ABSTRACT
The fifth-century emperors saw no objection to intermarriage of the royal house with barbarian leaders or nobles, provided they were of sufficient status and had some claims to civilized manners. Tides of barbarians swirled across Gaul and across Britain, with intervals of Roman recovery, temporary only; what Ambrose Aurelianus and Arthur did obscurely in Britain, Aegidius and Syagrius did at Soissons and in its surrounding territory. About the barbarians outside the Rhine—Danube frontier: they fall into two groups and two cultures, those of the Germanic peoples and the Tartars or Mongols, the nomads who came originally from the high grass pastures, the steppes, of Asia. The European peoples, again, were at a different stage of civilization from the nomads; they practised a primitive agriculture, using a plough, and possessing sheep and oxen. There must have been development between the cultures of the nomads of the Asian steppes and those of the Ukraine.
