became their kings and governors, not seldom under the recognised Roman titles of Patrician, Comes, etc. The law of the countries so conquered was the Roman civil law, with the tribal customs grafted on to it. Whatever oral works of imagination they might have carried with them, their literature soon became that of Rome only; for the great epical and mythological poems of the race have been kept alive solely by those tribes who never crossed Roman civilisation.
Their tribal religion soon gave way, nominally at least, to the official religion of the Empire, but nevertheless they 58 impressed some of their customary traditions on the Mediæval Church of the West, and took away some of its eastern character. Medieval Catholicism retained in consequence a certain portion of the this-worldliness and the solidarity of barbarian society, and so shows on one side a communistic interest in the corporation, whether church, guild, parish, or even monastery, which is quite alien to the individualistic introspectivism of the Christianity of the decaying Empire; the latter appears, on the other hand, sporadically, throughout the Middle Ages, in later times gathering volume under the Lollards, and at last culminating in the Protestantism of the Reformation.
This interpenetration of progressive barbarism and decaying Roman civilisation, so essential to the life of the new epoch, began with the first invasion of Italy by the Goths (406), and went on through centuries of confused war and struggle, till the process of welding together the varying elements grew complete about the time of Charles the Great, who was crowned at Rome in the 59 year 800. Thus was created the phantom of the Holy Roman, really the German, Empire of the Middle Ages, which continued the legend of Roman domination after the feudal system itself had fallen, while Rome became merely a memory of past history, an ideal for men to look backward to in an age particularly prone to forming such ideals.