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GERMAN KINGDOMS IN THE WEST 119 only account of them is the crude, strongly partisan, and often sadly ungrammatical and incoherent chron- So _ icle of Gregory of Tours (538-594). For Theodo- of our ric, the East Goth, we have the letters of his knowled s e secretary, Cassiodorus, who made some pretense to learning and literary style. Cassiodorus also composed a history of the Goths, now lost, but of which some use was made by Jordanes, who wrote a history of the Goths later in the sixth century, but who was an unreliable lover of legend with no capacity for criticism or exactness. Otherwise we have to rely on incidental references to Western events in Byzantine historians and on the laws issued during this period by the German kings. How large the new German element in the population of these kingdoms was, it is difficult to say. Sometimes the invading armies were not very large; Gaiseric, Population for instance, is said to have led only eighty thou- andlan s ua g e sand Vandals into North Africa which probably had a population of millions. We must remember, however, that there were many barbarians scattered through the Empire before this. Except in Britain and northeastern Gaul the language of the invaders had little or no abiding influence. The Salian Franks almost completely obliterated Roman civilization and Christianity from the region between the Meuse and the Scheldt, which they occupied in their first aggressions against the Empire, and where to-day is spoken a German dialect, Flemish. The Ripuarians also, in their first permanent advance west of the Rhine, seem to have dislodged Roman culture and the Christian religion, and their southwestern boundary at that time coincided roughly with the present limits of the French and German lan- guages. The Alamanni also appear to have introduced a permanent German element in the population west of the Rhine. Elsewhere in Gaul, and still more in Italy and Spain, the Latin races seem to have held their own. The German invaders usually became the aristocratic, fighting, landhold- ing class, though some of them dropped to a lower rank economic prosperity and in the social scale, while many in e