ABSTRACT
The Roman emperors, as we have seen, attempted to defend their Empire by using the barbarians. When the ‘Roman’ towns were full of barbarian troops nominally in ‘Roman’ employment, when many of the agricultural workers were barbarians, when whole areas were set aside for theoretically ‘allied’ tribes, it is hard to speak of the Empire being defended, at any rate in the West. The barbarians and their chieftain kings took over what remained of Roman administration; they took over the Latin language; and they were Christians, although at first of the Arian sort. Within a few generations the Goths, the Franks, and other barbarians were linguistically assimilated, though they contributed many basic words to the Romance dialects of French, Spanish, and Italian. A fundamental conservatism was in part responsible for the brief domination of the Merovingian kings and the rulers of the other barbarian kingdoms, just as it was with the more imposing Carolingian edifice.
