Everywhere she went Rome stamped upon the land its permanent form. But nowhere, outside of Italy itself, does she seem to have “Romanized” more thoroughly than in “Provincia.” To this day, “The valley banks of the Rhône ... have still a greater mass of imperial remains than the city [of Rome] itself,”[5] and the churches of Toulouse show the round arch and the small Roman bricks. When the Empire became Christian, Toulouse still grouped itself, as it does to this day, around its municipal building, the “Capitol.” That building and the “Place du Capitole” continued central in the town. The churches of Toulouse are fitted in like after-thoughts in the town plan. They do not dominate everything as do the cathedrals of the old towns of Northern France, as Notre Dame must have dominated mediæval Paris. This difference in town-planning[6] seems to be accompanied by a greater measure of continuity in municipal institutions: mediæval Toulouse called her chief magistrates “consules.” In the decline, when the Roman auxiliaries were fighting their aimless civil wars (much as if the “colonial troops” of to-day were to become dominant in armies and go about setting up their Europeanized leaders as chief executives), Toulouse was for a time the capital of one of their shifting sovereignties, that of the Visigoths, whose power, at its greatest, extended from the Loire and the Alps clear down to Gibraltar. After a few years, another little group of auxiliaries, the Franks, defeated the Visigoths, drove them out of south-western Gaul clear down to the Pyrenees, and took Toulouse. But although the Frankish chiefs would now and then raid Spain itself for plunder, they never cleared the Goths out of the coastal plain from the Rhône to the eastern Pyrenees. So matters stood when the first of the three great scourges of the Dark Ages, the Mohammedan Saracens, fell upon Europe. In their first rush north from Spain, the Mohammedans swept the Mediterranean coastal plain. Narbonne resisted them, and saw its people duly massacred, but some of the cities seemed to have surrendered (as many of the Spanish towns had done) on condition that their laws should be respected. The “Visigothic” State was a flimsy affair. That part of Gaul which submitted to the Saracens corresponded almost exactly to that which the Goths had held. Carcassonne, Beziers, Agde, Maguelonne, Lodève, and Nismes had Mohammedan garrisons. East of the Rhône they went beyond the Gothic boundaries, and for three or four years, with the support of local rebels, held Arles and Avignon.