rels and some even turned against their old
mother, Germania.

Even at home, the Roman Christian foreign culture seemed for a time
destined to overwhelm Germanism, but the Alemanni in the south and the
Saxons in the north and west proved too strong for denationalization and
carried Teutonic principles triumphantly through all the phases of the
struggle.

Having thus described the tribal existence of the Teutons in Germania
proper, in order to give to our study of the cultural history of German
womanhood full point, a word must be said about German colonization
abroad.

The Burgundians, after a checkered career of adventurous wanderings from
North Germany to the Alpine mountains of Savoy, conquered southeast Gaul
in the fifth century. In the southwest, or ancient Aquitaine, the
Visigoths settled, and, crossing the Pyrenees, conquered a large part of
Spain.

When Odoacer, the German king of the wandering hosts, had dethroned the
last shadow Emperor of Rome, Romulus Augustulus an ill-starred,
diminutive reminiscence of Rome's glorious inception as kingdom and
empire the Heruli were the dominant race. Their rule lasted but thirteen
ominous years. The Ostrogoths, under the great Theodoric, Dietrich von
Bern, the paramount hero of Germanic saga and song, replaced them and
founded a more permanent government. In northern Italy, the Langobards
succeeded the Ostrogoths and gradually extended their rule southward,
and pressing upon the Italian domain of the Bishops of Rome, who, by
this time, had asserted their supremacy and headship of the ruling
church of the world, brought about that cataclysm which finally
submerged the power of Rome under the flood of the Prankish universal
empire. The Salian Franks had, in the fifth century, conquered northern
Gaul from the Batavian coast to the Somme River; the Ripuarian Franks
formed a state along the Rhine, the Maas, and the Moselle, with Cologne
as a capital. Chlodwig, the Salian Frank, one of the most cunning and
unscrupulous kings in history, began, in A. D. 480, the unification of
the Franks and the adjacent German tribes into one nation. After the
subjugation of the Alemanni, the principal role, the hegemony within the
Teutonic race, belongs to the Franks. Christianity becomes a political
lever by which they extend their sway from north and east and finally
create that Carlovingian-Prankish Empire which inaugurated the Middle
Ages proper and founded therewith a stable Germanic