migration and population movements: Europe 679 Gaul in 451, the Visigoths loyally joined the Roman general Aetius to stop him By this time deals were being made with other barbarian peoples as well One of the Frankish warlords in the north, Childeric, ruling from the Roman town of Tournai, seems to have helped the Romans defeat Saxons and other invaders After Childeric’s death, his son Clovis (r 481–511) decided that he would rather rule everybody, Franks and Romans alike, and his warlike career established a kingdom that became the basis of France Clovis even defeated the Visigoths and drove them out, over the mountains into Spain Although they had ruled Aquitaine for a century, they left so little trace there that archaeologists cannot even identify a “Visigothic grave” from that time In addition, certain questions remain: Did not the Franks of Clovis spread all over the land that came to bear their name (France)? Are not the thousands of graves archaeologists have found with “Frankish” weapons and jewelry proof of this? The answers have proved far from clear, largely because indigenous peoples can adopt whatever customs and dress are in favor with new elites in power, just as invading or migrating peoples can adopt cultural features from them Thus the Franks, originally Germanic speakers, came to be the French, speaking a Romance language Indeed, modern historians continue to debate how much of what happened in those distant days was due to significant migrations of whole peoples—as opposed to movements of smaller elite groups who would soon mix with indigenous peoples—and how much was due to cultural adaptation and the forging of new senses of group identity All scholars would agree that the early Middle Ages were a time of great instability, when new movements of peoples were set in motion by new threats and opportunities In the 530s the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople, Justinian, decided to send his armies west to retake lands that had come to be ruled by barbarian groups In two years the Vandals of North Africa were defeated, to abruptly disappear from history without a trace Italy had been ruled for 40 years by another group of Goths who had originally migrated in with Byzantine approval After 20 years of savage wars, they, too, disappeared from history, but their place was soon taken by another Germanic people called the Lombards, then living over the Alps, in present-day Austria The Lombards had been feeling pressure from the east, from the Avars, a new group of mounted central Asian warriors who had replaced the long-vanished Huns Deciding they would rather fight the Byzantines for Italy than risk facing the Avars, the whole people in 568 crossed the Alps and seized the plains of the Po Valley, which have borne their name (Lombardy) ever since The Byzantines held on to the seacoasts, for the longest time to the south, around Bari, set- ting in place a cultural contrast between these regions that a visitor to Italy still feels today By about 600 a western European core area had emerged, and the migrations seemed to have subsided In all the lands from Rome to the borders of Scotland, from the Rhine to the Atlantic, power was intensely localized, as the heirs of indigenous peoples and of migrants from outside strove to forge new cultural identities as Franks or Lombards, as Irish or Anglo-Saxons Only memories of Roman grandeur and a Christian faith based on Latin liturgy and scriptures gave these peoples a vague sense of common culture This sense was sharpened by hostility to those peoples on the outside who did not share in that culture, such as the Avars, considered dangerous, to the east and the Slavic peoples who were likewise pagan and were considered primitive In the late 700s a mighty figure would arise to unite most of these lands for the first time, creating an “empire” with a sense of Christian identity This was Charlemagne, who before dying in 813 waged war upon bloody war to extend his power northeast into Saxony, forcing the people there to become Christian; he so smashed the Avars that they, too, vanished from history Yet for all his success, Charlemagne’s last years were troubled by the stirrings of what was to become the second great early medieval epoch of invasions and migrations, bearing in on the core area of western Europe To the south, a dynamic and destablizing force of unprecedented proportions—at least from Charlemagne’s point of view—proved to be Islam Bursting out of Arabia in the 630s, Islamic armies swept over North Africa, conquered most of Spain, and by the 730s were raiding far to the north in France Their defeat near Tours in 732 by Charlemagne’s grandfather stopped their advance in the west; in the 770s Charlemagne led his armies into northeast Spain, thus beginning the Christian reconquest, which would take more than 700 years to finish During the centuries up to 1100 the Muslims were most often the aggressors, but their usual interest was not land to settle and control but loot—including slaves—with which to return home From 800 to 1000 the danger of the frequent Islamic raids from the south was matched by that of attacks by other warlike outsiders from the north and the east The Magyars were a migrant people from the Asian steppes who in 895 seized the same mid-Danubian plains earlier occupied by Huns and Avars At first, like these earlier peoples, they used the region as a base from which to raid and plunder, riding their powerful horses to attack deep in Italy and Germany After a defeat by the German ruler Otto I in 955, however, they settled down to develop a society based on agriculture, and, significantly, converted to western Christianity In 1000 their ruler was baptized with the name Stephen, accepting the Latin rites of the Roman Catholic Church From the