hold in Italy and overlordship over the Thuringians, Alamans, and Bavarians in Germany; and the suzerainty they claimed over south-east England may have been more of a reality than most English historians have thought. The dying words of Chlothar I, by 561 the last surviving son of Clovis, were quite understandable: 'Wa! What kind of king is it in heaven, who kills off kings as great as me?'

The Franks succeeded in bringing a new kind of political stability in the sixth century, as heirs to the Romans. But the age of the migrations was not over. The collapse of Hunnic hegemony after the death of Attila in 453, and the movement of peoples into western Europe, allowed other peoples to move south or west. The Bavarians moved into the upper Danube area in the early sixth century. The Avars, a nomadic people from central Asia, came into the middle Danube region ( Hungary) in the mid-sixth century (persuading the Lombards to move into Italy); there they set up a powerful kingdom, which raided as far west as Thuringia and as far east as Constantinople, and survived until the campaigns of Charlemagne in the late eighth century. The Bulgars established themselves further east, in the seventh century. And finally, there were the movements of the Slavs themselves, the indigenous peoples of north-east Europe, which are only now being disentangled by the archaeologists. In the sixth century the Slavs were moving south across the Danube frontier into the Balkan provinces of the Roman Empire, and west into Bohemia and Moravia, and into the area between the Vistula and the Elbe which had previously been inhabited by Germans, and threatening the Germanic territories of Thuringia, Saxony, and Denmark.

The Spread of Christianity

In the year 400 most north Europeans worshipped one or more non-Christian gods; by 900 Christianity had reached most of the north-west, and had even begun to spread into Scandinavia and eastern Europe. In 400 the attack on non-Christian worship by means of legislation had only just begun, bishops such

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