You must recollect, meanwhile, that by the middle of the fifth century, the Western Empire had ceased to exist. The Angles and Saxons were fighting their way into Britain. The Franks were settled in north France and the lower Rhineland. South of them, the centre of Gaul still remained Roman, governed by Counts of cities, who were all but independent sovereigns, while they confessed a nominal allegiance to the Emperor of Constantinople. Their power was destined soon to be annihilated by the conquests of Clovis and his Franks--as false and cruel ruffians as their sainted king, the first-born son of the Church. The history of Gaul for some centuries becomes henceforth a tissue of internecine horrors, which you must read for yourselves in the pages of M. Sismondi, or of Gregory of Tours. The Allemanni (whose name has become among the Franks the general name for Germans) held the lands from the Maine to the Rhaetian Alps. The Burgunds, the lands to the south- west of them, comprising the greater part of south-east Gaul. The West Goths held the south-west of Gaul, and the greater part of Spain, having thrust the Sueves, and with them some Alans, into Gallicia, Asturias, and Portugal; and thrust, also, the Vandals across the straits of Gibraltar, to found a prosperous kingdom along the northern shore of Africa. The East Goths, meanwhile, after various wanderings to the north of the Alps, lay in the present Austria and in the Danube lands, resting after their great struggle with the Huns, and their crowning victory of Netad. To follow the fortunes of Italy, we must follow those of these East Goths, and especially of one man among them, Theodoric, known in German song as Dietrich of Bern or Verona.