Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. THE FRANCO-IBERIAN PENINSULA. As we have seen, France, Spain and Portugal, which are included in the Franco-Iberian peninsula, were under the control of Rome until the fall of the Western Empire in 476. At that time Odoacer was entrusted by Zeno, emperor at Constantinople, in whom the full control of the whole Roman Empire had been vested by the senate, with the government of the West. The Roman senate had voted that one emperor was enough, and so Odoacer, chief of a Teutonic tribe, the Heruli, who had previously captured and sacked the city, was named as Patrician at Rome. The old form of government, with senate, consuls, etc., was continued, but from this time on, as the historian Freeman expresses it, "old Rome itself passed into the power of the barbarians." The Iberians were probably an indigenous people whom the Celts in their migrations found in possession of this western territory. They were related to the Finns of the north. In France, under the name of Aquitani, they were crowded to the south of the Garonne, and, as Basques in Spain, they were forced to the northwest, the mixture of races being called Celtiberians. Alaric, king of the West-Goths, as we have seen, though kept in check for a considerable time by the Roman general,Stilicho, finally in 410, captured and sacked the city of Rome and, although he died before actually in control of a government in Spain, he is rated as its first sovereign (406). His successor, Athauf, went nominally as a Roman official to restore the Spanish province to the empire, but really made it an independent government modeled after that of Rome (411). General history makes Clovis, chief of the Salian Franks of Tournai, the first king of France in 481 A. D. By his victory at Soissons in 485 he defeated the last ...