Early European History

Roman rule over Gaul lasted five centuries after Caesar, but its effects were permanent. We need only consider the fact that though France bears the the name of a Germanic tribe, the Franks, who conquered Roman Gaul, the French language is derived neither from the Franks nor the Celtic Gauls, but from Latin. The French may speak of "our ancestors, the Gauls," but their civilization is Roman, and in the centuries after Rome fell they transmitted that civilization to lands where no legion ever marched.

Had there been no Roman conquest of Gaul, the subsequent history of Europe would surely have been unimagineably different. There could have been no Western Empire as such; the Roman Empire as a whole would have resembled an enlarged Byzantine Empire, with its wealth and vitality centered in the East, and Western Europe would have developed along entirely different lines, perhaps developing as a pagan, Celtic society, perhaps even eventually being incorporated in the Islamic world. Such

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onding to circumstances, he made the most of his opportunities. In any case, whether by grand design or shrewd opportunism, Caesar's political strategy in the conquest of Gaul was one that applied the established Roman traditions of diplomatic and military intervention in a new way, one that justified the conquest of a large region with many independent tribal groupings in the course of a few years. Caesar's strategic procedure of innovation based on precedent was mirrored on the military level. The Roman army was in modern terms an army configured for "conventional" war against centralized enemy powers fielding conventional armies of their own. It is true that on the tactical level the hallmark of the Roman legion was its flexibility in maneuver; this feature is what distinguished it from the Macedonian-type phalanx that was its most frequent enemy in the age of Roman expansion. Instead of a single massive and inflexible wall of spears, the Roman legion in battle was organized into smaller units, centuries and maniples, equipped to fight with a variety of weapons and to maneuver individually in co-ordination, managed by a sophisticated system of command and control. This open tactical order was crucial in Caesar's camp
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Approximate Word count = 3235
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)