In addition to these, there were, from time to time invasions of Europe by other nations which did not have any connection by blood with Celts, Latins, Greeks, Germans, or Slavs.  For instance, the ferocious Huns, a people of the yellow race, rushed into Europe about 400 A.D., but were beaten in a big battle by the Romans and Germans and finally went back to Asia.  Three hundred years later, a great horde of Moors and Arabs from Africa crossed over into Europe by way of the Straits of Gibraltar, and at one time threatened to sweep before them all the Christian nations.  For several hundred years after this, they held the southern part of Spain, but were finally driven out.

Let us now come back to the story of what happened in Europe after the Romans had conquered all the country south and west of the Danube and Rhine.  The wild tribes of the Germans were restlessly roaming through the central part of Europe.  They were not at peace with each other.  In fact, constant war was going on.  Julius Caesar, the great Roman general, who conquered what is now France and added it to the Roman world, tells us that one great tribe of Germans, the Suevi (Swe’vi), made it their boast that they would let no other tribe live anywhere near them.  About a hundred years B.C., two great German tribes. the Cimbri and the Teutones, broke across the Rhine and poured into the Roman lands in countless numbers.  For seven years they roamed about until at last they were conquered in two bloody battles by a Roman general, who was Caesar’s uncle by marriage.  After this time, the Romans tried to conquer the country of the Germans and they might have been successful but for a young German chief named Arminius.  He had lived in Rome as a young man and had learned the Romans’ method of war; so when an army came against his tribe, he taught the Germans how to defend themselves.  As a result, the Roman army was trapped in a big forest and slaughtered, almost to a man.

[Illustration:  Gaius Julius Caesar.  From a bust in the British Museum]

This defeat ended any thought that the Romans may have had of conquering all Germany.  For the next one hundred and fifty years, Germans and Romans lived apart, each afraid of the other.  Then came a time when the Germans again became the attacking party.  Other fiercer and wilder peoples, like the Huns, were assailing them in the east and pushing them forward.  They finally broke over the Rhine-Danube boundary and poured across the Roman Empire in wave after wave.  Some of these tribes were the Vandals, Burgundians, Goths, Franks, and Lombards.  The Roman Empire went to pieces under their savage attacks.

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