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There is very little to record of the nine years of Justinus’ reign, save that he healed the forty-years’ schism which had separated the churches of Rome and Constantinople since the publication of Zeno’s ‘Henoticon.’ Being undisputedly orthodox, he withdrew that document, and the schism disappeared with its cause. The only real importance of Justinus is that he prepared the way for his famous nephew and successor, Justinian, whom he adopted as colleague, and intrusted with those matters of civil administration with which he was himself incompetent to deal. He died and left the throne to Justinian in A.D. 528.

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The Franks in Northern Gaul—Their early conquests—State of Gaul in 481—Chlodovech conquers Northern Gaul, 486—He subdues the Alamanni, 495-6—Conversion of Chlodovech, 496—He conquers Aquitaine from the Visigoths, 507—He unites all the Frankish Kingdoms, 511.

While Odoacer was still reigning in Italy, and Theodoric the Amal had not yet left the Balkans, or the banks of the Danube, the foundations of a great kingdom were being laid upon the Scheldt and the Meuse. Early in the fifth century the confederacy of marsh-tribes on the Yssel and Lech who had taken the common name of Franks, had moved southward into the territory of the Empire, and found themselves new homes in the provinces which the Romans called Belgica and Germania Inferior. For many years the hold of the legions on this land had been growing weaker; and, long ere it became a Frankish kingdom, it had been largely sprinkled with Frankish colonists, whom the emperors had admitted as military settlers on the waste lands within their border. In the lowlands of Toxandria, which after-ages called Brabant and Guelders, there were no large cities to be protected, no great fortresses to be maintained, and, while the Romans still exerted themselves to hold Treveri and Colonia Agrippina and Moguntiacum,^[7] they allowed the plains more to the north and west to slip out of their hands. |The Franks in Lower Germany.| By the second quarter of the fifth century the Franks were firmly established on the Scheldt and Meuse and lower Rhine, where the Roman garrisons never reappeared after the usurper Constantine had carried off the northern frontier legions to aid him in his attack on Italy (406). By this time, too, Colonia Agrippina, first of the great Roman cities of the Rhineland, seems to have already fallen into the hands of the Franks. Between 430 and 450 they continued to push forward as far as the Somme and the Moselle, and when, at the time of Attila’s great invasion of Gaul, the last imperial garrisons in the Rhineland were exterminated, and the last governors driven forth by the Huns from Treveri and Moguntiacum and Mettis, it was the Franks who profited. After the Huns had rolled back again to the East, Frankish kings, not Roman officials, took possession of the ravaged land along the Moselle and Rhine, and the surviving provincials had for the future to obey a Teutonic master near home, not a governor despatched from distant Ravenna.