ght
political changes which seemed to threaten both Church and State.

Roman power was waning. Tribes from across the Rhine were gathering,
massing in northern Gaul, and its spirit was antagonistic to the
contentment of the rich Mediterranean provinces. The tribes were
brave, ruthless, and barbarous. Peace was galling to their
uncontrollable restlessness. The Gallo-Romans were artistic, literary,
idle, and luxurious. They fell, first to milder but heretical foes;
then to the fierce but orthodox Frank; and the story of succeeding
years was a chronicle of wars. Like a great swarm of locusts, the
Saracens--conquerors from India to Spain--came upon the South. They
took Narbonne, Nimes, and even Carcassonne, the Invulnerable. They
besieged Toulouse, and almost destroyed Bordeaux. Other cities,
perhaps as great as these, were razed to the very earth and even their
names are now forgotten. Europe was menaced; the South of France was
all but destroyed.

Again the Frank descended; and like a great wind blowing clouds from a
stormy sky, Charles Martel swept back the Arabs and saved Christianity.
Before 740, he had returned a third time to the South, not as a
deliverer, but for pure love of conquest; and by dismantling Nimes,
destroying the maritime cities of Maguelonne and Agde, and taking the
powerful strongholds of Arles and Marseilles, he paved the way for his
great descendant who nominally united "all France."

But Charlemagne's empire fell in pieces; and as Carlovingian had
succeeded Merovingian, so in 987 Capetian displaced the weak descendants
of the mighty head of the "Holy Roman Empire." The map changed with
bewildering frequency; and in these changes, the nobles--more stable
than their kings--grew to be the real lords of their several domains.
History speaks of France from Clovis to the Revolution as a kingdom; but
even later than the First Crusade the kingdom lay somewhere between
Paris and Lyons; the Royal Domain, not France as we know it now. The
Duchy of Aquitaine, the Duchy of Brittany, Burgundy, the Counties of
Toulouse, Provence, Champagne, Normandy, and many smaller possessions,
were as proudly separate in spirit as Norway and Sweden, and often as
politically distinct as they from Denmark.

In the midst of these times of turmoil the Church had steadily grown.
Every change, however fatal to North or South, brought to her new
strength. Confronted with cultured paganism in the first centuries, the
blood of her