334 THE HORSES OF PREHISTORIC [CH. 



of the Saracens could be seen but heaped-up carcases as far 

 as eye could reach. The flood tide of Saracen conquest had 

 spent its force against the immovable bulwark of Teutonic 

 chivalry, never more to return. Western Christendom was 

 saved, and no small part of that deliverance was due to the 

 stout horses which carried the mail-clad Frankish Avarriors, 

 for without good horses the northern host must have fallen 

 before the swift horsemen of Africa as inevitably as the 

 Romans and Gauls were routed by Hannibal's Numidians 

 more than nine centuries before. But the Franks rode upon 

 the descendants of those horses which from the second 

 century before Christ the Gauls had kept steadily importing 

 from the south, and whose blood the Tencteri had later on 

 acquired. 



We have seen that the large old breeds of Germany and 

 Denmark are included by Sanson in his E. c. germanicus and 

 the horses of Friesland, Holland and Flanders under his E. c. 

 frisius (p. 2). He considers that when the barbarians of 

 Germany and Scandinavia fell upon the Roman world in the 

 early centuries of our era, these horses passed with them into 

 their new settlements, — with the Angles and Saxons into 

 Britain, with the Northmen into Normandy, with the Bur- 

 gundians into France and Switzerland, into Italy with the 

 Lombards, and finally into Spain and North Africa with the 

 Vandals. But the historical evidence has made it clear that 

 this breed of horse was not developed in North Germany or 

 Scandinavia, where we have seen that it was only at a com- 

 paratively recent date that the grey and black horses began to 

 supersede or supplement the old dun and white horses of the 

 North. 



In Caesar's day the Germans possessed no good horses 

 (p. 114), and when Tacitus wrote only tribes such as the 

 Tencteri, who were in close contact with the Gauls (p. 115), 

 had been able to acquire good horses and organise a cavalry. 

 As the latter historian in his account of Germany carefully 

 describes the military resources, arms and dress of each tribe, 

 we may safely infer that, when he does not call attention to 

 their horses, such tribes did not possess any, or at least any of 



