Then the Burgundians. Then the East
Goths. Then the Alemanni. Then the Franks. There was no end to the
invasions. Rome at last was at the mercy of every ambitious highway
robber who could gather a few followers.

In the year 402 the Emperor fled to Ravenna, which was a sea-port and
strongly fortified, and there, in the year 475, Odoacer, commander of a
regiment of the German mercenaries, who wanted the farms of Italy to
be divided among themselves, gently but effectively pushed Romulus
Augustulus, the last of the emperors who ruled the western division,
from his throne, and proclaimed himself Patriarch or ruler of Rome. The
eastern Emperor, who was very busy with his own affairs, recognised him,
and for ten years Odoacer ruled what was left of the western provinces.

A few years later, Theodoric, King of the East Goths, invaded the newly
formed Patriciat, took Ravenna, murdered Odoacer at his own dinner
table, and established a Gothic Kingdom amidst the ruins of the western
part of the Empire. This Patriciate state did not last long. In the
sixth century a motley crowd of Longobards and Saxons and Slavs and
Avars invaded Italy, destroyed the Gothic kingdom, and established a new
state of which Pavia became the capital.

Then at last the imperial city sank into a state of utter neglect and
despair. The ancient palaces had been plundered time and again. The
schools had been burned down. The teachers had been starved to death.
The rich people had been thrown out of their villas which were now
inhabited by evil-smelling and hairy barbarians. The roads had fallen
into decay. The old bridges were gone and commerce had come to a
standstill. Civilisation--the product of thousands of years of patient
labor on the part of Egyptians and Babylonians and Greeks and Romans,
which had lifted man high above the most daring dreams of his earliest
ancestors, threatened to perish from the western continent.

It is true that in the far east, Constantinople continued to be the
centre of an Empire for another thousand years. But it hardly counted
as a part of the European continent. Its interests lay in the east. It
began to forget its western origin. Gradually the Roman language was
given up for the Greek. The Roman alphabet was discarded and Roman
law was written in Greek characters and explained by Greek judges. The
Emperor became an Asiatic despot, worshipped as the god-like kings of
Thebes had been worshipped in the valley of the Nil