Teutonic conquerors, the bishop was left as the spokesman of the Gallo-Roman population. Thus the Gallic churches, far from succumbing before the barbarian invasions, rescued and appropriated the derelict functions of government, and emerged aggrandized from the political and racial revolution. In the year 400 the city of Trèves was Latin in speech and Roman in government; in the year 500 the Roman government had been overthrown, and a German-speaking population predominated in what was left of the city, but the church went on unchanged in constitution and in language.
There was constant intercourse between Teutons and Romans along the northern boundaries of the Empire. In the Danube regions many of the former were converted. The Goths, through the labours of Ulfilas and others in the fourth century, became Arian Christians; their conversion was of moment to themselves and others, but destiny severed the continuity of its import for history. In the provinces of Rhaetia, Vindelicia, and Noricum there were Christians, some of them Teutons, as early as the time of Constantine. For the next century, when disruption of the Empire was in full progress, the Life of St. Severinus by Eugippius, his disciple, gives the picture.[1] Bits and fragments of Roman government endured; letters were not quite quenched; but Alemanni and Rugii moved as they would, marauding, besieging, and destroying. Everywhere there was uncertainty and confusion, and yet civilized Roman provincials still clung to a driven life. Through this mountain land, the monk Severinus went here and there, barefoot even in ice and snow, austere, commanding. He encouraged the townspeople to maintain decency and courage; he turned the barbarians from ruthlessness. Clear-seeing, capable, his energies shielded the land. He was an ascetic who took nothing for himself, and won men to the Faith by this guarantee of disinterestedness. So he shepherded his harrowed flocks, and more than once averted their destruction. But his arm was too feeble; after his death even his cell was plundered, while the confusion swept on.
Such were fifth-century conditions on the northern
- ↑ Mon. Germ. hist. Auctores antiquissimi, tom. i. Cf. Ebert, Ges. des Lit. des Mittelalters, i. 452 sqq.
