The Franks by Walter Perry
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Overview: If the Greeks and Romans are rightly called the people of the past, the Germans, in the wider sense of the appellation, have an undoubted claim to be considered the people of the present and the future. To whatever part we turn our eyes of the course which this favoured race has run, whether under the name of Teuton, German, Frank, Saxon, Dane, Norman, Englishman, or North American, we find it full of interest and glory. Majestic in stature, high in spirit, with fearless hearts, on which no shackle had been laid, they came forth from their primeval forests to wrestle with the masters of the world. They dared to meet the Romans when they were mightiest; when their armies, schooled in a thousand battles with the bravest foes, were led by “Danger’s own twin brother,” whose military genius laid the Roman Empire at his feet : and he himself has told us, that his tribunes and prefects wept with terror at the very aspect of their giant foes ; that throughout his ever victorious army the Roman soldiers, on the eve of their first conflict with the forces of Ariovistus, were engaged in making their wills in the recesses of their tents.
Genre: Non Fiction > History
This mere horde of undisciplined barbarians, with naked bodies, and swords so badly tempered that they bent at every stroke, — with no fortifications but their waggons, and no reserve but their wives and children, —rushed fearlessly on the finest armies that the ancient world produced, and came off with honour, and sometimes with success, according to the testimony of their not over-truthful enemies. Triumphed over in the streets of Rome, they remained unconquered on the Rhine. The tide of German life which set towards the East, was one of which no imperial command from Rome could stay the impetuous course. When African, Parthian, Greek and Gaul had bent the neck and borne the chain, the Germans alone kept up a doubtful struggle with the universal conquerors, and laughed at their pompous threats and empty triumphs.
And if Rome maintained for a time a nominal empire over her barbarian foes, it was by that “counsel “ (consilium) which in others she called “ perfidy ; “ by cunningly dividing the strength she could not break; by leading German mercenaries against German freemen. It was to his German soldiers that the first Caesar owed the victory of Pharsalia; and the throne of his successors, for many generations, was propped by the Goth and Frank, who, when it fell, divided the accumulated spoils of an enslaved and plundered world. In somewhat more than three hundred years after the conquest of Gaul by the Franks, the power of the Roman Emperors of the West, and even the very titles of Caesar and Augustus, devolved upon a German head, and in the person of Charlemagne the Germans were recognised as the successors of the Italians in the Western Roman Empire. To the great Frankish heroes therefore is attached an interest irrespective of their many great deeds and noble qualities. They illustrate to our minds the progress of a new and mighty race ; their reign is a bright page in its annals, to which many a brighter has succeeded, and will yet succeed…
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