lost to the Empire. Even the immediate neighborhood of Constantinople was saved only by a seventy-eight-mile Long Wall that protected the narrow tongue of land on which the capital stood.

582. Restoration and Reconquests. At length, a century and a half after Theodosius the Great, another strong ruler arose at Constantinople. Justinian (527–565 a.d.) renewed the old frontier of the Danube, saved Europe from a threatened Persian conquest, and then turned to restore the imperial power in the West. He reconquered Africa, the Mediterranean islands, and part of Spain; and of course he caught eagerly at the conditions in Italy, after the death of Theodoric, to regain that land and the ancient Roman capital. His generals, Belisarius and Narses, were victorious here also, but only after a dreadful twenty years' war that destroyed at once the Gothic race and the rising greatness of the peninsula. Rome itself was sacked once more (by the Gothic king, Totila, 546 A.D.), and left for eleven days absolutely uninhabited.1

583. The Justinian Code. Justinian is best remembered for his work in bringing about the codification of the Roman law. In the course of centuries that law had become an intolerable maze. Julius Caesar had planned its codification. Theodosius II. (§ 573) had made a beginning a century before Justinian; and now, in an incredibly short time, a commission of great lawyers gave to the whole body of the law a marvelous symmetry, brevity, and perspicuity. The work comprised the Code, or laws proper, the Digest, based upon the multitudinous "opinions" of the great lawyers of the past, and the Institutes, a kind of text-book upon the principles of Roman law.

The reconquest of Italy by Justinian established the Code in that land. Thence, in later centuries, it spread over the West, becoming the foundation of all modern legal study in continental Europe, and the basis of nearly all codes of law

1 Read the story of this struggle in Kingsley's Roman and Teuton.

now in existence. Says Ihne (Early Rome, 2), "Every one of us is benefited directly or indirectly by this legacy of the Roman people-a legacy as valuable as the literary and artistic models which we owe to the great writers and sculptors of Greece." And Woodrow Wilson declares (The State, 158) that Roman Law "has furnished Europe with many, if not most, of her principles of private right." 1

E. THE LOMBARDS IN ITALY.

584. Invited by Narses. Among the mercenaries with whom Narses had conquered the Goths were bands of Lombards, a new German people who had crossed the Danube into the Eastern Empire when the East Goths moved on into Italy. Narses had been made governor of Italy with the title of exarch, and with his capital at Ravenna. After the death of Justinian, it is said, he found that enemies at the imperial court were plotting his ruin, and in revenge he invited the Lombard nation to seize Italy for themselves.

585. Final Break-up of Italian Unity. In 568 A.D. these new invaders entered the land, and soon occupied the greater part of it. Their chief kingdom was in the Po valley, which ever since has kept the name Lombardy, while Lombard "dukedoms" were scattered over other parts of the peninsula. The Empire retained (1) the Exarchate of Ravenna on the Adriatic, (2) Rome, with a little surrounding territory on the west coast, and (3) the extreme south. This last was to remain Greek for centuries.

1 Cf. §§ 463 and 500. English and American law is always regarded, properly, as having a very distinct origin; but Roman law profoundly affected legal development even in England, and so in the United States, while the law of Louisiana came very directly from it through the French code. On Roman Law, advanced students may consult Hadley, Introduction to Roman Law, and the noted forty-fourth chapter of Gibbon. Wilson's The State, pp. 142159, gives an excellent account of its growth, and pp. 160, 161, a full bibliography for advanced students. A good treatment of Justinian's work is given also in Bury, bk. iv. ch. iii.

Thus the middle land which Roman and Teuton had struggled for through two centuries was at last divided between them, and shattered into fragments in the process. Italy ceased to be a state for thirteen centuries, and was not again united until 1870.

IV. THE FRANKS.

The re

586. Preeminence among the Teutonic Conquerors. lation of the Franks on the lower Rhine to the early invasions has been noted (§ 568). Their real advance began almost at the time of the rise of the East Goths-eighty years later than the making of the Vandal, Burgundian, and Visigothic kingdoms, and as much earlier than the Lombard kingdom. To them fell the work of consolidating the Teutonic states into a mighty empire. Their final success was due, in the

main, to two causes.

a. They did not migrate to distant lands, but only expanded from their original home; hence their state kept a sound basis for its power in an unmixed Teutonic element, while the other conquering nations lost themselves in the larger Roman populations among whom they settled.

b. When they adopted Christianity, it was the orthodox instead of the Arian form; this not only gained them support in their wars, but it did away for them with a standing cause of jealousy that existed between the other Teutons and their subjects.

587. Clovis; Early Conquests. Until nearly 500 A.D. the Franks were pagans. Nor were they yet a nation, but were split into petty divisions without a common king. The founder of their greatness was Clovis (Clodowig, Louis). In 481 A.D., at the age of fifteen, he became king of a petty tribe near the mouth of the Rhine. In 486 he attacked the Roman possessions in North Gaul, and, after a victory at Soissons, added them to his kingdom. Ten years later he conquered the Alemanni, who had invaded Gaul, in a great battle near Strassburg, and made tributary their territory beyond the Rhine.