In 275 A.D., after a five years' struggle, the Eastern Emperor gave the province of Dacia, to the south of the Danube, to the Visigoths, in an effort to buy them off from further invasion and warfare. This eased the pressure for another century. In 378 A.D., now pressed on by the terrible Huns from behind, the Visigoths, as a body, invaded the Eastern Empire, and in the Battle of Adrianople, near Constantinople, defeated the Roman army, slew the Roman Emperor, definitely broke the boundaries of the Empire, and they and the Ostrogoths now moved southward and settled in Moesia and Thrace. The Germans at Adrianople learned that they could beat the Roman legions, and from this time on it was they, and not the Romans, who named the terms of ransom and the price of peace. A few years later, under Alaric, the Visigoths invaded Greece, then turned westward through Illyria to the valley of the Po, in northern Italy, which they reached in the year 400. In 410 the great calamity came when they captured and sacked Rome. The effect produced on the Roman world by the fall of the Eternal City, as the news of the almost incredible disaster penetrated to the remote provinces, was profound (R. 48). For eight hundred years Rome had not been touched by foreign hands, and now it had been captured and plundered by barbarian hordes. It seemed to many as though the end of the world were approaching. The Visigoths now turned west once more, carrying with them the beautiful sister of the Emperor as a captive bride of the chief, and finally settled in Spain and southern Gaul, which provinces were thenceforth lost to Rome. This was the first of the great permanent inroads into the Empire, and from now on Roman resistance seemed powerless to stop the flood. [Illustration: FIG. 32. THE GERMAN MIGRATIONS The barriers of the Empire along the Rhine and the Danube now are broken down. Take a pencil and trace the route followed by each of these peoples.]