nks in a battle in which
one of their kings was slain, and succeeded in maintaining for eleven
years longer the independence of his nation. In the year 532, however,
the Frankish kings again entered the valley of the Rhone with their
desolating hosts, and in 534 they completed its conquest and added it to
the great unwieldy monarchy over which they ruled in a kind of family
partnership.

In Spain too the Frankish kings had achieved some successes, and at the
cost of a descendant of Theodoric. Amalaric, king of the Visigoths, had
married, probably after his grandfather's death, Clotilda, daughter of
Clovis, and for a time seems to have pursued a tolerant policy towards
the Catholics, but gradually drifted into a position of unreasoning and
barbarous hostility towards them, hostility from which his own wife was
not exempted. He caused filth to be cast at the devout Clotilda, when
she was on her way to the Catholic basilica, nay, he even lifted his
hand to strike her. The cowardly blow brought blood, and the drops of
this blood, royal and Frankish, collected on a handkerchief and sent
northward over the Pyrenees, brought the two brother-kings of the Franks
into Spain (431). Amalaric was defeated,[142] fled to Barcelona, and
sought to escape thence by sea, probably to Italy; but his passage to
the harbour was barred by his own mutinous soldiers, and he perished by
a javelin hurled by one of them. The Franks returned, enriched with
great booty, to their own land, and Theudis, the Ostrogothic noble,
whose power had long overshadowed his master's, and who was accused by
some of having caused the mutiny of his troops, succeeded to his throne.

[Footnote 142: At Narbonne. The part of Languedoc called Septimania was
still held by the Visigoths.]

So had the great Arian league and the network of family alliances, by
which Theodoric had sought to guard it from the spoiler, passed away
into nothingness: and thus did the Ostrogothic kingdom now stand alone
and without allies before the rejuvenated Empire, flushed with victory,
and possessing such a head as Justinian, such a terrible right arm as
Belisarius. Not many months had elapsed from the battle of Tricamaron
when the ambassadors of the Empire appeared at Ravenna to present those
claims out of which Greek ingenuity would soon fashion a pretext for
war. The town of Lilybaeum, in Sicily had long ago been handed over by
Theodoric to the Vandal king Thrasamund as part of Amalafrid