establishment of his personal ascendancy over the whole group. Such a
supremacy was obtained by AEthelbert of Kent, the first royal convert to
Christianity; by Edwin of Northumbria and his two immediate successors
in the seventh century; by Offa of Mercia (757-796); and by Egbert of
Wessex (802-839), whose power foreshadowed the later triumphs of the
house of Alfred.

(2) Southern Gaul was divided in the fifth century between the Visigoths
and the Burgundians. The former of these peoples entered the imperial
service in 410, after the death of Alaric I, who had led them into
Italy. His successors, Athaulf and Wallia, undertook to pacify Gaul and
to recover Spain for the rulers of Ravenna; the second of these
sovereigns was rewarded with a settlement, for himself and his
followers, between the Loire and the Garonne (419). In the terrible
battle of Troyes, against Attila the Hun (451), they did good service to
the Roman cause; but both before and after that event they were chiefly
occupied in extending their boundaries by force or fraud. At the close
of the fifth century their power in Gaul extended from the Loire to the
Pyrenees, from the Atlantic to the Rhone valley, and along the
Mediterranean seaboard farther east to the Alps. In Spain--which had
been, since 409, the prey of the Vandals, Alans and Suevi--they found a
more legitimate field for their ambitions. Between 466 and 484 they
annexed every part of the peninsula except the north-west corner, which
remained the last stronghold of their defeated competitors. The
Burgundians, from less auspicious beginnings, had built up a smaller but
yet a powerful kingdom. Transplanted by a victorious Roman general to
Savoy (443) from the lands between the Necker and the Main, they had
descended into the Rhone basin at the invitation of the provincials, to
protect that fertile land alike against Teutonic marauders and Roman
tax-collectors. By the year 500 they ruled from the Durance in the south