When Rome fell and changed trade conditions necessitated the transfer of power from its historic capital in Italy to a strategic situation on the Bosporus, western Europe was definitely and finally abandoned to its Teutonic invaders. These same barbarians swept up again and again to the Propontis, only to recoil before the organized strength of the Byzantine Empire and the walls of Mikklegard. The final line of cleavage between the western and eastern Empires corresponded closely to the boundaries of Latin and Greek speech and differences of language no doubt were the chief cause of the political and later of the religious divergence between them. Until the coming of the Alpine Slavs the Eastern Empire still held in Europe the Balkan Peninsula and much of the eastern Mediterranean. The Western Empire, however, collapsed utterly under the impact of hordes of Nordic Teutons at a much earlier date. In the fourth and fifth centuries of our era north Africa, once the empire of Carthage, had become the seat of the kingdom of Nordic Vandals. Spain fell under the control of the Visigoths and Lusitania, now Portugal, under that of the Suevi. Gaul was Visigothic in the south and Burgundian in the east, while the Frankish kingdom dominated the north until it finally absorbed and incorporated all the territories of ancient Gaul and made it the land of the Franks. Strictly speaking, the northern half of France and the adjoining districts, the country of Langued’oil, is the true land of the Franks while the southern Languedoc was never Frankish except by conquest, and was never as thoroughly Nordicized as the north. Whatever Nordic elements are still to be found there are Gothic and Burgundian but not Frankish. Italy fell under the control first of the Ostrogoths and then of the Lombards. The purely Nordic Saxons with kindred tribes conquered the British Isles and meanwhile the Norse and Danish Scandinavians contributed a large element to all the coast populations as far south as Spain and the Swedes organized in the eastern Baltic what is now Russia. Thus when Rome passed all Europe had become superficially Teutonic. At first these Teutons were isolated and independent tribes bearing some shadowy relation to the one organized state they knew, the Empire of Rome. Then came the Mohammedan invasion, which reached western Europe from Africa and destroyed the Visigothic kingdom. The Moslems swept on unchecked until their light horsemen dashed themselves to pieces against the heavy armed cavalry of Charles Martel and his Franks at Tours in 732 A. D.