This is the land of the _Provençal_ tongue, the _tongue of Oc_, a tongue which, it must be remembered, reached to the Ebro. ♦Division under Lewis the Pious. | First glimpses of Modern France.♦ It is in the various divisions, contemplated and actual, among the sons of Lewis the Pious, the successor of Charles the Great, that we see the first approaches to a national division between Germany and Gaul, and the first glimmerings of a state answering in any way to _France_ in the modern sense. ♦Division of 817.♦