Pauli Iovii Novocomensis opera quotquot extant omnia

catchword: virtue
and was led to the furthest regions of the East as reinforcements for the legions, and into the Parthian wars. Indeed, many years earlier, through long association and admiration of the Roman soldiers—who had become entrenched during perpetual winters and defended the peace of the subjugated nation with a fixed garrison—they had learned not only to study the discipline of military affairs with diligence, but also to cultivate their minds with refined manners and liberal arts and letters, and to imitate eloquence. Equipped with these manners and prepared for opportunity, they threw off the yoke of long-standing servitude with raised heads, as the majesty of the Roman Empire was torn apart by civil wars and dire incursions of barbarians.

But, as we have said above, the Scottish war immediately followed that joy of recovered liberty, and remedies for those disasters were not provided with any certain or swift counsel. For all their forces and the consensus of public safety were broken by the divergent opinions of cities and leaders; indeed, every best one among the petty kings, in order to display greater and more distinguished zeal in the councils, dissented from his peers out of emulation of virtue. Therefore, by a healthy decree which necessity had forced, they transferred the sum and command of the war to Vortigern, who surpassed the others in his skill in military matters. And so that nothing would be lacking in supreme power according to his judgment, they added the crown of the royal name, by which he might be perpetually distinguished.

This Vortigern was the first King of the Britons, but he was very unfortunate and, by his fatal counsel, most disastrous to his fatherland. For when he had made trial of his own forces several times against the Scots without success, and had often repaired the war with significant care and new levies, he decided that the enemies should be repelled by hired and foreign soldiers, so that the kingdom would not be completely stripped of all its youth, afflicted by such great and such persistent evils. Not long after, with great gifts and great stipends, he summoned from the Saxon shore the Angles, a people most warlike among the Germans. Their leader was Hengist, under whose command the Scots were defeated and slaughtered in battle and, driven far and wide within their own borders, they ceased to harass the Britons. Furthermore, Vortigern, as was fitting for one who was grateful and liberal, divided lands among the liberators of his country. He gave as a gift, first of all, Kent and the region of the Eastern coast for them to inhabit, so that they might have a ready force by which the Scots, if they should again burst into the borders, might be destroyed to the point of extermination.

Vortigern also, so that the pact of the initiated alliance might be strengthened by the stronger bond of the friendship of the new nation, entered into marriage with Rowena, the daughter of Hengist. This was not a happy omen, for being captured by an unfortunate love for the foreign youth due to her excellent beauty, he most unjustly repudiated his former wife, from whom he had already received a son in the hope of the kingdom, in order to prepare a vacant bed for his ill-timed lust. It is agreed that from this marriage torch that fire was ignited by which at last, with the fates pressing, all of Britain—having lost the dignity of its empire and name—was consumed. For Hengist, who had arrived at fertile and most pleasant regions from the filth of his own marshes and the sterility of that squalid native soil, being of immense and perfidious character, turned arms against his son-in-law in order to occupy the kingdom. To the report of that stirred-up war, the Angles who had remained in Germany were immediately summoned by Hengist for the rich plunder, and from the easy victory they crossed over into the island to the blessed seats. And such was their multitude and virtue that for many years the Britons fought with the Angles for the possession of their fatherland, with the outcome of the war often alternating, when Hengist, moved by nothing of his previous disgrace, had also joined the Scots into a society of war with accumulated treachery. In these miseries of the deadly war, Vortigern died, consumed by grief of mind. Hengist also paid the just penalties for his wickedness, slaughtered in the battle line by the son of his son-in-law. New kings immediately took up the war and the Empire on both sides, whom the rights of blood, the suffrages of the nobility, and military