While the story reeks of an after-the-fact prediction coming true, there’s an aspect of it that seems to make some sense—if anyone should understand the potential danger posed by warlike “barbarians” from the frozen north, it would be a Roman emperor. This “Roman” emperor might have been expected to know this better than most; he was, after all, a tall, light-haired, mustachioed, blue-eyed German-speaking warrior king. And he was a man who had been fighting “pagan” German tribesmen long before he became the first Roman emperor to rule in the West in three hundred years. Sometimes in history,
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