re to keep sufficiently concentrated
for military purposes, and ever ready for some fresh foray, either
against a rival Teutonic band or some hitherto unassailed city of the
provincials.

Gradually, however, the conquerors acquired a desire for permanent
landed possessions. They lost somewhat of the restless thirst for
novelty and adventure which had first made them throng beneath the
banner of the boldest captains of their tribe, and leave their native
forests for a roving military life on the left bank of the Rhine. They
were converted to the Christian faith, and gave up with their old creed
much of the coarse ferocity which must have been fostered in the spirits
of the ancient warriors of the North by a mythology which promised, as
the reward of the brave on earth, an eternal cycle of fighting and
drunkenness in heaven.

But, although their conversion and other civilizing influences operated
powerfully upon the Germans in Gaul, and although the Franks--who were
originally a confederation of the Teutonic tribes that dwelt between the
Rhine, the Maine, and the Weser--established a decisive superiority over
the other conquerors of the province, as well as over the conquered
provincials, the country long remained a chaos of uncombined and
shifting elements. The early princes of the Merovingian dynasty were
generally occupied in wars against other princes of their house,
occasioned by the frequent subdivisions of the Frank monarchy; and the
ablest and best of them had found all their energies tasked to the
utmost to defend the barrier of the Rhine against the pagan Germans who
strove to pass that river and gather their share of the spoils of the
Empire.

The conquests which the Saracens effected over the southern and eastern
provinces of Rome were far more rapid than those achieved by the Germans
in the North, and the new organizations of society which the Moslems
introduced were summarily and uniformly enforced. Exactly a century
passed between the death of Mahomet and the date of the battle of Tours.
During that century the followers of the prophet had torn away half the
Roman Empire; and besides their conquests over Persia, the Saracens had
overrun Syria, Egypt, Africa, and Spain, in an unchecked and apparently
irresistible career of victory. Nor, at the commencement of the eighth
century of our era, was the Mahometan world divided against itself, as
it subsequently became. All these vast regions obeyed the Caliph;