The German Invasions 329 Section 53. Results of the Barbarian Invasions As one looks back over the German invasions it is natural Fusion of to ask upon what terms the newcomers lived among the old ^^ and the mhabitants of the Empire, how far they adopted the customs Roman popu- of those among whom they settled, and how far they clung to their old habits ? These questions cannot be answered very sat- isfactorily. So little is known of the confused period of which we have been speaking that it is impossible to follow closely the mixing of the two races. Yet a few things are tolerably clear. In the first place, we The number must be on our guard against exaggerating the numbers in the barians^^*^ various bodies of invaders. The writers of the time indicate that the West Goths, when they were first admitted to the Empire before the battle of Adrianople, amounted to four or five hundred thousand persons, including men, women, and chil- dren. This is the largest band reported, and it must have been greatly reduced before the West Goths, after long wanderings and many batdes, finally settled in Spain and southern Gaul. The Burgundians, when they appear for the first time on the banks of the Rhine, are reported to have had eighty thousand warriors among them. When Clovis and his army were baptized, Gregory of Tours speaks of " over three thousand " soldiers who became Christians upon that occasion. This would seem to indicate that this was the entire army of the Frankish king at this time. Undoubtedly these figures are very meager and unreliable. But the readiness with which the Germans appear to have adopted the language and customs of the Romans would tend to prove that the invaders formed but a small minority of the population. Since hundreds of thousands of barbarians had been absorbed during the previous five centuries, the invasions of the fifth century can hardly have made an abrupt change in the character of the population. The barbarians within the old Empire were soon speaking the same conversational Eatin which was everywhere used by the
