(2) Southern Gaul was divided in the fifth century
between the Visigoths and the Burgundians. The former of these peoples entered
the imperial service in 410, after the death of Alaric I, who had led them into
Italy. His successors, Athaulf and Wallia, undertook to pacify Gaul and to
recover Spain for the rulers of Ravenna; the second of these sovereigns was
rewarded with a settlement, for himself and his followers, between the Loire
and the Garonne (419). In the terrible battle of Troyes, against Attila the Hun
(451), they did good service to the Roman cause; but both before and after that
event they were chiefly occupied in extending their boundaries by force or
fraud. At the close of the fifth century their power in Gaul extended from the
Loire to the Pyrenees, from the Atlantic to the Rhone valley, and along the Mediterranean
seaboard farther east to the Alps.
In Spain - which had been, since 409, the prey
of the Vandals, Alans and Suevi - they found a more legitimate field for their
ambitions. Between 466 and 484 they annexed every part of the peninsula except
the north-west corner, which remained the last stronghold of their defeated
competitors. The Burgundians, from less auspicious beginnings, had built up a
smaller but yet a powerful kingdom. Transplanted by a victorious Roman general
to Savoy (443) from the lands between the Necker and the Main, they had descended
into the Rhone basin at the invitation of the provincials, to protect that
fertile land alike against Teutonic marauders and Roman tax-collectors. By the
year 500 they ruled from the Durance in the south to the headwaters of the
Doubs and the Saone in the north, from the Alps and the Jura to the sources of
the Loire.
