[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.]
A PERIOD OF TRIBAL MOVEMENTS. The Hunnish pressure also started the Vandals and Suevi, and within fifty years they had been able to move across Germany, France, and Spain, plundering the cities on their way. Finally they crossed to the northern coast of Africa, where they became noted as the great sea pirates of the Mediterranean. In 455 they crossed back to Italy, and Rome was sacked for the second time by barbarian hordes. The Huns, under the leadership of Attila, the so-called "Scourge of God," now moved in and ravaged Gaul (451) and northern Italy (452), and then, at the intercession of the Roman Pope Leo, were induced by a ransom price to return to the lower Danube, where they have since remained. In 476 the barbarian soldiers of the Empire, tired of camp life and demanding land on which they too might settle, rose in revolt, displaced the last of the Western Emperors, and elevated Odovacar, a tribesman from the north, as ruler in his stead. The Western Roman Empire was now at an end. In 493 Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths, became king of Italy.
Between 443 and 485 the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes left their earlier homes in what is now Denmark and northwestern Germany, and overran eastern and southern Britain. In 486 the Franks, a great nation living along the lower Rhine, began to move, and within two generations had overrun almost all of Gaul. In 586 the Lombards invaded and settled the valleys of northern Italy, displacing the Ostrogoths there. Slavic tribes now moved into the Eastern Empire--Serbs and Bulgars--and settled in Moesia and Thrace. Southeastern Europe thus became Slavic-Greek, as western Europe had become Teutonic-Latin. Figure 32 shows the results of these different migrations up to about 500 A.D.
EUROPE TO BE TEUTONIC-LATIN. In the seventh century another great wave of people, of a different racial stock and religion--Semitic and Mohammedan-- starting from Arabia and along the shores of the Red Sea, swept rapidly through Egypt and Africa and across into Spain and France. For a time it looked as though they might overrun all western Europe and bring the German tribes under subjection. Fortunately they were definitely stopped and decisively defeated by the Franks, in the great Battle of Tours, in 732. They also overran Syria and Persia, but were held in check in Asia Minor by the Eastern Empire, which did not completely succumb to barbarian inroads until Constantinople was taken by the Turks, in 1453.