Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. HELVETIA TINDER THE FRANKS. — THE EARLY CHURCH. [ A. D. 400 to 900. ] DURING the long period of the dying agony of Rome, there was little left to tell of the past prosperity of the Helvetian cities. In A. D. 400, when the country emerged from the mist which had settled down upon it, it was thinly covered with a mixed population of Vandals, Burgundians, Alemaimi, Ostrogoths, Franks, and Lombards. Again it was beginning to recover somewhat from its ruined condition, when there burst upon Europe from the ends of the earth "the scourge of God," the destroyer of nations, Attila, with his half a million Huns. Their faces were so hideous as to appear scarcely human, and their actions were less human still. Very little is known of this last plague, as it fell upon Helvetia, but there remainsa tradition of the general destruction that accompanied it. About the end of the fifth century, the country was divided into three parts; the northern occupied by the Alemanui; Rhaetia, which included, besides Suabia and the Tyrol, the centre and southeastern part of the present Switzerland, and belonged to the Ostrogoths ; while the Burgun- dians were settled on both sides of the Jura, wherever the French and Romansch tongues are now spoken. The new masters of the country ruled very differently in the three divisions. The Alemanni governed as conquerors pure and simple, and made all their laws merely for themselves, their herds of buffaloes, their stags, and shepherd dogs, and the mares which supplied them with their daintiest food. In upper Rhaetia, however, the Ostrogoths ruled with a gentler hand. The slavery of the conquered people was softened to them by the permission to keep many of their own customs. In Rhaetia, also, the old Roman fortresses were left undestroyed, and ne...