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The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 04

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Title: The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 04

Editor: Rossiter Johnson
        Charles F. Horne
        LL. D. John Rudd


        
Release date: March 12, 2005 [eBook #15345]
                Most recently updated: December 14, 2020

Language: English

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THE GREAT EVENTS BY FAMOUS HISTORIANS

VOLUME IV

A COMPREHENSIVE AND READABLE ACCOUNT OF THE WORLD'S HISTORY, EMPHASIZING
THE MORE IMPORTANT EVENTS, AND PRESENTING THESE AS COMPLETE NARRATIVES
IN THE MASTER-WORDS OF THE MOST EMINENT HISTORIANS

NON-SECTARIAN            NON-PARTISAN            NON-SECTIONAL

ON THE PLAN EVOLVED FROM A CONSENSUS OF OPINIONS GATHERED FROM THE MOST
DISTINGUISHED SCHOLARS OF AMERICA AND EUROPE, INCLUDING BRIEF
INTRODUCTIONS BY SPECIALISTS TO CONNECT AND EXPLAIN THE CELEBRATED
NARRATIVES. ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. WITH THOROUGH INDICES,
BIBLIOGRAPHIES, CHRONOLOGIES, AND COURSES OF READING

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

ROSSITER JOHNSON, LL.D.

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

CHARLES F. HORNE, Ph.D.
JOHN RUDD, LL.D.

With a staff of specialists

VOLUME IV

The National Alumni

1905







CONTENTS

VOLUME IV


An Outline Narrative of the Great Events,
  CHARLES F. HORNE

Visigoths Pillage Rome (A.D. 410),
  EDWARD GIBBON

Huns Invade the Eastern Roman Empire
Attila Dictates a Treaty of Peace (A.D. 441),
  EDWARD GIBBON

The English Conquest of Britain (A.D. 449-579),
  JOHN R. GREEN
  CHARLES KNIGHT

Attila Invades Western Europe
Battle of Châlons (A.D. 451),
  SIR EDWARD S. CREASY
  EDWARD GIBBON

Foundation of Venice (A.D. 452),
  THOMAS HODGKIN
  JOHN RUSKIN

Clovis Founds the Kingdom of the Franks
It Becomes Christian (A.D. 486-511),
  FRANÇOIS P.G. GUIZOT

Publication of the Justinian Code (A.D. 529-534),
  EDWARD GIBBON

Augustine's Missionary Work in England (A.D. 597),
  THE VENERABLE BEDE
  JOHN R. GREEN

The Hegira: Career of Mahomet
The Koran: and Mahometan Creed (A.D. 622),
  WASHINGTON IRVING
  SIMON OCKLEY

The Saracen Conquest of Syria (A.D. 636),
  SIMON OCKLEY

Saracens Conquer Egypt
Destruction of the Library at Alexandria (A.D. 640),
  WASHINGTON IRVING

Evolution of the Dogeship in Venice (A.D. 697),
  WILLIAM C. HAZLITT

Saracens in Spain
Battle of the Guadalete (A.D. 711),
  AHMED IBN MAHOMET AL-MAKKARI

Battle of Tours (A.D. 732),
  SIR EDWARD S. CREASY

Founding of the Carlovingian Dynasty
Pépin the Short Usurps the Frankish Crown (A.D. 751),
  FRANÇOIS P.G. GUIZOT

Career of Charlemagne (A.D. 772-814),
  FRANÇOIS P.G. GUIZOT

Egbert Becomes King of the Anglo-Saxon
Heptarchy (A.D. 827),
  DAVID HUME

Universal Chronology (A.D. 410-842),
  JOHN RUDD




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

VOLUME IV


A captive's wife pleads with the barbarian chief for
the life of her husband,                           Frontispiece
  Painting by R. Peacock.

Mahomet, preaching the unity of God, enters Mecca
at the head of his victorious followers,
  Painting by A. Mueller.




[Illustration: A captive's wife pleads with the barbarian chief for the
life of her husband

Painting by R. Peacock.]





AN OUTLINE NARRATIVE

TRACING BRIEFLY THE CAUSES, CONNECTIONS, AND CONSEQUENCES OF THE GREAT
EVENTS

(FROM THE FALL OF ROME TO THE EMPIRE OF CHARLEMAGNE)

CHARLES F. HORNE


Our modern civilization is built up on three great corner-stones, three
inestimably valuable heritages from the past. The Græco-Roman
civilization gave us our arts and our philosophies, the bases of
intellectual power. The Hebrews bequeathed to us the religious idea,
which has saved man from despair, has been the potent stimulus to two
thousand years of endurance and hope. The Teutons gave us a healthy,
sturdy, uncontaminated physique, honest bodies and clean minds, the lack
of which had made further progress impossible to the ancient world.

This last is what made necessary the barbarian overthrow of Rome, if the
world was still to advance. The slowly progressing knowledge of the arts
and handicrafts which we have seen passed down from Egypt to Babylonia,
to Persia, Greece, and Rome, had not been acquired without heavy loss.
The system of slavery which allowed the few to think, while the many
were constrained to toil as beasts, had eaten like a canker into the
heart of society. The Roman world was repeating the oft-told tale of the
past, and sinking into the lifeless formalism of which Egypt was the
type. Man had become wise, but worthless.

As though on purpose to prove to future generations how utterly
worthless, the Roman civilization was allowed to continue uninterrupted
in one unneeded corner of its former domains. For over a thousand years
the successors of Theodosius and of Constantine held unbroken sway in
the capital which the latter had founded. They only succeeded in
emphasizing how futile their culture had become.

The entire ten centuries that followed the overthrow of Rome have long
been spoken of as the "Dark Ages," but, considering how infinitely
darker those same ages must have become without the intervention of the
Teutons, present criticism begins to protest against the term. All that
was lost with the ancient world was something of intellectual keenness,
something of artistic culture, quickly regained when man was once more
ripe for them. What the Teutons had to offer of infinitely greater
worth, what they had developed in their cold, northern forests, was
their sense of liberty and equality, their love of honesty, their
respect for womankind. It is not too much to say that, without these,
any higher progress was, and always will be, impossible.

In short, the Roman and Grecian races had become impotent and decrepit.
The high destiny of man lay not with them, but with the younger race,
for whom all earlier civilizations had but prepared the way.

Who were these Teutons? Rome knew them only vaguely as wild tribes
dwelling in the gloom of the great forest wilderness. In reality they
were but the vanguard of vast races of human beings who through ages had
been slowly populating all Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. Beyond the
Teutons were other Aryans, the Slavs. Beyond these were vague non-Aryan
races like the Huns, content to direct their careers of slaughter
against one another, and only occasionally and for a moment flaring with
red-fire beacons of ruin along the edge of the Aryan world.

Some at least of the Teutonic tribes had grown partly civilized. The
Germans along the Rhine, and the Goths along the Danube, had been from
the time of Augustus in more or less close contact with Rome. Germanicus
had once subdued almost the whole of Germany; later emperors had held
temporarily the broad province of Dacia, beyond the Danube. The
barbarians were eagerly enlisted in the Roman army. During the closing
centuries of decadence they became its main support; they rose to high
commands; there were even barbarian emperors at last. The intermingling
of the two worlds thus became extensive, and the Teutons learned much of
Rome. The Goths whom Theodosius permitted to settle within its dominions
were already partly Christian.


THE PERIOD OF INVASION

It was these same Goths who became the immediate cause of Rome's
downfall. Theodosius had kept them in restraint; his feeble sons scarce
even attempted it. The intruders found a famous leader in Alaric, and,
after plundering most of the Grecian peninsula, they ravaged Italy,
ending in 410 with the sack of Rome itself.[1]

This seems to us, perhaps, a greater event than it did to its own
generation. The "Emperor of the West," the degenerate son of Theodosius,
was not within the city when it fell; and the story is told that, on
hearing the news, he expressed relief, because he had at first
understood that the evil tidings referred to the death of a favorite hen
named Rome. The tale emphasizes the disgrace of the famous capital; it
had sunk to be but one city among many. Alaric's Goths had been
nominally an army belonging to the Emperor of the East; their invasion
was regarded as only one more civil war.

Besides, the Roman world might yet have proved itself big enough to
assimilate and engulf the entire mass of this already half-civilized
people. Its name was still a spell on them. Ataulf, the successor of
Alaric, was proud to accept a Roman title and become a defender of the
Empire. He marched his followers into Gaul under a commission to
chastise the "barbarians" who were desolating it.

These later comers were the instruments of that more overwhelming
destruction for which the Goths had but prepared the way. To resist
Alaric, the Roman legions had been withdrawn from all the western
frontiers, and thus more distant and far more savage tribes of the
Teutons beheld the glittering empire unprotected, its pathways most
alluringly left open. They began streaming across the undefended Rhine
and Danube. Their bands were often small and feeble, such as earlier
emperors would have turned back with ease; but now all this fascinating
world of wealth, so dimly known and doubtless fiercely coveted, lay
helpless, open to their plundering. The Vandals ravaged Gaul and Spain,
and, being defeated by the Goths, passed on into Africa. The Saxons and
Angles penetrated England[2] and fought there for centuries against the
desperate Britons, whom the Roman legions had perforce abandoned to
their fate. The Franks and Burgundians plundered Gaul.

Fortunately the invading tribes were on the whole a kindly race. When
they joyously whirled their huge battle-axes against iron helmets,
smashing down through bone and brain beneath, their delight was not in
the scream of the unlucky wretch within, but in their own vigorous sweep
of muscle, in the conscious power of the blow. Fierce they were, but not
coldly cruel like the ancients. The condition of the lower classes
certainly became no worse for their invasion; it probably improved. Much
the new-comers undoubtedly destroyed in pure wantonness. But there was
much more that they admired, half understood, and sought to save.

Behind them, however, came a conqueror of far more terrible mood. We
have seen that when the Goths first entered Roman territory they were
driven on by a vast migration of the Asiatic Huns. These wild and
hideous tribes then spent half a century roaming through central Europe,
ere they were gathered into one huge body by their great chief, Attila,
and in their turn approached the shattered regions of the
Mediterranean.[3] Their invasion, if we are to trust the tales of their
enemies, from whom alone we know of them, was incalculably more
destructive than all those of the Teutons combined. The Huns delighted
in suffering; they slew for the sake of slaughter. Where they passed
they left naught but an empty desert, burned and blackened and devoid of
life.

Crossing the Danube, they ravaged the Roman Empire of the East almost
without opposition. Only the impregnable walls of Constantinople
resisted the destruction. A few years later the savage horde appeared
upon the Rhine, and in enormous numbers penetrated Gaul. No people had
yet understood them, none had even checked their career. The white races
seemed helpless against this "yellow peril," this "Scourge of God," as
Attila was called.

Goths and Romans and all the varied tribes which were ranging in
perturbed whirl through unhappy Gaul laid aside their lesser enmities
and met in common cause against this terrible invader. The battle of
Châlons, 451,[4] was the most tremendous struggle in which Turanian was
ever matched against Aryan, the one huge bid of the stagnant,
unprogressive races, for earth's mastery.

Old chronicles rise into poetry at thought of that immeasurable battle.
They figure the slain by hundred thousands; they describe the souls of
the dead as rising above the bodies and continuing their furious
struggle in the air. Attila was checked and drew back. Defeated we can
scarce call him, for only a year or so later we find him ravaging Italy.
Fugitives fleeing before him to the marshes lay the first stones of
Venice.[5] Leo, the great Pope, pleads with him for Rome. His forces,
however, are obviously weaker than they were. He retreats; and after his
death his irresponsible followers disappear forever in the wilderness.


THE PERIOD OF SETTLEMENT

Toward the close of this tumultuous fifth century, the various Teutonic
tribes show distinct tendencies toward settling down and forming
kingdoms amid the various lands they have overrun. The Vandals build a
state in Africa, and from the old site of Carthage send their ships to
the second sack of Rome. The Visigoths form a Spanish kingdom, which
lasts over two hundred years. The Ostrogoths construct an empire in
Italy (493-554), and, under the wise rule of their chieftain Theodoric,
men joyfully proclaim that peace and happiness and prosperity have
returned to earth. Most important of all in its bearing upon later
history, the Franks under Clovis begin the building of France.[6]

Encouraged by these milder days, the Roman emperors of Constantinople
attempt to reclaim their old domain. The reign of Justinian begins
(527-565), and his great general Belisarius temporarily wins back for
him both Africa and Italy. This was a comparatively unimportant detail,
a mere momentary reversal of the historic tide. Justinian did for the
future a far more noted service.

If there was one subject which Roman officials had learned thoroughly
through their many generations of rule, it was the set of principles by
which judges must be guided in their endeavor to do justice. Long
practical experience of administration made the Romans the great
law-givers of antiquity. And now Justinian set his lawyers to work to
gather into a single code, or "digest," all the scattered and elaborate
rules and decisions which had place in their gigantic system.[7]

It is this Code of Justinian which, handed down through the ages, stands
as the basis of much of our law to-day. It shapes our social world, it
governs the fundamental relations between man and man. There are not
wanting those who believe its principles are wrong, who aver that man's
true attitude toward his fellows should be wholly different from its
present artificial pose. But whether for better or for worse we live
to-day by Roman law.

This law the Teutons were slowly absorbing. They accepted the general
structure of the world into which they had thrust themselves; they
continued its style of building and many of its rougher arts; they even
adopted its language, though in such confused and awkward fashion that
Italy, France, and Spain grew each to have a dialect of its own. And
most important of all, they accepted the religion, the Christian
religion of Rome. Missionaries venture forth again. Augustine preaches
in England.[8] Boniface penetrates the German wilds.

It must not be supposed that the moment a Teuton accepted baptism he
became filled with a pure Christian spirit of meekness and of love. On
the contrary, he probably remained much the same drunken, roistering
heathen as before. But he was brought in contact with noble examples in
the lives of some of the Christian bishops around him; great truths
began to touch his mobile nature; he was impressed, softened; he began
to think and feel.

Given a couple of centuries of this, we really begin to see some very
encouraging results. We realize that for once we are being allowed to
study a civilization in its earlier stages, to be present almost at its
birth, to watch the methods of the Master-builder in the making of a
race. Gazing at similar developments in the days of Egypt and Babylon,
we guessed vaguely that they must have been of slowest growth. Here at
last one takes place under our eyes, and it does not need so many ages
after all. There is no study more fascinating than to trace the slow
changes stamping themselves ineradicably upon the Teutonic mind and soul
during these misty far-off centuries of turmoil.

On the whole, of course, the sixth, seventh, and even the eighth
centuries form a period of strife. The Teutons had spent too many ages
warring against one another in petty strife to abandon the pleasure in a
single generation. Men fought because they liked fighting, much as they
play football to-day. Then, too, there came another great outburst of
Semite religious enthusiasm. Mahomet[9] started the Arabs on their
remarkable career of conquest.


THE MAHOMETAN OUTBURST

Mahomet himself died (632) before he had fully established his influence
even over Arabia: his successors had practically to reconquer it. Yet
within five years of his death the Arabs had mastered Syria.[10] They
spread like some sudden, unexpected, immeasurable whirlwind. Ancient
Persia went down before them. By 640 they had trampled Egypt under foot,
and destroyed the celebrated Alexandrian library.[11] They swept over
all Africa, completely obliterating every trace of Vandal or of Roman.
Their dominion reached farther east than that of Alexander. They wrested
most of its Asiatic possessions from the pretentious Empire at
Constantinople, and reduced that exhausted State to a condition of
weakness from which it never arose. Then, passing on through their
African possessions, they entered Spain and overthrew the kingdom of
the Visigoths.[12] It was a storm whose end no man could measure, whose
coming none could have foreseen. And then, just a century after
Mahomet's death, the Arabs, pressing on through Spain, encountered the
Franks on the plains of France.

A thousand years had passed since Semitic Carthage had fallen before
Aryan Rome. Now once again the Semites, far more dangerous because in
the full tide of the religious frenzy of their race, threatened to
engulf the Aryan world. They were repulsed by the still sturdy Franks
under their great leader, Charles Martel, at Tours. The battle of
Tours[13] was only less momentous to the human race than that of
Châlons. What the Arab domination of Europe would have meant we can
partly guess by looking at the lax and lawless states of Northern Africa
to-day. These fair lands, under both Roman and Vandal, had long been
sharing the lot of Aryan Europe; they seemed destined to follow in its
growth and fortune. But the Arab conquest restored them to Semitism,
made Asia the seat from which they were to have their training, attached
them to the chariot of sloth instead of that of effort. What they are
to-day, all Europe might have been.

Yet with the picture of these fifth and sixth and seventh centuries of
battle full before us, we are not tempted to glory overmuch even in such
victories as Tours and Châlons. We see war for what it has ever
been--the curse of man, the hugest hinderance to our civilization. While
men fight they have small time for thought or art or any soft or kindly
sentiment. The survivors may with good luck develop into a stronger
breed; they are inevitably more brutal.

We thus begin to recognize just how necessary for human progress was the
work Rome had been engaged in. By holding the world at peace, she had
given humankind at least the opportunity to grow. The moment her
restraining hand was shaken off, war sprang up everywhere. Not only do
we find the inheritors of her territory fighting among themselves, they
are exposed to the savagery of Attila, the fury of the Arabs. New bands
of more distant Teutons come, ever pushing in amid their half-settled
brethren, overthrowing them in turn. The Lombards capture Northern
Italy, only Venice remaining safe amid her marshes.[14] The
East-Franks--that is, the semi-barbarians still remaining in the
wilderness--master the more cultured West-Franks, who hold Gaul. No
sooner does civilization start up than it is trodden on.


THE EMPIRE OF CHARLEMAGNE

At length there arose among the Franks a series of stalwart rulers,
keen-eyed, penetrating somewhat at least into the meaning of their
world, determined to have peace if they must fight for it. Charles
Martel was one of these. Then came his son Pépin,[15] who held out his
hand to the bishops of Rome, acknowledged their vast civilizing
influence, saved them from the Lombards, and joined church and state
once more in harmony. After Pépin came his son, Charlemagne, whose reign
marks an epoch of the world. The peace his fathers had striven for, he
won at last, though only, as they had done, by constant fighting. He
attacked the Arabs and reduced them to permanent feebleness in Spain. He
turned backward the Teutonic movement, marching his Franks into the
German forests, and in campaign after campaign defeating the wild tribes
that still remained there. The strongest of them, the Saxons, accepted
an enforced Christianity. Even the vague races beyond the German borders
were so harried, so weakened, that they ceased to be a serious menace.

Charlemagne[16] had thus in very truth created a new empire. He had
established at least one central spot, so hedged round by border
dependencies that no later wave of barbarians ever quite succeeded in
submerging it. The bones of the great Emperor, in their cathedral
sepulchre at Aix, have never been disturbed by an unfriendly hand, Paris
submitted to no new conquest until over a thousand years later, when the
nineteenth century had stolen the barbarity from war. It was then no
more than a just acknowledgment of Charlemagne's work when, on Christmas
Day of the year 800, as he rose from kneeling at the cathedral altar in
Rome, he was crowned by the Pope whom he had defended, and hailed by an
enthusiastic people as lord of a re-created "Holy Roman Empire."

In England, also, the centuries of warfare among the Britons and the
various antagonistic Teutonic tribes seemed drawing to an end. Egbert
established the "heptarchy";[17] that is, became overlord of all the
lesser kings. Truly for a moment civilization seemed reëstablished. The
arts returned to prominence. England could send so noteworthy a scholar
as Alcuin to the aid of the great Emperor. Charlemagne encouraged
learning; Alcuin established schools. Once more men sowed and reaped in
security. The "Roman peace" seemed come again.


[FOR THE NEXT SECTION OF THIS GENERAL SURVEY SEE VOLUME V.]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See _Visigoths Pillage Rome_, page 1.

[2] See _The English Conquest of Britain_, page 55.

[3] See _Huns Invade the Eastern Roman Empire_, page 28.

[4] See _Attila Invades Western Europe_, page 72.

[5] See _Foundation of Venice_, page 95.

[6] See _Clovis Founds the Kingdom of the Franks_, page 113.

[7] See _Publication of the Justinian Code_, page 138.

[8] See _Augustine's Missionary Work in England_, page 182.

[9] See _The Hegira_, page 198.

[10] See _The Saracen Conquest of Syria_, page 247.

[11] See _Saracens Conquer Egypt_, page 278.

[12] See _Saracens in Spain_, page 301.

[13] See _Battle of Tours_, page 313.

[14] See _Evolution of the Dogeship in Venice_, page 292.

[15] See _Founding of the Carlovingian Dynasty_, page 324.

[16] See _Career of Charlemagne_, page 334.

[17] See _Egbert Becomes King of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy_, page 372.




VISIGOTHS PILLAGE ROME

A.D. 410

EDWARD GIBBON

     Of the two great historical divisions of the Gothic race the
     Visigoths or West Goths were admitted into the Roman Empire in A.D.
     376, when they sought protection from the pursuing Huns, and were
     transported across the Danube to the Moesian shore. The story of
     their gradual progress in civilization and growth in military
     power, which at last enabled them to descend with overwhelming
     force upon Rome itself, forms one of the romances of history.

     From their first reception into Lower Moesia the Visigoths were
     subjected to the most contemptuous and oppressive treatment by the
     Romans who had admitted them into their domains. At last the
     outraged colonists were provoked to revolt, and a stubborn war
     ensued, which was ended at Adrianople, August 9, A.D. 378, by the
     defeat of the emperor Valens and the destruction of his army,
     two-thirds of his soldiers perishing with Valens himself, whose
     body was never found.

     In 382 a treaty was made which restored peace to the Eastern
     Empire, the Visigoths nominally owning the sovereignty of Rome, but
     living in virtual independence. They continued to increase in
     numbers and in power, and in A.D. 395, under Alaric, their King,
     they invaded Greece, but were compelled by Stilicho, in 397, to
     retire into Epirus. Stilicho was the commander-in-chief of the
     Roman army, and the guardian of the young emperor Honorius. Alaric
     soon afterward became commander-in-chief of the Roman forces in
     Eastern Illyricum and held that office for four years. During that
     time he remained quiet, arming and drilling his followers, and
     waiting for the opportunity to make a bold stroke for a wider and
     more secure dominion.

     In the autumn of A.D. 400, while Stilicho was campaigning in Gaul,
     Alaric made his first invasion of Italy, and for more than a year
     he ranged at will over the northern part of the peninsula. Rome was
     made ready for defence, and Honorius, the weak Emperor of the
     Western Empire, prepared for flight into Gaul; but on March 19th of
     the year 402, Stilicho surprised the camp of Alaric, near
     Pollentia, while most of his followers were at worship, and after a
     desperate battle they were beaten. Alaric made a safe retreat, and
     soon afterward crossed the Po, intending to march against Rome, but
     desertions from his ranks caused him to abandon that purpose. In
     403 he was overtaken and again defeated by Stilicho at Verona,
     Alaric himself barely escaping capture. Stilicho, however,
     permitted him--some historians say, bribed him--to withdraw to
     Illyricum, and he was made prefect of Western Illyricum by
     Honorius. Such is the prelude, followed in history by the amazing
     exploits of Alaric's second invasion of Italy.

     His troops having revolted at Pavia, Stilicho fled to Ravenna,
     where the ungrateful Emperor had him put to death August 23, 408.
     In October of that year Alaric crossed the Alps, advancing without
     resistance until he reached Ravenna; after threatening Ravenna he
     marched upon Rome and began the preparations that ended in the sack
     of the city.

The incapacity of a weak and distracted government may often assume the
appearance, and produce the effects, of a treasonable correspondence
with the public enemy. If Alaric himself had been introduced into the
council of Ravenna, he would probably have advised the same measures
which were actually pursued by the ministers of Honorius. The King of
the Goths would have conspired, perhaps with some reluctance, to destroy
the formidable adversary, by whose arms, in Italy as well as in Greece,
he had been twice overthrown. Their active and interested hatred
laboriously accomplished the disgrace and ruin of the great Stilicho.
The valor of Sarus, his fame in arms, and his personal, or hereditary,
influence over the confederate Barbarians, could recommend him only to
the friends of their country, who despised, or detested, the worthless
characters of Turpilio, Varanes, and Vigilantius. By the pressing
instances of the new favorites, these generals, unworthy as they had
shown themselves of the names of soldiers, were promoted to the command
of the cavalry, of the infantry, and of the domestic troops. The Gothic
prince would have subscribed with pleasure the edict which the
fanaticism of Olympius dictated to the simple and devout Emperor.

Honorius excluded all persons who were adverse to the Catholic Church
from holding any office in the State; obstinately rejected the service
of all those who dissented from his religion; and rashly disqualified
many of his bravest and most skilful officers who adhered to the pagan
worship or who had imbibed the opinions of Arianism. These measures, so
advantageous to an enemy, Alaric would have approved, and might perhaps
have suggested; but it may seem doubtful whether the Barbarian would
have promoted his interest at the expense of the inhuman and absurd
cruelty which was perpetrated by the direction, or at least with the
connivance, of the imperial ministers. The foreign auxiliaries who had
been attached to the person of Stilicho lamented his death; but the
desire of revenge was checked by a natural apprehension for the safety
of their wives and children, who were detained as hostages in the strong
cities of Italy, where they had likewise deposited their most valuable
effects.

At the same hour, and as if by a common signal, the cities of Italy were
polluted by the same horrid scenes of universal massacre and pillage
which involved in promiscuous destruction the families and fortunes of
the Barbarians. Exasperated by such an injury, which might have awakened
the tamest and most servile spirit, they cast a look of indignation and
hope toward the camp of Alaric, and unanimously swore to pursue, with
just and implacable war, the perfidious nation that had so basely
violated the laws of hospitality. By the imprudent conduct of the
ministers of Honorius the republic lost the assistance, and deserved the
enmity, of thirty thousand of her bravest soldiers; and the weight of
that formidable army, which alone might have determined the event of the
war, was transferred from the scale of the Romans into that of the
Goths.

In the arts of negotiation, as well as in those of war, the Gothic King
maintained his superior ascendant over an enemy, whose seeming changes
proceeded from the total want of counsel and design. From his camp, on
the confines of Italy, Alaric attentively observed the revolutions of
the palace, watched the progress of faction and discontent, disguised
the hostile aspect of a Barbarian invader, and assumed the more popular
appearance of the friend and ally of the great Stilicho; to whose
virtues, when they were no longer formidable, he could pay a just
tribute of sincere praise and regret.

The pressing invitation of the malcontents, who urged the King of the
Goths to invade Italy, was enforced by a lively sense of his personal
injuries; and he might speciously complain that the Imperial ministers
still delayed and eluded the payment of the four thousand pounds of gold
which had been granted by the Roman senate, either to reward his
services or to appease his fury. His decent firmness was supported by an
artful moderation, which contributed to the success of his designs. He
required a fair and reasonable satisfaction; but he gave the strongest
assurances that, as soon as he had obtained it, he would immediately
retire. He refused to trust the faith of the Romans, unless Aetius and
Jason, the sons of two great officers of state, were sent as hostages to
his camp; but he offered to deliver, in exchange, several of the noblest
youths of the Gothic nation. The modesty of Alaric was interpreted, by
the ministers of Ravenna, as a sure evidence of his weakness and fear.
They disdained either to negotiate a treaty or to assemble an army; and
with a rash confidence, derived only from their ignorance of the extreme
danger, irretrievably wasted the decisive moments of peace and war.
While they expected, in sullen silence, that the Barbarians should
evacuate the confines of Italy, Alaric, with bold and rapid marches,
passed the Alps and the Po; hastily pillaged the cities of Aquileia,
Altinum, Concordia, and Cremona, which yielded to his arms; increased
his forces by the accession of thirty thousand auxiliaries; and, without
meeting a single enemy in the field, advanced as far as the edge of the
morass which protected the impregnable residence of the Emperor of the
West.

Instead of attempting the hopeless siege of Ravenna, the prudent leader
of the Goths proceeded to Rimini, stretched his ravages along the
sea-coast of the Adriatic, and meditated the conquest of the ancient
mistress of the world. An Italian hermit, whose zeal and sanctity were
respected by the Barbarians themselves, encountered the victorious
monarch, and boldly denounced the indignation of heaven against the
oppressors of the earth; but the saint himself was confounded by the
solemn asseveration of Alaric, that he felt a secret and preternatural
impulse, which directed, and even compelled, his march to the gates of
Rome. He felt that his genius and his fortune were equal to the most
arduous enterprises; and the enthusiasm which he communicated to the
Goths insensibly removed the popular, and almost superstitious,
reverence of the nations for the majesty of the Roman name. His troops,
animated by the hopes of spoil, followed the course of the Flaminian
way, occupied the unguarded passes of the Apennine, descended into the
rich plains of Umbria; and, as they lay encamped on the banks of the
Clitumnus, might wantonly slaughter and devour the milk-white oxen,
which had been so long reserved for the use of Roman triumphs. A lofty
situation, and a seasonable tempest of thunder and lightning, preserved
the little city of Narni; but the King of the Goths, despising the
ignoble prey, still advanced with unabated vigor; and after he had
passed through the stately arches, adorned with the spoils of Barbaric
victories, he pitched his camp under the walls of Rome.

By a skilful disposition of his numerous forces, who impatiently watched
the moment of an assault, Alaric encompassed the walls, commanded the
twelve principal gates, intercepted all communication with the adjacent
country, and vigilantly guarded the navigation of the Tiber, from which
the Romans derived the surest and most plentiful supply of provisions.
The first emotions of the nobles and of the people were those of
surprise and indignation that a vile Barbarian should dare to insult the
capital of the world; but their arrogance was soon humbled by
misfortune; and their unmanly rage, instead of being directed against an
enemy in arms, was meanly exercised on a defenceless and innocent
victim. Perhaps in the person of Serena, the Romans might have respected
the niece of Theodosius, the aunt, nay, even the adoptive mother, of the
reigning Emperor; but they abhorred the widow of Stilicho; and they
listened with credulous passion to the tale of calumny, which accused
her of maintaining a secret and criminal correspondence with the Gothic
invader. Actuated or overawed by the same popular frenzy, the senate,
without requiring any evidence of her guilt, pronounced the sentence of
her death. Serena was ignominiously strangled; and the infatuated
multitude were astonished to find that this cruel act of injustice did
not immediately produce the retreat of the Barbarians and the
deliverance of the city.

That unfortunate city gradually experienced the distress of scarcity,
and at length the horrid calamities of famine. The daily allowance of
three pounds of bread was reduced to one-half, to one-third, to nothing;
and the price of corn still continued to rise in a rapid and extravagant
proportion. The poorer citizens, who were unable to purchase the
necessaries of life, solicited the precarious charity of the rich; and
for a while the public misery was alleviated by the humanity of Læta,
the widow of the emperor Gratian, who had fixed her residence at Rome,
and consecrated to the use of the indigent the princely revenue which
she annually received from the grateful successors of her husband. But
these private and temporary donatives were insufficient to appease the
hunger of a numerous people; and the progress of famine invaded the
marble palaces of the senators themselves. The persons of both sexes,
who had been educated in the enjoyment of ease and luxury, discovered
how little is requisite to supply the demands of nature, and lavished
their unavailing treasures of gold and silver to obtain the coarse and
scanty sustenance which they would formerly have rejected with disdain.
The food the most repugnant to sense or imagination, the aliments the
most unwholesome and pernicious to the constitution, were eagerly
devoured, and fiercely disputed, by the rage of hunger. A dark suspicion
was entertained that some desperate wretches fed on the bodies of their
fellow-creature, whom they had secretly murdered; and even mothers--such
was the horrid conflict of the two most powerful instincts implanted by
nature in the human breast--even mothers are said to have tasted the
flesh of their slaughtered infants!

Many thousands of the inhabitants of Rome expired in their houses or in
the streets for want of sustenance; and as the public sepulchres without
the walls were in the power of the enemy, the stench which arose from so
many putrid and unburied carcasses infected the air; and the miseries of
famine were succeeded and aggravated by the contagion of a pestilential
disease. The assurances of speedy and effectual relief, which were
repeatedly transmitted from the court of Ravenna, supported for some
time the fainting resolution of the Romans, till at length the despair
of any human aid tempted them to accept the offers of a preternatural
deliverance. Pompeianus, prefect of the city, had been persuaded, by the
art or fanaticism of some Tuscan diviners, that, by the mysterious force
of spells and sacrifices, they could extract the lightning from the
clouds, and point those celestial fires against the camp of the
Barbarians. The important secret was communicated to Innocent, the
Bishop of Rome; and the successor of St. Peter is accused, perhaps with
foundation, of preferring the safety of the republic to the rigid
severity of the Christian worship. But when the question was agitated in
the senate; when it was proposed, as an essential condition, that those
sacrifices should be performed in the Capitol, by the authority, and in
the presence, of the magistrates, the majority of that respectable
assembly, apprehensive either of the divine or of the Imperial
displeasure, refused to join in an act which appeared almost equivalent
to the public restoration of paganism.

The last resource of the Romans was in the clemency, or at least in the
moderation, of the King of the Goths. The senate, who in this emergency
assumed the supreme powers of government, appointed two ambassadors to
negotiate with the enemy. This important trust was delegated to
Basilius, a senator of Spanish extraction, and already conspicuous in
the administration of provinces; and to John, the first tribune of the
notaries, who was peculiarly qualified by his dexterity in business, as
well as by his former intimacy with the Gothic prince. When they were
introduced into his presence, they declared, perhaps in a more lofty
style than became their abject condition, that the Romans were resolved
to maintain their dignity, either in peace or war; and that, if Alaric
refused them a fair and honorable capitulation, he might sound his
trumpets, and prepare to give battle to an innumerable people, exercised
in arms, and animated by despair. "The thicker the hay, the easier it is
mowed," was the concise reply of the Barbarian; and this rustic metaphor
was accompanied by a loud and insulting laugh, expressive of his
contempt for the menaces of an unwarlike populace, enervated by luxury
before they were emaciated by famine. He then condescended to fix the
ransom which he would accept as the price of his retreat from the walls
of Rome: _all_ the gold and silver in the city, whether it were the
property of the State or of individuals; _all_ the rich and precious
movables; and _all_ the slaves who could prove their title to the name
of _Barbarians_. The ministers of the senate presumed to ask, in a
modest and suppliant tone, "If such, O king, are your demands, what do
you intend to leave us?"

"_Your lives_!" replied the haughty conqueror.

They trembled and retired. Yet, before they retired, a short suspension
of arms was granted, which allowed some time for a more temperate
negotiation. The stern features of Alaric were insensibly relaxed; he
abated much of the rigor of his terms; and at length consented to raise
the siege on the immediate payment of five thousand pounds of gold, of
thirty thousand pounds of silver, of four thousand robes of silk, of
three thousand pieces of fine scarlet cloth, and of three thousand
pounds weight of pepper. But the public treasury was exhausted; the
annual rents of the great estates in Italy and the provinces were
intercepted by the calamities of war; the gold and gems had been
exchanged, during the famine, for the vilest sustenance; the hoards of
secret wealth were still concealed by the obstinacy of avarice; and some
remains of consecrated spoils afforded the only resource that could
avert the impending ruin of the city.

As soon as the Romans had satisfied the rapacious demands of Alaric,
they were restored, in some measure, to the enjoyment of peace and
plenty. Several of the gates were cautiously opened; the importation of
provisions from the river and the adjacent country was no longer
obstructed by the Goths; the citizens resorted in crowds to the free
market, which was held during three days in the suburbs; and while the
merchants who undertook this gainful trade made a considerable profit,
the future subsistence of the city was secured by the ample magazines
which were deposited in the public and private granaries.

A more regular discipline than could have been expected was maintained
in the camp of Alaric; and the wise Barbarian justified his regard for
the faith of treaties by the just severity with which he chastised a
party of licentious Goths who had insulted some Roman citizens on the
road to Ostia. His army, enriched by the contributions of the capital,
slowly advanced into the fair and fruitful province of Tuscany, where he
proposed to establish his winter quarters; and the Gothic standard
became the refuge of forty thousand Barbarian slaves, who had broken
their chains, and aspired, under the command of their great deliverer,
to revenge the injuries and the disgrace of their cruel servitude. About
the same time he received a more honorable reinforcement of Goths and
Huns, whom Adolphus, the brother of his wife, had conducted, at his
pressing invitation, from the banks of the Danube to those of the
Tiber; and who had cut their way, with some difficulty and loss, through
the superior numbers of the Imperial troops. A victorious leader, who
united the daring spirit of a Barbarian with the art and discipline of a
Roman general, was at the head of a hundred thousand fighting men; and
Italy pronounced, with terror and respect, the formidable name of
Alaric.

At the distance of fourteen centuries, we may be satisfied with relating
the military exploits of the conquerors of Rome, without presuming to
investigate the motives of their political conduct.

In the midst of his apparent prosperity, Alaric was conscious, perhaps,
of some secret weakness, some internal defect; or perhaps the moderation
which he displayed was intended only to deceive and disarm the easy
credulity of the ministers of Honorius. The King of the Goths repeatedly
declared that it was his desire to be considered as the friend of peace
and of the Romans. Three senators, at his earnest request, were sent
ambassadors to the court of Ravenna, to solicit the exchange of hostages
and the conclusion of the treaty; and the proposals, which he more
clearly expressed during the course of the negotiations, could only
inspire a doubt of his sincerity as they might seem inadequate to the
state of his fortune. The Barbarian still aspired to the rank of
master-general of the armies of the West; he stipulated an annual
subsidy of corn and money; and he chose the provinces of Dalmatia,
Noricum, and Venetia for the seat of his new kingdom, which would have
commanded the important communication between Italy and the Danube. If
these modest terms should be rejected, Alaric showed a disposition to
relinquish his pecuniary demands, and even to content himself with the
possession of Noricum; an exhausted and impoverished country perpetually
exposed to the inroads of the Barbarians of Germany.

But the hopes of peace were disappointed by the weak obstinacy, or
interested views, of the minister Olympius. Without listening to the
salutary remonstrances of the senate, he dismissed their ambassadors
under the conduct of a military escort, too numerous for a retinue of
honor and too feeble for an army of defence. Six thousand Dalmatians,
the flower of the Imperial legions, were ordered to march from Ravenna
to Rome, through an open country which was occupied by the formidable
myriads of the Barbarians. These brave legionaries, encompassed and
betrayed, fell a sacrifice to ministerial folly; their general, Valens,
with a hundred soldiers, escaped from the field of battle; and one of
the ambassadors, who could no longer claim the protection of the law of
nations, was obliged to purchase his freedom with a ransom of thirty
thousand pieces of gold. Yet Alarie, instead of resenting this act of
impotent hostility, immediately renewed his proposals of peace; and the
second embassy of the Roman senate, which derived weight and dignity
from the presence of Innocent, bishop of the city, was guarded from the
dangers of the road by a detachment of Gothic soldiers.

Olympius might have continued to insult the just resentment of a people
who loudly accused him as the author of the public calamities; but his
power was undermined by the secret intrigues of the palace. The favorite
eunuchs transferred the government of Honorius, and the Empire, to
Jovius, the prætorian prefect; an unworthy servant, who did not atone,
by the merit of personal attachment, for the errors and misfortunes of
his administration. The exile, or escape, of the guilty Olympius,
reserved him for more vicissitudes of fortune: he experienced the
adventure of an obscure and wandering life; he again rose to power; he
fell a second time into disgrace; his ears were cut off; he expired
under the lash; and his ignominious death afforded a grateful spectacle
to the friends of Stilicho.

After the removal of Olympius, whose character was deeply tainted with
religious fanaticism, the pagans and heretics were delivered from the
impolitic proscription which excluded them from the dignities of the
State. The brave Gennerid, a soldier of Barbarian origin, who still
adhered to the worship of his ancestors, had been obliged to lay aside
the military belt; and though he was repeatedly assured by the Emperor
himself that laws were not made for persons of his rank or merit, he
refused to accept any partial dispensation, and persevered in honorable
disgrace till he had extorted a general act of justice from the distress
of the Roman Government. The conduct of Gennerid, in the important
station to which he was promoted or restored, of master-general of
Dalmatia, Pannonia, Noricum, and Rhætia, seemed to revive the discipline
and spirit of the republic. From a life of idleness and want, his troops
were soon habituated to severe exercise and plentiful subsistence; and
his private generosity often supplied the rewards which were denied by
the avarice, or poverty, of the court of Ravenna.

The valor of Gennerid, formidable to the adjacent Barbarians, was the
firmest bulwark of the Illyrian frontier; and his vigilant care assisted
the Empire with a reinforcement of ten thousand Huns, who arrived on the
confines of Italy, attended by such a convoy of provisions, and such a
numerous train of sheep and oxen, as might have been sufficient, not
only for the march of an army, but for the settlement of a colony.

But the court and councils of Honorius still remained a scene of
weakness and distraction, of corruption and anarchy. Instigated by the
prefect Jovius, the guards rose in furious mutiny, and demanded the
heads of two generals and of the two principal eunuchs. The generals,
under a perfidious promise of safety, were sent on shipboard and
privately executed; while the favor of the eunuchs procured them a mild
and secure exile at Milan and Constantinople. Eusebius the eunuch, and
the Barbarian Allobich, succeeded to the command of the bed-chamber and
of the guards; and the mutual jealousy of these subordinate ministers
was the cause of their mutual destruction. By the insolent order of the
count of the domestics, the great chamberlain was shamefully beaten to
death with sticks, before the eyes of the astonished Emperor; and the
subsequent assassination of Allobich, in the midst of a public
procession, is the only circumstance of his life in which Honorius
discovered the faintest symptom of courage or resentment.

Yet before they fell, Eusebius and Allobich had contributed their part
to the ruin of the Empire, by opposing the conclusion of a treaty which
Jovius, from a selfish, and perhaps a criminal, motive, had negotiated
with Alaric, in a personal interview under the walls of Rimini. During
the absence of Jovius, the Emperor was persuaded to assume a lofty tone
of inflexible dignity, such as neither his situation nor his character
could enable him to support; and a letter, signed with the name of
Honorius, was immediately despatched to the prætorian prefect, granting
him a free permission to dispose of the public money, but sternly
refusing to prostitute the military honors of Rome to the proud demands
of a Barbarian. This letter was imprudently communicated to Alaric
himself; and the Goth, who in the whole transaction had behaved with
temper and decency, expressed, in the most outrageous language, his
lively sense of the insult so wantonly offered to his person and to his
nation.

The conference of Rimini was hastily interrupted; and the prefect
Jovius, on his return to Ravenna, was compelled to adopt, and even to
encourage, the fashionable opinions of the court. By his advice and
example, the principal officers of the State and army were obliged to
swear that, without listening, in any circumstances, to any conditions
of peace, they would still persevere in perpetual and implacable war
against the enemy of the republic. This rash engagement opposed an
insuperable bar to all future negotiation. The ministers of Honorius
were heard to declare that if they had only invoked the name of the
Deity they would consult the public safety, and trust their souls to the
mercy of heaven; but they had sworn by the sacred head of the Emperor
himself; they had touched, in solemn ceremony, that august seat of
majesty and wisdom; and the violation of their oath would expose them,
to the temporal penalties of sacrilege and rebellion.

While the Emperor and his court enjoyed, with sullen pride, the security
of the marshes and fortifications of Ravenna, they abandoned Rome,
almost without defence, to the resentment of Alaric. Yet such was the
moderation which he still preserved, or affected, that, as he moved with
his army along the Flaminian way, he successively despatched the bishops
of the towns of Italy to reiterate his offers of peace and to conjure
the Emperor that he would save the city and its inhabitants from hostile
fire and the sword of the Barbarians. These impending calamities were,
however, averted, not indeed by the wisdom of Honorius, but by the
prudence or humanity of the Gothic King; who employed a milder, though
not less effectual, method of conquest. Instead of assaulting the
capital, he successfully directed his efforts against the port of Ostia,
one of the boldest and most stupendous works of Roman magnificence.

The accidents to which the precarious subsistence of the city was
continually exposed in a winter navigation and an open road, had
suggested to the genius of the first Cæsar the useful design which was
executed under the reign of Claudius. The artificial moles, which formed
the narrow entrance, advanced far into the sea, and firmly repelled the
fury of the waves, while the largest vessels securely rode at anchor
within three deep and capacious basins, which received the northern
branch of the Tiber, about two miles from the ancient colony of Ostia.
The Roman port insensibly swelled to the size of an episcopal city,
where the corn of Africa was deposited in spacious granaries for the use
of the capital. As soon as Alaric was in possession of that important
place, he summoned the city to surrender at discretion; and his demands
were enforced by the positive declaration that a refusal, or even a
delay, should be instantly followed by the destruction of the magazines,
on which the life of the Roman people depended. The clamors of that
people, and the terror of famine, subdued the pride of the senate; they
listened, without reluctance, to the proposal of placing a new emperor
on the throne of the unworthy Honorius; and the suffrage of the Gothic
conqueror bestowed the purple on Attalus, prefect of the city. The
grateful monarch immediately acknowledged his protector as
master-general of the armies of the West; Adolphus, with the rank of
count of the domestics, obtained the custody of the person of Attalus;
and the two hostile nations seemed to be united in the closest bands of
friendship and alliance.

The gates of the city were thrown open, and the new Emperor of the
Romans, encompassed on every side by the Gothic arms, was conducted, in
tumultuous procession, to the palace of Augustus and Trajan. After he
had distributed the civil and military dignities among his favorites and
followers, Attalus convened an assembly of the senate; before whom, in a
formal and florid speech, he asserted his resolution of restoring the
majesty of the republic, and of uniting to the Empire the provinces of
Egypt and the East which had once acknowledged the sovereignty of Rome.
Such extravagant promises inspired every reasonable citizen with a just
contempt for the character of an unwarlike usurper, whose elevation was
the deepest and most ignominious wound which the republic had yet
sustained from the insolence of the Barbarians. But the populace, with
their usual levity, applauded the change of masters. The public
discontent was favorable to the rival of Honorius; and the sectaries,
oppressed by his persecuting edicts, expected some degree of
countenance, or at least of toleration, from a prince who, in his native
country of Ionia, had been educated in the pagan superstition, and who
had since received the sacrament of baptism from the hands of an Arian
bishop.

The first days of the reign of Attains were fair and prosperous. An
officer of confidence was sent with an inconsiderable body of troops to
secure the obedience of Africa; the greatest part of Italy submitted to
the terror of the Gothic powers; and though the city of Bologna made a
vigorous and effectual resistance, the people of Milan, dissatisfied
perhaps with the absence of Honorius, accepted, with loud acclamations,
the choice of the Roman senate. At the head of a formidable army, Alaric
conducted his royal captive almost to the gates of Ravenna; and a solemn
embassy of the principal ministers, of Jovius, the prætorian prefect, of
Valens, master of the cavalry and infantry, of the quæstor Potamius, and
of Julian, the first of the notaries, was introduced, with martial pomp,
into the Gothic camp. In the name of their sovereign, they consented to
acknowledge the lawful election of his competitor, and to divide the
provinces of Italy and the West between the two emperors. Their
proposals were rejected with disdain; and the refusal was aggravated by
the insulting clemency of Attalus, who condescended to promise that, if
Honorius would instantly resign the purple, he should be permitted to
pass the remainder of his life in the peaceful exile of some remote
island. So desperate indeed did the situation of the son of Theodosius
appear, to those who were the best acquainted with his strength and
resources, that Jovius and Valens, his minister and his general,
betrayed their trust, infamously deserted the sinking cause of their
benefactor, and devoted their treacherous allegiance to the service of
his more fortunate rival.

Astonished by such examples of domestic treason, Honorius trembled at
the approach of every servant, at the arrival of every messenger. He
dreaded the secret enemies who might lurk in his capital, his palace,
his bed-chamber; and some ships lay ready in the harbor of Ravenna to
transport the abdicated monarch to the dominions of his infant nephew,
the Emperor of the East.

But there is a Providence--such at least was the opinion of the
historian Procopius--that watches over innocence and folly; and the
pretensions of Honorius to its peculiar care cannot reasonably be
disputed. At the moment when his despair, incapable of any wise or manly
resolution, meditated a shameful flight, a seasonable reinforcement of
four thousand veterans unexpectedly landed in the port of Ravenna. To
these valiant strangers, whose fidelity had not been corrupted by the
factions of the court, he committed the walls and gates of the city; and
the slumbers of the Emperor were no longer disturbed by the apprehension
of imminent and internal danger. The favorable intelligence which was
received from Africa suddenly changed the opinions of men and the state
of public affairs. The troops and officers whom Attalus had sent into
that province were defeated and slain; and the active zeal of Heraclian
maintained his own allegiance and that of his people. The faithful Count
of Africa transmitted a large sum of money, which fixed the attachment
of the Imperial guards; and his vigilance in preventing the exportation
of corn and oil introduced famine, tumult, and discontent into the walls
of Rome.

The failure of the African expedition was the source of mutual complaint
and recrimination in the party of Attalus; and the mind of his protector
was insensibly alienated from the interest of a prince who wanted spirit
to command, or docility to obey. The most imprudent measures were
adopted, without the knowledge, or against the advice, of Alaric; and
the obstinate refusal of the senate to allow, in the embarkation, the
mixture even of five hundred Goths, betrayed a suspicious and
distrustful temper, which, in their situation, was neither generous nor
prudent. The resentment of the Gothic King was exasperated by the
malicious arts of Jovius, who had been raised to the rank of patrician,
and who afterward excused his double perfidy, by declaring, without a
blush, that he had only _seemed_ to abandon the service of Honorius,
more effectually to ruin the cause of the usurper. In a large plain near
Rimini, and in the presence of an innumerable multitude of Romans and
Barbarians, the wretched Attalus was publicly despoiled of the diadem
and purple; and those ensigns of royalty were sent by Alaric, as the
pledge of peace and friendship, to the son of Theodosius.

The officers who returned to their duty were reinstated in their
employments, and even the merit of a tardy repentance was graciously
allowed; but the degraded Emperor of the Romans, desirous of life and
insensible of disgrace, implored the permission of following the Gothic
camp, in the train of a haughty and capricious Barbarian.

The degradation of Attalus removed the only real obstacle to the
conclusion of the peace; and Alaric advanced within three miles of
Ravenna, to press the irresolution of the Imperial ministers, whose
insolence soon returned with the return of fortune. His indignation was
kindled by the report that a rival chieftain, that Sarus, the personal
enemy of Adolphus, and the hereditary foe of the house of Balti, had
been received into the palace. At the head of three hundred followers,
that fearless Barbarian immediately sallied from the gates of Ravenna;
surprised, and cut in pieces, a considerable body of Goths; reëntered
the city in triumph; and was permitted to insult his adversary by the
voice of a herald, who publicly declared that the guilt of Alaric had
forever excluded him from the friendship and alliance of the Emperor.

The crime and folly of the court of Ravenna were expiated a third time
by the calamities of Rome. The King of the Goths, who no longer
dissembled his appetite for plunder and revenge, appeared in arms under
the walls of the capital; and the trembling senate, without any hopes of
relief, prepared, by a desperate resistance, to delay the ruin of their
country. But they were unable to guard against the secret conspiracy of
their slaves and domestics; who, either from birth or interest, were
attached to the cause of the enemy. At the hour of midnight the Salarian
gate was silently opened, and the inhabitants were awakened by the
tremendous sound of the Gothic trumpet. Eleven hundred and sixty-three
years after the foundation of Rome, the Imperial city, which had subdued
and civilized so considerable a part of mankind, was delivered to the
licentious fury of the tribes of Germany and Scythia.

The proclamation of Alaric, when he forced his entrance into a
vanquished city, discovered, however, some regard for the laws of
humanity and religion. He encouraged his troops boldly to seize the
rewards of valor, and to enrich themselves with the spoils of a wealthy
and effeminate people; but he exhorted them, at the same time, to spare
the lives of the unresisting citizens, and to respect the churches of
the apostles St. Peter and St. Paul as holy and inviolable sanctuaries.
Amid the horrors of a nocturnal tumult, several of the Christian Goths
displayed the fervor of a recent conversion; and some instances of their
uncommon piety and moderation are related, and perhaps adorned, by the
zeal of ecclesiastical writers.

While the Barbarians roamed through the city in quest of prey, the
humble dwelling of an aged virgin, who had devoted her life to the
service of the altar, was forced open by one of the powerful Goths. He
immediately demanded, though in civil language, all the gold and silver
in her possession; and was astonished at the readiness with which she
conducted him to a splendid hoard of massy plate, of the richest
materials and the most curious workmanship. The Barbarian viewed with
wonder and delight this valuable acquisition, till he was interrupted by
a serious admonition, addressed to him in the following words: "These,"
said she, "are the consecrated vessels belonging to St. Peter; if you
presume to touch them, the sacrilegious deed will remain on your
conscience. For my part, I dare not keep what I am unable to defend."
The Gothic captain, struck with reverential awe, despatched a messenger
to inform the King of the treasure which he had discovered; and received
a peremptory order from Alaric, that all the consecrated plate and
ornaments should be transported, without damage or delay, to the church
of the apostle.

From the extremity, perhaps, of the Quirinal hill, to the distant
quarter of the Vatican, a numerous detachment of Goths, marching in
order of battle through the principal streets, protected, with
glittering arms, the long train of their devout companions, who bore
aloft on their heads the sacred vessels of gold and silver; and the
martial shouts of the Barbarians were mingled with the sound of
religious psalmody. From all the adjacent houses a crowd of Christians
hastened to join this edifying procession; and a multitude of
fugitives, without distinction of age, or rank, or even of sect, had the
good fortune to escape to the secure and hospitable sanctuary of the
Vatican. The learned work, concerning the _City of God_, was professedly
composed by St. Augustine, to justify the ways of Providence in the
destruction of the Roman greatness. He celebrates, with peculiar
satisfaction, this memorable triumph of Christ; and insults his
adversaries by challenging them to produce some similar example of a
town taken by storm, in which the fabulous gods of antiquity had been
able to protect either themselves or their deluded votaries.

In the sack of Rome, some rare and extraordinary examples of Barbarian
virtue have been deservedly applauded. But the holy precincts of the
Vatican, and the apostolic churches, could receive a very small
proportion of the Roman people; many thousand warriors, more especially
of the Huns, who served under the standard of Alaric, were strangers to
the name, or at least to the faith, of Christ; and we may suspect,
without any breach of charity or candor, that in the hour of savage
license, when every passion was inflamed, and every restraint was
removed, the precepts of the Gospel seldom influenced the behavior of
the Gothic Christians. The writers the best disposed to exaggerate their
clemency have freely confessed that a cruel slaughter was made of the
Romans; and that the streets of the city were filled with dead bodies,
which remained without burial during the general consternation. The
despair of the citizens was sometimes converted into fury; and whenever
the Barbarians were provoked by opposition, they extended the
promiscuous massacre to the feeble, the innocent, and the helpless. The
private revenge of forty thousand slaves was exercised without pity or
remorse; and the ignominious lashes which they had formerly received
were washed away in the blood of the guilty or obnoxious families. The
matrons and virgins of Rome were exposed to injuries more dreadful, in
the apprehension of chastity, than death itself; and the ecclesiastical
historian has selected an example of female virtue for the admiration of
future ages.

A Roman lady, of singular beauty and orthodox faith, had excited the
impatient desires of a young Goth, who, according to the sagacious
remark of Sozomen, was attached to the Arian heresy. Exasperated by her
obstinate resistance, he drew his sword, and, with the anger of a lover,
slightly wounded her neck. The bleeding heroine still continued to brave
his resentment and to repel his love, till the ravisher desisted from
his unavailing efforts, respectfully conducted her to the sanctuary of
the Vatican, and gave six pieces of gold to the guards of the church, on
condition that they should restore her inviolate to the arms of her
husband. Such instances of courage and generosity were not extremely
common.

Avarice is an insatiate and universal passion; since the enjoyment of
almost every object that can afford pleasure to the different tastes and
tempers of mankind may be procured by the possession of wealth. In the
pillage of Rome a just preference was given to gold and jewels, which
contain the greatest value in the smallest compass and weight; but after
these portable riches had been removed by the more diligent robbers, the
palaces of Rome were rudely stripped of their splendid and costly
furniture. The sideboards of massy plate, and the variegated wardrobes
of silk and purple, were irregularly piled in the wagons, that always
followed the march of a Gothic army. The most exquisite works of art
were roughly handled or wantonly destroyed; many a statue was melted for
the sake of the precious materials; and many a vase, in the division of
the spoil, was shivered into fragments by the stroke of a battle-axe.
The acquisition of riches served only to stimulate the avarice of the
rapacious Barbarians, who proceeded, by threats, by blows, and by
tortures, to force from their prisoners the confession of hidden
treasure. Visible splendor and expense were alleged as the proof of a
plentiful fortune; the appearance of poverty was imputed to a
parsimonious disposition; and the obstinacy of some misers, who endured
the most cruel torments before they would discover the secret object of
their affection, was fatal to many unhappy wretches, who expired under
the lash for refusing to reveal their imaginary treasures.

The edifices of Rome--though the damage has been much
exaggerated--received some injury from the violence of the Goths. At
their entrance through the Salarian gate they fired the adjacent houses
to guide their march, and to distract the attention of the citizens;
the flames, which encountered no obstacle in the disorder of the night,
consumed many private and public buildings; and the ruins of the palace
of Sallust remained, in the age of Justinian, a stately monument of the
Gothic conflagration. Yet a contemporary historian has observed that
fire could scarcely consume the enormous beams of solid brass, and that
the strength of man was insufficient to subvert the foundations of
ancient structures. Some truth may possibly be concealed in his devout
assertion that the wrath of heaven supplied the imperfections of hostile
rage; and that the proud Forum of Rome, decorated with the statues of so
many gods and heroes, was levelled in the dust by the stroke of
lightning.

Whatever might be the number of equestrian or plebeian rank who perished
in the massacre of Rome, it is confidently affirmed that only one
senator lost his life by the sword of the enemy. But it was not easy to
compute the multitudes who, from an honorable station and a prosperous
fortune, were suddenly reduced to the miserable condition of captives
and exiles. As the Barbarians had more occasion for money than for
slaves, they fixed a moderate price for the redemption of their indigent
prisoners; and the ransom was often paid by the benevolence of their
friends or the charity of strangers.

The captives, who were regularly sold either in open market or by
private contract, would have legally regained their native freedom,
which it was impossible for a citizen to lose or to alienate. But as it
was soon discovered that the vindication of their liberty would endanger
their lives; and that the Goths, unless they were tempted to sell, might
be provoked to murder their useless prisoners; the civil jurisprudence
had been already qualified by a wise regulation that they should be
obliged to serve the moderate term of five years, till they had
discharged by their labor the price of their redemption.

The nations who invaded the Roman Empire had driven before them, into
Italy, whole troops of hungry and affrighted provincials, less
apprehensive of servitude than of famine. The calamities of Rome and
Italy dispersed the inhabitants to the most lonely, the most secure, the
most distant places of refuge. While the Gothic cavalry spread terror
and desolation along the sea-coast of Campania and Tuscany, the little
island of Igilium, separated by a narrow channel from the Argentarian
promontory, repulsed, or eluded, their hostile attempts; and at so small
a distance from Rome, great numbers of citizens were securely concealed
in the thick woods of that sequestered spot. The ample patrimonies,
which many senatorian families possessed in Africa, invited them, if
they had time, and prudence, to escape from the ruin of their country,
to embrace the shelter of that hospitable province. The most illustrious
of these fugitives was the noble and pious Proba, the widow of the
prefect Petronius. After the death of her husband, the most powerful
subject of Rome, she had remained at the head of the Anician family, and
successively supplied, from her private fortune, the expense of the
consulships of her three sons. When the city was besieged and taken by
the Goths, Proba supported, with Christian resignation, the loss of
immense riches; embarked in a small vessel, from whence she beheld, at
sea, the flames of her burning palace, and fled with her daughter Læta,
and her granddaughter, the celebrated virgin Demetrias, to the coast of
Africa. The benevolent profusion with which the matron distributed the
fruits, or the price, of her estates, contributed to alleviate the
misfortunes of exile and captivity. But even the family of Proba herself
was not exempt from the rapacious oppression of Count Heraclian, who
basely sold, in matrimonial prostitution, the noblest maidens of Rome to
the lust or avarice of the Syrian merchants.

The Italian fugitives were dispersed through the provinces, along the
coast of Egypt and Asia, as far as Constantinople and Jerusalem; and the
village of Bethlehem, the solitary residence of St. Jerome and his
female converts, was crowded with illustrious beggars of either sex, and
every age, who excited the public compassion by the remembrance of their
past fortune. This awful catastrophe of Rome filled the astonished
Empire with grief and terror. So interesting a contrast of greatness and
ruin disposed the fond credulity of the people to deplore, and even to
exaggerate, the afflictions of the queen of cities. The clergy, who
applied to recent events the lofty metaphors of oriental prophecy, were
sometimes tempted to confound the destruction of the capital and the
dissolution of the globe.

There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the
advantages, and to magnify the evils, of the present times. Yet, when
the first emotions had subsided, and a fair estimate was made of the
real damage, the more learned and judicious contemporaries were forced
to confess that infant Rome had formerly received more essential injury
from the Gauls than she had now sustained from the Goths in her
declining age. The experience of eleven centuries has enabled posterity
to produce a much more singular parallel, and to affirm with confidence
that the ravages of the Barbarians, whom Alaric had led from the banks
of the Danube, were less destructive than the hostilities exercised by
the troops of Charles V, a Catholic prince, who styled himself Emperor
of the Romans.

The Goths evacuated the city at the end of six days, but Rome remained
above nine months in the possession of the Imperialists, and every hour
was stained by some atrocious act of cruelty, lust, and rapine. The
authority of Alaric preserved some order and moderation among the
ferocious multitude which acknowledged him for their leader and king;
but the constable of Bourbon had gloriously fallen in the attack of the
walls; and the death of the general removed every restraint of
discipline from an army which consisted of three independent nations,
the Italians, the Spaniards, and the Germans.

The retreat of the victorious Goths, who evacuated Rome on the sixth
day, might be the result of prudence; but it was not surely the effect
of fear. At the head of an army encumbered with rich and weighty spoils,
their intrepid leader advanced along the Appian way into the southern
provinces of Italy, destroying whatever dared to oppose his passage, and
contenting himself with the plunder of the unresisting country.

Above four years elapsed from the successful invasion of Italy by the
arms of Alaric to the voluntary retreat of the Goths under the conduct
of his successor Adolphus; and during the whole time they reigned
without control over a country which, in the opinion of the ancients,
had united all the various excellences of nature and art. The
prosperity, indeed, which Italy had attained in the auspicious age of
the Antonines had gradually declined with the decline of the Empire. The
fruits of a long peace perished under the rude grasp of the Barbarians;
and they themselves were incapable of tasting the more elegant
refinements of luxury which had been prepared for the use of the soft
and polished Italians. Each soldier, however, claimed an ample portion
of the substantial plenty, the corn and cattle, oil and wine that was
daily collected and consumed in the Gothic camp; and the principal
warriors insulted the villas and gardens, once inhabited by Lucullus and
Cicero, along the beauteous coast of Campania. Their trembling captives,
the sons and daughters of Roman senators, presented, in goblets of gold
and gems, large draughts of Falernian wine to the haughty victors, who
stretched their huge limbs under the shade of plane trees, artificially
disposed to exclude the scorching rays and to admit the genial warmth of
the sun. These delights were enhanced by the memory of past hardships;
the comparison of their native soil, the bleak and barren hills of
Scythia, and the frozen banks of the Elbe and Danube added new charms to
the felicity of the Italian climate.[18]

Whether fame or conquest or riches were the object of Alaric, he pursued
that object with an indefatigable ardor which could neither be quelled
by adversity nor satiated by success. No sooner had he reached the
extreme land of Italy than he was attracted by the neighboring prospect
of a fertile and peaceful island. Yet even the possession of Sicily he
considered only as an intermediate step to the important expedition
which he already meditated against the continent of Africa.

The whole design was defeated by the premature death of Alaric, which
fixed, after a short illness, the fatal term of his conquests. The
ferocious character of the Barbarians was displayed in the funeral of a
hero whose valor and fortune they celebrated with mournful applause. By
the labor of a captive multitude, they forcibly diverted the course of
the Busentinus, a small river that washes the walls of Consentia. The
royal sepulchre, adorned with the splendid spoils and trophies of Rome,
was constructed in the vacant bed; the waters were then restored to
their natural channel, and the secret spot where the remains of Alaric
had been deposited was forever concealed by the inhuman massacre of the
prisoners who had been employed to execute the work.

The personal animosities and hereditary feuds of the Barbarians were
suspended by the strong necessity of their affairs, and the brave
Adolphus, the brother-in-law of the deceased monarch, was unanimously
elected to succeed to his throne. The character and political system of
the new King of the Goths may be best understood from his own
conversation with an illustrious citizen of Narbonne; who afterward, in
a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, related it to St. Jerome, in the presence
of the historian Orosius. "In the full confidence of valor and victory,
I once aspired (said. Adolphus) to change the face of the universe; to
obliterate the name of Rome; to erect on its ruins the dominion of the
Goths; and to acquire, like Augustus, the immortal fame of the founder
of a new empire. By repeated experiments I was gradually convinced that
laws are essentially necessary to maintain and regulate a
well-constituted state; and that the fierce, untractable humor of the
Goths was incapable of bearing the salutary yoke of laws and civil
government. From that moment I proposed to myself a different object of
glory and ambition; and it is now my sincere wish that the gratitude of
future ages should acknowledge the merit of a stranger who employed the
sword of the Goths, not to subvert, but to restore and maintain, the
prosperity of the Roman Empire." With these pacific views, the successor
of Alaric suspended the operations of war, and seriously negotiated with
the Imperial court a treaty of friendship and alliance. It was the
interest of the ministers of Honorius, who were now released from, the
obligation of their extravagant oath, to deliver Italy from the
intolerable weight of the Gothic powers; and they readily accepted their
service against the tyrants and Barbarians who infested the provinces
beyond the Alps. Adolphus, assuming the character of a Roman general,
directed his march from the extremity of Campania to the southern
provinces of Gaul. His troops, either by force or agreement,
immediately occupied the cities of Narbonne, Toulouse, and Bordeaux; and
though they were repulsed by Count Boniface from the walls of
Marseilles, they soon extended their quarters from the Mediterranean to
the ocean. The oppressed provincials might exclaim that the miserable
remnant which the enemy had spared was cruelly ravished by their
pretended allies; yet some specious colors were not wanting to palliate,
or justify, the violence of the Goths. The cities of Gaul, which they
attacked, might perhaps be considered as in a state of rebellion against
the government of Honorius; the articles of the treaty or the secret
instructions of the court might sometimes be alleged in favor of the
seeming usurpations of Adolphus; and the guilt of any irregular,
unsuccessful act of hostility might always be imputed, with an
appearance of truth, to the ungovernable spirit of a Barbarian host,
impatient of peace or discipline. The luxury of Italy had been less
effectual to soften the temper than to relax the courage of the Goths;
and they had imbibed the vices, without imitating the arts and
institutions, of civilized society.

The professions of Adolphus were probably sincere, and his attachment to
the cause of the republic was secured by the ascendant which a Roman
princess had acquired over the heart and understanding of the Barbarian
king. Placidia, the daughter of the great Theodosius, and of Galla, his
second wife, had received a royal education in the palace of
Constantinople; but the eventful story of her life is connected with the
revolutions which agitated the Western Empire under the reign of her
brother Honorius. When Rome was first invested by the arms of Alaric,
Placidia, who was then about twenty years of age, resided in the city;
and her ready consent to the death of her cousin Serena has a cruel and
ungrateful appearance, which, according to the circumstances of the
action, may be aggravated, or excused, by the consideration of her
tender age. The victorious Barbarians detained, either as a hostage or a
captive, the sister of Honorius; but, while she was exposed to the
disgrace of following round Italy the motions of a Gothic camp, she
experienced, however, a decent and respectful treatment. The authority
of Jornandes, who praises the beauty of Placidia, may perhaps be
counterbalanced by the silence, the expressive silence, of her
flatterers; yet the splendor of her birth, the bloom of youth, the
elegance of manners, and the dexterous insinuation which she
condescended to employ, made a deep impression on the mind of Adolphus,
and the Gothic King aspired to call himself the brother of the Emperor.
The ministers of Honorius rejected with disdain the proposal of an
alliance so injurious to every sentiment of Roman pride, and repeatedly
urged the restitution of Placidia as an indispensable condition of the
treaty of peace. But the daughter of Theodosius submitted, without
reluctance, to the desires of the conqueror, a young and valiant prince,
who yielded to Alaric in loftiness of stature, but who excelled in the
more attractive qualities of grace and beauty. The marriage of Adolphus
and Placidia was consummated before the Goths retired from Italy; and
the solemn, perhaps the anniversary, day of their nuptials was afterward
celebrated in the house of Ingenuus, one of the most illustrious
citizens of Narbonne in Gaul. The bride, attired and adorned like a
Roman empress, was placed on a throne of state; and the King of the
Goths, who assumed, on this occasion, the Roman habit, contented himself
with a less honorable seat by her side. The nuptial gift which,
according to the custom of his nation, was offered to Placidia,
consisted of the rare and magnificent spoils of her country. Fifty
beautiful youths, in silken robes, carried a basin in each hand; and one
of these basins was filled with pieces of gold, the other with precious
stones of an inestimable value. Attalus, so long the sport of fortune
and of the Goths, was appointed to lead the chorus of the hymeneal song;
and the degraded Emperor might aspire to the praise of a skilful
musician. The Barbarians enjoyed the insolence of their triumph; and the
provincials rejoiced in this alliance, which tempered, by the mild
influence of love and reason, the fierce spirit of their Gothic lord.

After the deliverance of Italy from the oppression of the Goths, some
secret counsellor was permitted, amid the factions of the palace, to
heal the wounds of that afflicted country. By a wise and humane
regulation the eight provinces which had been the most deeply injured,
Campania, Tuscany, Picenum, Samnium, Apulia, Calabria, Bruttium, and
Lucania, obtained an indulgence of five years; the ordinary tribute was
reduced to one-fifth, and even that fifth was destined to restore and
support the useful institution of the public posts. By another law, the
lands which had been left without inhabitants or cultivation were
granted, with some diminution of taxes, to the neighbors who should
occupy or the strangers who should solicit them; and the new possessors
were secured against the future claims of the fugitive proprietors.
About the same time a general amnesty was published in the name of
Honorius, to abolish the guilt and memory of all the _involuntary_
offences which had been committed by his unhappy subjects during the
term of the public disorder and calamity. A decent and respectful
attention was paid to the restoration of the capital; the citizens were
encouraged to rebuild the edifices which had been destroyed or damaged
by hostile fire; and extraordinary supplies of corn were imported from
the coast of Africa. The crowds that so lately fled before the sword of
the Barbarians were soon recalled by the hopes of plenty and pleasure;
and Albinus, prefect of Rome, informed the Court, with some anxiety and
surprise, that in a single day he had taken an account of the arrival of
fourteen thousand strangers. In less than seven years the vestiges of
the Gothic invasion were almost obliterated, and the city appeared to
resume its former splendor and tranquillity. The venerable matron
replaced her crown of laurel, which had been ruffled by the storms of
war; and was still amused, in the last moment of her decay, with the
prophecies of revenge, of victory, and of eternal dominion.

FOOTNOTE:

[18]

     "The prostrate South to the destroyer yields
     Her boasted titles and her golden fields;
     With grim delight the brood of winter view
     A brighter day and skies of azure hue;
     Scent the new fragrance of the opening rose,
     And quaff the pendent vintage as it grows."

See Gray's _Poems_, published by Mr. Mason, p. 197.




HUNS INVADE THE EASTERN ROMAN EMPIRE

ATTILA DICTATES A TREATY OF PEACE

A.D. 441

EDWARD GIBBON


     Beyond the Great Wall of China, erected to secure the empire from
     their encroachments, were numerous tribes of troublesome Hiongnou
     who, becoming united under one head, were successful in an invasion
     of that country. These confederated tribes became known as the
     Huns. Until the advent of M. Deguignes all was dark concerning
     them. That learned and laborious scholar conceived the idea that
     the Huns might be thus identified, and has written the history from
     Chinese sources, of those who since that time have poured down upon
     the civilized countries of Asia and Europe and wasted them. Boulger
     also identifies these tribes with the Huns of Attila. After driving
     the Alani across the Danube and compelling them to seek an asylum
     within the borders of the Roman Empire, the terrible Huns had
     halted in their march westward for something more than a
     generation. They were hovering, meantime, on the eastern frontiers
     of the empire, "taking part like other barbarians in its
     disturbances and alliances." Emperors paid them tribute, and Roman
     generals kept up a politic or a questionable correspondence with
     them. Stilicho had detachments of Huns in the armies which fought
     against Alaric, King of the Goths, the greatest Roman soldier after
     Stilicho--and, like Stilicho, of barbarian parentage--Aetius, who
     was to be their most formidable antagonist, had been a hostage and
     messmate in their camps. All historians agree that the influx of
     these barbaric peoples hastened, more than any other cause, the
     rapid decline of the great empire which the Romans had built up.

     About A.D. 433 Attila, equally famous in history and legend, became
     the King of the Huns. The attraction of his daring character, and
     of his genius for the war which nomadic tribes delight in, gave him
     absolute ascendency over his nation, and over the Teutonic and
     Slavonic tribes near him. Like other conquerors of his race he
     imagined and attempted an empire of ravage and desolation, a vast
     hunting ground and preserve, in which men and their works should
     supply the objects and zest of the chase.

     The gradual encroachments of the Huns on the northern frontiers of
     the Roman domain led to a terrific war in 441. Attila was king. His
     first assault upon the Roman power was directed against the
     Eastern Empire. The court at Constantinople had been duly
     obsequious to him, but he found a pretext for war. The dreadful
     ravages of his hordes and the shameful treaty which he forced upon
     the empire form a thrilling yet terrible chapter in the history of
     the world.


The western world was oppressed by the Goths and Vandals, who fled
before the Huns; but the achievements of the Huns themselves were not
adequate to their power and prosperity. Their victorious hordes had
spread from the Volga to the Danube; but the public force was exhausted
by the discord of independent chieftains; their valor was idly consumed
in obscure and predatory excursions; and they often degraded their
national dignity by condescending, for the hopes of spoil, to enlist
under the banners of their fugitive enemies. In the reign of Attila the
Huns again became the terror of the world; and I shall now describe the
character and actions of that formidable Barbarian; who alternately
insulted and invaded the East and the West, and urged the rapid downfall
of the Roman Empire.

In the tide of emigration which impetuously rolled from the confines of
China to those of Germany, the most powerful and populous tribes may
commonly be found on the verge of the Roman provinces. The accumulated
weight was sustained for a while by artificial barriers; and the easy
condescension of the emperors invited, without satisfying, the insolent
demands of the Barbarians, who had acquired an eager appetite for the
luxuries of civilized life. The Hungarians, who ambitiously insert the
name of Attila among their native kings, may affirm with truth that the
hordes, which were subject to his uncle Roas, or Rugilas, had formed
their encampments within the limits of modern Hungary,[19] in a fertile
country, which liberally supplied the wants of a nation of hunters and
shepherds. In this advantageous situation, Rugilas and his valiant
brothers, who continually added to their power and reputation,
commanded the alternative of peace or war with the two empires. His
alliance with the Romans of the West was cemented by his personal
friendship for the great Aetius, who was always secure of finding, in
the Barbarian camp, a hospitable reception and a powerful support. At
his solicitation, and in the name of John the Usurper, sixty thousand
Huns advanced to the confines of Italy; their march and their retreat
were alike expensive to the State; and the grateful policy of Aetius
abandoned the possession of Pannonia to his faithful confederates.

The Romans of the East were not less apprehensive of the arms of
Rugilas, which threatened the provinces, or even the capital. Some
ecclesiastical historians have destroyed the Barbarians with lightning
and pestilence; but Theodosius was reduced to the more humble expedient
of stipulating an annual payment of three hundred and fifty pounds of
gold, and of disguising this dishonorable tribute by the title of
general, which the King of the Huns condescended to accept. The public
tranquillity was frequently interrupted by the fierce impatience of the
Barbarians and the perfidious intrigues of the Byzantine court. Four
dependent nations, among whom we may distinguish the Bavarians,
disclaimed the sovereignty of the Huns; and their revolt was encouraged
and protected by a Roman alliance, till the just claims and formidable
power of Rugilas were effectually urged by the voice of Eslaw his
ambassador. Peace was the unanimous wish of the senate: their decree was
ratified by the Emperor; and two ambassadors were named, Plinthas, a
general of Scythian extraction, but of consular rank; and the quæstor
Epigenes, a wise and experienced statesman, who was recommended to that
office by his ambitious colleague.

The death of Rugilas suspended the progress of the treaty. His two
nephews, Attila and Bleda, who succeeded to the throne of their uncle,
consented to a personal interview with the ambassadors of
Constantinople; but as they proudly refused to dismount, the business
was transacted on horseback, in a spacious plain near the city of
Margus, in the Upper Mæsia. The kings of the Huns assumed the solid
benefits, as well as the vain honors, of the negotiation. They dictated
the conditions of peace, and each condition was an insult on the majesty
of the empire. Besides the freedom of a safe and plentiful market on
the banks of the Danube, they required that the annual contribution
should be augmented from three hundred and fifty to seven hundred pounds
of gold; that a fine or ransom of eight pieces of gold should be paid
for every Roman captive who had escaped from his Barbarian master; that
the Emperor should renounce all treaties and engagements with the
enemies of the Huns; and that all the fugitives who had taken refuge in
the court or provinces of Theodosius should be delivered to the justice
of their offended sovereign. This justice was rigorously inflicted on
some unfortunate youths of a royal race. They were crucified on the
territories of the empire, by the command of Attila: and as soon as the
King of the Huns had impressed the Romans with the terror of his name,
he indulged them in a short and arbitrary respite, while he subdued the
rebellious or independent nations of Scythia and Germany.

Attila, the son of Mundzuk, deduced his noble, perhaps his regal,
descent from the ancient Huns, who had formerly contended with the
monarchs of China. His features, according to the observation of a
Gothic historian, bore the stamp of his national origin; and the
portrait of Attila exhibits the genuine deformity of a modern Calmuk; a
large head, a swarthy complexion, small, deep-seated eyes, a flat nose,
a few hairs in the place of a beard, broad shoulders, and a short square
body, of nervous strength, though of a disproportioned form. The haughty
step and demeanor of the King of the Huns expressed the consciousness of
his superiority above the rest of mankind; and he had a custom of
fiercely rolling his eyes, as if he wished to enjoy the terror which he
inspired. Yet this savage hero was not inaccessible to pity; his
suppliant enemies might confide in the assurance of peace or pardon; and
Attila was considered by his subjects as a just and indulgent master.

He delighted in war; but, after he had ascended the throne in a mature
age, his head, rather than his hand, achieved the conquest of the North;
and the fame of an adventurous soldier was usefully exchanged for that
of a prudent and successful general. The effects of personal valor are
so inconsiderable, except in poetry or romance, that victory, even among
Barbarians, must depend on the degree of skill with which the passions
of the multitude are combined and guided for the service of a single
man. The Scythian conquerors, Attila and Zingis, surpassed their rude
countrymen in art rather than in courage; and it may be observed that
the monarchies, both of the Huns and of the Moguls, were erected by
their founders on the basis of popular superstition. The miraculous
conception, which fraud and credulity ascribed to the virgin-mother of
Zingis, raised him above the level of human nature; and the naked
prophet, who in the name of the Deity invested him with the empire of
the earth, pointed the valor of the Moguls with irresistible enthusiasm.

The religious arts of Attila were not less skilfully adapted to the
character of his age and country. It was natural enough that the
Scythians should adore, with peculiar devotion, the god of war; but as
they were incapable of forming either an abstract idea or a corporeal
representation, they worshipped their tutelar deity under the symbol of
an iron cimeter. One of the shepherds of the Huns perceived, that a
heifer, who was grazing, had wounded herself in the foot, and curiously
followed the track of the blood, till he discovered, among the long
grass, the point of an ancient sword, which he dug out of the ground and
presented to Attila. That magnanimous, or rather that artful, prince
accepted, with pious gratitude, this celestial favor, and, as the
rightful possessor of the _sword of Mars,_ asserted his divine and
indefeasible claim to the dominion of the earth. If the rites of Scythia
were practised on this solemn occasion, a lofty altar, or rather pile of
fagots, three hundred yards in length and in breadth, was raised in a
spacious plain; and the sword of Mars was placed erect on the summit of
this rustic altar, which was annually consecrated by the blood of sheep,
horses, and of the hundredth captive.

Whether human sacrifices formed any part of the worship of Attila, or
whether he propitiated the god of war with the victims which he
continually offered in the field of battle, the favorite of Mars soon
acquired a sacred character, which rendered his conquests more easy and
more permanent; and the Barbarian princes confessed, in the language of
devotion or flattery, that they could not presume to gaze, with a steady
eye, on the divine majesty of the King of the Huns. His brother Bleda,
who reigned over a considerable part of the nation, was compelled to
resign his sceptre and his life. Yet even this cruel act was attributed
to a supernatural impulse; and the vigor with which Attila wielded the
sword of Mars convinced the world that it had been reserved alone for
his invincible arm. But the extent of his empire affords the only
remaining evidence of the number and importance of his victories; and
the Scythian monarch, however ignorant of the value of science and
philosophy, might perhaps lament that his illiterate subjects were
destitute of the art which could perpetuate the memory of his exploits.

If a line of separation were drawn between the civilized and the savage
climates of the globe; between the inhabitants of cities, who cultivated
the earth, and the hunters and shepherds, who dwelt in tents, Attila
might aspire to the title of supreme and sole monarch of the Barbarians.
He alone, among the conquerors of ancient and modern times, united the
two mighty kingdoms of Germany and Scythia; and those vague
appellations, when they are applied to his reign, may be understood with
an ample latitude. Thuringia, which stretched beyond its actual limits
as far as the Danube, was in the number of his provinces; he interposed,
with the weight of a powerful neighbor, in the domestic affairs of the
Franks; and one of his lieutenants chastised, and almost exterminated,
the Burgundians of the Rhine. He subdued the islands of the ocean, the
kingdoms of Scandinavia, encompassed and divided by the waters of the
Baltic; and the Huns might derive a tribute of furs from that northern
region, which has been protected from all other conquerors by the
severity of the climate and the courage of the natives.

Toward the east, it is difficult to circumscribe the dominion of Attila
over the Scythian deserts: yet we may be assured that he reigned on the
banks of the Volga; that the King of the Huns was dreaded, not only as a
warrior, but as a magician; that he insulted and vanquished the khan of
the formidable Geougen; and that he sent ambassadors to negotiate an
equal alliance with the empire of China. In the proud review of the
nations who acknowledged the sovereignty of Attila, and who never
entertained, during his lifetime, the thought of a revolt, the Gepidæ
and the Ostrogoths were distinguished by their numbers, their bravery,
and the personal merit of their chiefs. The renowned Ardaric, King of
the Gepidæ, was the faithful and sagacious counsellor of the monarch,
who esteemed his intrepid genius, while he loved the mild and discreet
virtues of the noble Walamir, King of the Ostrogoths. The crowd of
vulgar kings, the leaders of so many martial tribes, who served under
the standard of Attila, were ranged in the submissive order of guards
and domestics round the person of their master. They watched his nod;
they trembled at his frown; and at the first signal of his will they
executed, without murmur or hesitation, his stern and absolute commands.
In time of peace the dependent princes, with their national troops,
attended the royal camp in regular succession; but when Attila collected
his military force he was able to bring into the field an army of five
or, according to another account, of seven hundred thousand Barbarians.

The ambassadors of the Huns might awaken the attention of Theodosius, by
reminding him that they were his neighbors both in Europe and Asia;
since they touched the Danube on one hand, and reached, with the other,
as far as the Tanais. In the reign of his father Arcadius, a band of
adventurous Huns had ravaged the provinces of the East, from whence they
brought away rich spoils and innumerable captives. They advanced, by a
secret path, along the shores of the Caspian Sea; traversed the snowy
mountains of Armenia; passed the Tigris, the Euphrates, and the Halys;
recruited their weary cavalry with the generous breed of Cappadocian
horses: occupied the hilly country of Cilicia, and disturbed the festal
songs and dances of the citizens of Antioch.

Egypt trembled at their approach; and the monks and pilgrims of the Holy
Land prepared to escape their fury by a speedy embarkation. The memory
of this invasion was still recent in the minds of the orientals. The
subjects of Attila might execute, with superior forces, the design which
these adventurers had so boldly attempted; and it soon became the
subject of anxious conjecture whether the tempest would fall on the
dominions of Rome or of Persia. Some of the great vassals of the King of
the Huns, who were themselves in the rank of powerful princes, had been
sent to ratify an alliance and society of arms with the Emperor, or
rather with the general, of the West. They related, during their
residence at Rome, the circumstances of an expedition which they had
lately made into the East.

After passing a desert and a morass, supposed by the Romans to be the
lake Mæotis, they penetrated through the mountains, and arrived, at the
end of fifteen days' march, on the confines of Media; where they
advanced as far as the unknown cities of Basic and Cursic. They
encountered the Persian army in the plains of Media; and the air,
according to their own expression, was darkened by a cloud of arrows.
But the Huns were obliged to retire before the numbers of the enemy.
Their laborious retreat was effected by a different road; they lost the
greater part of their booty; and at length returned to the royal camp,
with some knowledge of the country, and an impatient desire of revenge.
In the free conversation of the imperial ambassadors, who discussed, at
the court of Attila, the character and designs of their formidable
enemy, the ministers of Constantinople expressed their hope that his
strength might be diverted and employed in a long and doubtful contest
with the princes of the house of Sassan.

The more sagacious Italians admonished their eastern brethren of the
folly and danger of such a hope; and convinced them, that the Medes and
Persians were incapable of resisting the arms of the Huns; and that the
easy and important acquisition would exalt the pride, as well as power,
of the conqueror. Instead of contenting himself with a moderate
contribution and a military title, which equalled him only to the
generals of Theodosius, Attila would proceed to impose a disgraceful and
intolerable yoke on the necks of the prostrate and captive Romans, who
would then be encompassed, on all sides, by the empire of the Huns.

While the powers of Europe and Asia were solicitous to avert the
impending danger, the alliance of Attila maintained the Vandals in the
possession of Africa. An enterprise had been concerted between the
courts of Ravenna and Constantinople for the recovery of that valuable
province; and the ports of Sicily were already filled with the military
and naval forces of Theodosius. But the subtle Genseric, who spread his
negotiations round the world, prevented their designs, by exciting the
King of the Huns to invade the Eastern Empire; and a trifling incident
soon became the motive, or pretence, of a destructive war. Under the
faith of the treaty of Margus, a free market was held on the northern
side of the Danube, which was protected by a Roman fortress surnamed
Constantia. A troop of Barbarians violated the commercial security,
killed or dispersed the unsuspecting traders, and levelled the fortress
with the ground. The Huns justified this outrage as an act of reprisal,
alleged that the Bishop of Margus had entered their territories to
discover and steal a secret treasure of their kings, and sternly
demanded the guilty prelate, the sacrilegious spoil, and the fugitive
subjects who had escaped from the justice of Attila.

The refusal of the Byzantine court was the signal of war; and the
Mæsians at first applauded the generous firmness of their sovereign. But
they were soon intimidated by the destruction of Viminiacum and the
adjacent towns; and the people were persuaded to adopt the convenient
maxim that a private citizen, however innocent or respectable, may be
justly sacrificed to the safety of his country. The Bishop of Margus,
who did not possess the spirit of a martyr, resolved to prevent the
designs which he suspected. He boldly treated with the princes of the
Huns; secured, by solemn oaths, his pardon and reward; posted a numerous
detachment of Barbarians, in silent ambush, on the banks of the Danube;
and, at the appointed hour, opened, with his own hand, the gates of his
episcopal city. This advantage, which had been obtained by treachery,
served as a prelude to more honorable and decisive victories.

The Illyrian frontier was covered by a line of castles and fortresses;
and though the greatest part of them consisted only of a single tower,
with a small garrison, they were commonly sufficient to repel or to
intercept the inroads of an enemy who was ignorant of the art and
impatient of the delay of a regular siege. But these slight obstacles
were instantly swept away by the inundation of the Huns. They destroyed,
with fire and sword, the populous cities of Sirmium and Singidunum, of
Ratiaria and Marcianopolis, of Naissus and Sardica; where every
circumstance of the discipline of the people and the construction of the
buildings had been gradually adapted to the sole purpose of defence. The
whole breadth of Europe, as it extends above five hundred miles from the
Euxine to the Hadriatic, was at once invaded and occupied and desolated
by the myriads of Barbarians whom Attila led into the field. The public
danger and distress could not, however, provoke Theodosius to interrupt
his amusements and devotion or to appear in person at the head of the
Roman legions.

But the troops which had been sent against Genseric were hastily
recalled from Sicily; the garrisons on the side of Persia were
exhausted; and a military force was collected in Europe, formidable by
their arms and numbers, if the generals had understood the science of
command and their soldiers the duty of obedience. The armies of the
Eastern Empire were vanquished in three successive engagements; and the
progress of Attila may be traced by the fields of battle. The two
former, on the banks of the Utus and under the walls of Marcianapolis,
were fought in the extensive plains between the Danube and Mount Hæmus.
As the Romans were pressed by a victorious enemy, they gradually and
unskilfully retired toward the Chersonesus of Thrace; and that narrow
peninsula, the last extremity of the land, was marked by their third,
and irreparable, defeat.

By the destruction of this army Attila acquired the indisputable
possession of the field. From the Hellespont to Thermopylæ, and the
suburbs of Constantinople, he ravaged, without resistance and without
mercy, the provinces of Thrace and Macedonia. Heraclea and Hadrianople
might, perhaps, escape this dreadful irruption of the Huns; but the
words, the most expressive of total extirpation and erasure, are applied
to the calamities which they inflicted on seventy cities of the Eastern
Empire. Theodosius, his court, and the unwarlike people were protected
by the walls of Constantinople; but those waits had been shaken by a
recent earthquake, and the fall of fifty-eight towers had opened a large
and tremendous breach. The damage indeed was speedily repaired; but this
accident was aggravated by a superstitious fear, that heaven itself had
delivered the imperial city to the shepherds of Scythia, who were
strangers to the laws, the language, and the religion of the Romans.

In all their invasions of the civilized empires of the South, the
Scythian shepherds have been uniformly actuated by a savage and
destructive spirit. The laws of war, that restrain the exercise of
national rapine and murder, are founded on two principles of substantial
interest: the knowledge of the permanent benefits which may be obtained
by a moderate use of conquest; and a just apprehension, lest the
desolation which we inflict on the enemy's country may be retaliated on
our own. But these considerations of hope and fear are almost unknown in
the pastoral state of nations. The Huns of Attila may, without
injustice, be compared to the Moguls and Tartars, before their primitive
manners were changed by religion and luxury.

After the Moguls had subdued the northern provinces of China, it was
seriously proposed, not in the hour of victory and passion, but in calm
deliberate council, to exterminate all the inhabitants of that populous
country, that the vacant land might be converted to the pasture of
cattle. The firmness of a Chinese mandarin, who insinuated some
principles of rational policy into the mind of Genghis, diverted him
from the execution of this horrid design. But in the cities of Asia,
which yielded to the Moguls, the inhuman abuse of the rights of war was
exercised with a regular form of discipline, which may, with equal
reason, though not with equal authority, be imputed to the victorious
Huns. The inhabitants, who had submitted to their discretion, were
ordered to evacuate their houses, and to assemble in some plain adjacent
to the city; where a division was made of the vanquished into three
parts. The first class consisted of the soldiers of the garrison, and of
the young men capable of bearing arms; and their fate was instantly
decided; they were either enlisted among the Moguls, or they were
massacred on the spot by the troops, who, with pointed spears and bended
bows, had formed a circle round-the captive multitude. The second class,
composed of the young and beautiful women, of the artificers of every
rank and profession, and of the more wealthy or honorable citizens, from
whom a private ransom might be expected, was distributed in equal or
proportionable lots. The remainder, whose life or death was alike
useless to the conquerors, were permitted to return to the city; which,
in the mean while, had been stripped of its valuable furniture; and a
tax was imposed on those wretched inhabitants for the indulgence of
breathing their native air.

Such was the behavior of the Moguls, when they were not conscious of any
extraordinary rigor. But the most casual provocation, the slightest
motive of caprice or convenience, often provoked them to involve a whole
people in an indiscriminate massacre; and the ruin of some flourishing
cities was executed with such unrelenting perseverance that, according
to their own expression, horses might run, without stumbling, over the
ground where they had once stood. The three great capitals of Khorassan,
and Maru, Neisabour, and Herat, were destroyed by the armies of Genghis,
and the exact account which was taken of the slain amounted to four
million three hundred and forty-seven thousand persons. Timur, or
Tamerlane, was educated in a less barbarous age, and in the profession
of the Mahometan religion; yet, if Attila equalled the hostile ravages
of Tamerlane,[20] either the Tartar or the Hun might deserve the epithet
of the "Scourge of God."

It may be affirmed, with bolder assurance, that the Huns depopulated the
provinces of the Empire, by the murder of Roman subjects whom they led
away into captivity. In the hands of a wise legislator, such an
industrious colony might have contributed to diffuse through the deserts
of Scythia the rudiments of the useful and ornamental arts; but these
captives, who had been taken in war, were accidentally dispersed among
the hordes that obeyed the empire of Attila. The estimate of their
respective value was formed by the simple judgment of unenlightened and
unprejudiced Barbarians. Perhaps they might not understand the merit of
a theologian, profoundly skilled in the controversies of the Trinity and
the Incarnation; yet they respected the ministers of every religion;
ind the active zeal of the Christian missionaries, without approaching
the person or the palace of the monarch, successfully labored in the
propagation of the Gospel.

The pastoral tribes, who were ignorant of the distinction of landed
property, must have disregarded the use, as well as the abuse, of civil
jurisprudence; and the skill of an eloquent lawyer could excite only
their contempt or their abhorrence. The perpetual intercourse of the
Huns and the Goths had communicated the familiar knowledge of the two
national dialects; and the Barbarians were ambitious of conversing in
Latin, the military idiom even of the Eastern Empire. But they disdained
the language and the sciences of the Greeks; and the vain sophist, or
grave philosopher, who had enjoyed the flattering applause of the
schools, was mortified to find that his robust servant was a captive of
more value and importance than himself. The mechanic arts were
encouraged and esteemed, as they tended to satisfy the wants of the
Huns. An architect in the service of Onegesius, one of the favorites of
Attila, was employed to construct a bath; but this work was a rare
example of private luxury; and the trades of the smith, the carpenter,
the armorer, were much more adapted to supply a wandering people with
the useful instruments of peace and war.

But the merit of the physician was received with universal favor and
respect: the Barbarians, who despised death, might be apprehensive of
disease; and the haughty conqueror trembled in the presence of a captive
to whom he ascribed perhaps an imaginary power of prolonging or
preserving his life. The Huns might be provoked to insult the misery of
their slaves, over whom they exercised a despotic command; but their
manners were not susceptible of a refined system of oppression; and the
efforts of courage and diligence were often recompensed by the gift of
freedom. The historian Priscus, whose embassy is a source of curious
instruction, was accosted in the camp of Attila by a stranger, who
saluted him in the Greek language, but whose dress and figure displayed
the appearance of a wealthy Scythian. In the siege of Viminiacum he had
lost, according to his own account, his fortune and liberty; he became
the slave of Onegesius; but his faithful services, against the Romans
and the Acatzires, had gradually raised him to the rank of the native
Huns; to whom he was attached by the domestic pledges of a new wife and
several children. The spoils of war had restored and improved his
private property; he was admitted to the table of his former lord; and
the apostate Greek blessed the hour of his captivity, since it had been
the introduction to a happy and independent state, which he held by the
honorable tenure of military service.

This reflection naturally produced a dispute on the advantages and
defects of the Roman government, which was severely arraigned by the
apostate, and defended by Priscus in a prolix and feeble declamation.
The freedman of Onegesius exposed, in true and lively colors, the vices
of a declining empire, of which he had so long been the victim; the
cruel absurdity of the Roman princes, unable to protect their subjects
against the public enemy, unwilling to trust them with arms for their
own defence; the intolerable weight of taxes, rendered still more
oppressive by the intricate or arbitrary modes of collection; the
obscurity of numerous and contradictory laws; the tedious and expensive
forms of judicial proceedings; the partial administration of justice;
and the universal corruption, which increased the influence of the rich
and aggravated the misfortunes of the poor. A sentiment of patriotic
sympathy was at length revived in the breast of the fortunate exile: and
he lamented, with a flood of tears, the guilt or weakness of those
magistrates who had perverted the wisest and most salutary institutions.

The timid or selfish policy of the Western Romans had abandoned the
Eastern Empire to the Huns. The loss of armies, and the want of
discipline or virtue, were not supplied by the personal character of the
monarch. Theodosius might still affect the style, as well as the title,
of "Invincible Augustus"; but he was reduced to solicit the clemency of
Attila, who imperiously dictated these harsh and humiliating conditions
of peace:

I. The Emperor of the East resigned, by an express or tacit convention,
an extensive and important territory, which stretched along the southern
banks of the Danube, from Singidunum, or Belgrade, as far as Novæ, in
the diocese of Thrace. The breadth was defined by the vague computation
of fifteen days' journey; but, from the proposal of Attila to remove
the situation of the national market, it soon appeared that he
comprehended the ruined city of Naissus within the limits of his
dominions.

II. The King of the Huns required and obtained that his tribute or
subsidy should be augmented from seven hundred pounds of gold to the
annual sum of two thousand one hundred; and he stipulated the immediate
payment of six thousand pounds of gold to defray the expenses or to
expiate the guilt of the war. One might imagine that such a demand,
which scarcely equalled the measure of private wealth, would have been
readily discharged by the opulent Empire of the East; and the public
distress affords a remarkable proof of the impoverished, or at least of
the disorderly, state of the finances. A large proportion of the taxes
extorted from the people was detained and intercepted in their passage,
through the foulest channels, to the treasury of Constantinople. The
revenue was dissipated by Theodosius and his favorites in wasteful and
profuse luxury, which was disguised by the name of imperial magnificence
or Christian charity. The immediate supplies had been exhausted by the
unforeseen necessity of military preparations. A personal contribution,
rigorously but capriciously imposed on the members of the senatorian
order, was the only expedient that could disarm, without loss of time,
the impatient avarice of Attila; and the poverty of the nobles compelled
them to adopt the scandalous resource of exposing to public auction the
jewels of their wives and the hereditary ornaments of their palaces.

III. The King of the Huns appears to have established, as a principle of
national jurisprudence, that he could never lose the property, which he
had once acquired, in the persons who had yielded either a voluntary or
reluctant submission to his authority. From this principle he concluded,
and the conclusions of Attila were irrevocable laws, that the Huns, who
had been, taken prisoners in war, should be released without delay and
without ransom; that every Roman captive who had presumed to escape
should purchase his right to freedom at the price of twelve pieces of
gold; and that all the Barbarians who had deserted the standard of
Attila should be restored, with out any promise or stipulation of
pardon. In the execution of this cruel and ignominious treaty the
imperial officers were forced to massacre several loyal and noble
deserters who refused to devote themselves to certain death; and the
Romans forfeited all reasonable claims to the friendship of any Scythian
people, by this public confession, that they were destitute either of
faith or power to protect the suppliant who had embraced the throne of
Theodosius.

It would have been strange, indeed, if Theodosius had purchased, by the
loss of honor, a secure and solid tranquillity, or if his tameness had
not invited the repetition of injuries. The Byzantine court was insulted
by five or six successive embassies, and the ministers of Attila were
uniformly instructed to press the tardy or imperfect execution of the
last treaty; to produce the names of fugitives and deserters, who were
still protected by the Empire; and to declare, with seeming moderation,
that, unless their sovereign obtained complete and immediate
satisfaction, it would be impossible for him, were it even his wish, to
check the resentment of his warlike tribes. Besides the motives of pride
and interest, which might prompt the King of the Huns to continue this
train of negotiation, he was influenced by the less honorable view of
enriching his favorites at the expense of his enemies. The imperial
treasury was exhausted to procure the friendly offices of the
ambassadors and their principal attendants, whose favorable report might
conduce to the maintenance of peace.

The Barbarian monarch was flattered by the liberal reception of his
ministers; he computed, with pleasure, the value and splendor of their
gifts, rigorously exacted the performance of every promise which would
contribute to their private emolument, and treated as an important
business of state the marriage of his secretary Constantius. That Gallic
adventurer, who was recommended by Aetius to the King of the Huns, had
engaged his service to the ministers of Constantinople, for the
stipulated reward of a wealthy and noble wife; and the daughter of Count
Saturninus was chosen to discharge the obligations of her country. The
reluctance of the victim, some domestic troubles, and the unjust
confiscation of her fortune cooled the ardor of her interested lover;
but he still demanded, in the name of Attila, an equivalent alliance;
and, after many ambiguous delays and excuses, the Byzantine court was
compelled to sacrifice to this insolent stranger the widow of Armatius,
whose birth, opulence, and beauty placed her in the most illustrious
rank of the Roman matrons.

For these importunate and oppressive embassies Attila claimed a suitable
return: he weighed, with suspicious pride, the character and station of
the imperial envoys; but he condescended to promise that he would
advance as far as Sardica to receive any ministers who had been invested
with the consular dignity. The council of Theodosius eluded this
proposal, by representing the desolate and ruined condition of Sardica,
and even ventured to insinuate that every officer of the army or
household was qualified to treat with the most powerful princes of
Scythia. Maximin, a respectable courtier, whose abilities had been long
exercised in civil and military employments, accepted, with reluctance,
the troublesome, and perhaps dangerous, commission of reconciling the
angry spirit of the King of the Huns.

His friend, the historian Priscus, embraced the opportunity of observing
the Barbarian hero in the peaceful and domestic scenes of life: but the
secret of the embassy, a fatal and guilty secret, was intrusted only to
the interpreter Vigilius. The two last ambassadors of the Huns, Orestes,
a noble subject of the Pannonian province, and Edecon, a valiant
chieftain of the tribe of the Scyrri, returned at the same time from
Constantinople to the royal camp. Their obscure names were afterward
illustrated by the extraordinary fortune and the contrast of their sons:
the two servants of Attila became the fathers of the last Roman Emperor
of the West, and of the first Barbarian King of Italy.

The ambassadors, who were followed by a numerous train of men and
horses, made their first halt at Sardica, at the distance of three
hundred and fifty miles, or thirteen days' journey, from Constantinople.
As the remains of Sardica were still included within the limits of the
Empire, it was incumbent on the Romans to exercise the duties of
hospitality. They provided, with the assistance of the provincials, a
sufficient number of sheep and oxen, and invited the Huns to a splendid,
or, at least, a plentiful supper. But the harmony of the entertainment
was soon disturbed by mutual prejudice and indiscretion. The greatness
of the Emperor and the empire was warmly maintained by their ministers;
the Huns, with equal ardor, asserted the superiority of their victorious
monarch: the dispute was inflamed by the rash and unseasonable flattery
of Vigilius, who passionately rejected the comparison of a mere mortal
with the divine Theodosius; and it was with extreme difficulty that
Maximin and Priscus were able to divert the conversation, or to soothe
the angry minds, of the Barbarians. When they rose from the table, the
Imperial ambassador presented Edecon and Orestes with rich gifts of silk
robes and Indian pearls, which they thankfully accepted.

Yet Orestes could not forbear insinuating that _he_ had not always been
treated with such respect and liberality; and the offensive distinction
which was implied, between his civil office and the hereditary rank of
his colleague seems to have made Edecon a doubtful friend and Orestes an
irreconcilable enemy. After this entertainment they travelled about one
hundred miles from Sardica to Naissus. That flourishing city, which had
given birth to the great Constantine, was levelled with the ground; the
inhabitants were destroyed or dispersed; and the appearance of some sick
persons, who were still permitted to exist among the ruins of the
churches, served only to increase the horror of the prospect. The
surface of the country was covered with the bones of the slain; and the
ambassadors, who directed their course to the northwest, were obliged to
pass the hills of modern Servia before they descended into the flat and
marshy grounds which are terminated by the Danube.

The Huns were masters of the great river: their navigation was performed
in large canoes, hollowed out of the trunk of a single tree; the
ministers of Theodosius were safely landed on the opposite bank; and
their Barbarian associates immediately hastened to the camp of Attila,
which was equally prepared for the amusements of hunting or of war. No
sooner had Maximin advanced about two miles from the Danube than he
began to experience the fastidious insolence of the conqueror. He was
sternly forbidden to pitch his tents in a pleasant valley, lest he
should infringe the distant awe that was due to the royal mansion. The
ministers of Attila pressed him to communicate the business, and the
instructions, which he reserved for the ear of their sovereign. When
Maximin temperately urged the contrary practice of nations, he was still
more confounded to find that the resolutions of the Sacred Consistory,
those secrets (says Priscus) which should not be revealed to the gods
themselves, had been treacherously disclosed to the public enemy. On his
refusal to comply with such ignominious terms, the Imperial envoy was
commanded instantly to depart; the order was recalled; it was again
repeated; and the Huns renewed their ineffectual attempts to subdue the
patient firmness of Maximin.

At length, by the intercession of Scotta, the brother of Onegesius,
whose friendship had been purchased by a liberal gift, he was admitted
to the royal presence; but, instead of obtaining a decisive answer, he
was compelled to undertake a remote journey toward the north, that
Attila might enjoy the proud satisfaction of receiving, in the same
camp, the ambassadors of the Eastern and Western empires. His journey
was regulated by the guides, who obliged him to halt, to hasten his
march, or to deviate from the common road, as it best suited the
convenience of the King. The Romans, who traversed the plains of
Hungary, suppose that they passed _several_ navigable rivers, either in
canoes or portable boats; but there is reason to suspect that the
winding stream of the Teyss, or Tibiscus, might present itself in
different places under different names.

From the contiguous villages they received a plentiful and regular
supply of provisions; mead instead of wine, millet in the place of
bread, and a certain liquor named _camus_, which, according to the
report of Priscus, was distilled from barley.[21] Such fare might appear
coarse and indelicate to men who had tasted the luxury of
Constantinople; but, in their accidental distress, they were relieved by
the gentleness and hospitality of the same Barbarians, so terrible and
so merciless in war. The ambassadors had encamped on the edge of a large
morass. A violent tempest of wind and rain, of thunder and lightning,
overturned their tents, immersed their baggage and furniture in the
water, and scattered their retinue, who wandered in the darkness of the
night, uncertain of their road, and apprehensive of some unknown danger,
till they awakened by their cries the inhabitants of a neighboring
village, the property of the widow of Bleda. A bright illumination, and,
in a few moments, a comfortable fire of reeds, was kindled by their
officious benevolence; the wants, and even the desires, of the Romans
were liberally satisfied; and they seem to have been embarrassed by the
singular politeness of Bleda's widow, who added to her other favors the
gift, or at least the loan, of a sufficient number of beautiful and
obsequious damsels.

The sunshine of the succeeding day was dedicated to repose, to collect
and dry the baggage, and to the refreshment of the men and horses; but,
in the evening, before they pursued their journey, the ambassadors
expressed their gratitude to the bounteous lady of the village, by a
very acceptable present of silver cups, red fleeces, dried fruits, and
Indian pepper. Soon after this adventure, they rejoined the march of
Attila, from whom they had been separated about six days, and slowly
proceeded to the capital of an empire, which did not contain, in the
space of several thousand miles, a single city.

As far as we may ascertain the vague and obscure geography of Priscus,
this capital appears to have been seated between the Danube, the Teyss,
and the Carpathian hills, in the plains of Upper Hungary, and most
probably in the neighborhood of Jezberin, Agria, or Tokay. In its origin
it could be no more than an accidental camp, which, by the long and
frequent residence of Attila, had insensibly swelled into a huge
village, for the reception of his court, of the troops who followed his
person, and of the various multitude of idle or industrious slaves and
retainers. The baths, constructed by Onegesius, were the only edifice of
stone; the materials had been transported from Pannonia; and since the
adjacent country was destitute even of large timber, it may be presumed
that the meaner habitations of the royal village consisted of straw, or
mud, or of canvas. The wooden houses of the more illustrious Huns were
built and adorned with rude magnificence, according to the rank, the
fortune, or the taste of the proprietors. They seemed to have been
distributed with some degree of order and symmetry; and each spot
became more honorable as it approached the person of the sovereign.

The palace of Attila, which surpassed all other houses in his dominions,
was built entirely of wood, and covered an ample space of ground. The
outward enclosure was a lofty wall, or palisade, of smooth square
timber, intersected with high towers, but intended rather for ornament
than defence. This wall, which seems to have encircled the declivity of
the hill, comprehended a great variety of wooden edifices, adapted to
the uses of royalty. A separate house was assigned to each of the
numerous wives of Attila; and, instead of the rigid and illiberal
confinement imposed by Asiatic jealousy, they politely admitted the
Roman ambassadors to their presence, their table, and even to the
freedom of an innocent embrace. When Maximin offered his presents to
Cerce, the principal Queen, he admired the singular architecture of her
mansion, the height of the round columns, the size and beauty of the
wood, which was curiously shaped or turned, or polished or carved; and
his attentive eye was able to discover some taste in the ornaments and
some regularity in the proportions.

After passing through the guards, who watched before the gate, the
ambassadors were introduced into the private apartment of Cerce. The
wife of Attila received their visit sitting, or rather lying, on a soft
couch; the floor was covered with a carpet; the domestics formed a
circle round the Queen; and her damsels, seated on the ground, where
employed in working the variegated embroidery which adorned the dress of
the Barbaric warriors. The Huns were ambitious of displaying those
riches which were the fruit and evidence of their victories; the
trappings of their horses, their swords, and even their shoes were
studded with gold and precious stones; and their tables were profusely
spread with plates, and goblets, and vases of gold and silver, which had
been fashioned by the labor of Grecian artists. The monarch alone
assumed the superior pride of still adhering to the simplicity of his
Scythian ancestors. The dress of Attila, his arms, and the furniture of
his horse were plain, without ornament, and of a single color. The royal
table was served in wooden cups and platters; flesh was his only food;
and the conqueror of the North never tasted the luxury of bread.

When Attila first gave audience to the Roman ambassadors on the banks
of the Danube, his tent was encompassed with a formidable guard. The
monarch himself was seated in a wooden chair. His stern countenance,
angry gestures, and impatient tone, astonished the firmness of Maximin;
but Vigilius had more reason to tremble, since he distinctly understood
the menace, that if Attila did not respect the law of nations, he would
nail the deceitful interpreter to the cross, and leave his body to the
vultures. The Barbarian condescended, by producing an accurate list, to
expose the bold falsehood of Vigilius, who had affirmed that no more
than seventeen deserters could be found. But he arrogantly declared that
he apprehended only the disgrace of contending with his fugitive slaves;
since he despised their impotent efforts to defend the provinces which
Theodosius had intrusted to their arms: "For what fortress," added
Attila, "what city, in the wide extent of the Roman Empire, can hope to
exist, secure and impregnable, if it is our pleasure that it should be
erased from the earth?"

He dismissed, however, the interpreter, who returned to Constantinople
with his peremptory demand of more complete restitution and a more
splendid embassy. His anger gradually subsided, and his domestic
satisfaction in a marriage which he celebrated on the road with the
daughter of Eslam, might perhaps contribute to mollify the native
fierceness of his temper. The entrance of Attila into the royal village
was marked by a very singular ceremony. A numerous troop of women came
out to meet their hero and their King. They marched before him,
distributed into long and regular files; the intervals between the files
were filled by white veils of thin linen, which the women on either side
bore aloft in their hands, and which formed a canopy for a chorus of
young virgins, who chanted hymns and songs in the Scythian language. The
wife of his favorite Onegesius, with a train of female attendants,
saluted Attila at the door of her own house, on his way to the palace;
and offered, according to the custom of the country, her respectful
homage, by entreating him to taste the wine and meat which she had
prepared for his reception. As soon as the monarch had graciously
accepted her hospitable gift, his domestics lifted a small silver table
to a convenient height, as he sat on horseback; and Attila, when he had
touched the goblet with his lips, again saluted the wife of Onegesius,
and continued his march.

During his residence at the seat of empire, his hours were not wasted in
the recluse idleness of a seraglio; and the King of the Huns could
maintain his superior dignity, without concealing his person from the
public view. He frequently assembled his council, and gave audience to
the ambassadors of the nations; and his people might appeal to the
supreme tribunal, which he held at stated times, and, according to the
Eastern custom, before the principal gate of his wooden palace. The
Romans, both of the East and of the West, were twice invited to the
banquets, where Attila feasted with the princes and nobles of Scythia.
Maximin and his colleagues were stopped on the threshold, till they had
made a devout libation to the health and prosperity of the King of the
Huns, and were conducted, after this ceremony, to their respective seats
in a spacious hall. The royal table and couch, covered with carpets and
fine linen, was raised by several steps in the midst of the hall; and a
son, an uncle, or perhaps a favorite king were admitted to share the
simple and homely repast of Attila.

Two lines of small tables, each of which contained three or four guests,
were ranged in order on either hand; the right was esteemed the most
honorable, but the Romans ingenuously confess that they were placed on
the left; and that Beric, an unknown chieftain, most probably of the
Gothic race, preceded the representatives of Theodosius and Valentinian.
The Barbarian monarch received from his cup-bearer a goblet filled with
wine, and courteously drank to the health of the most distinguished
guest, who rose from his seat and expressed in the same manner his loyal
and respectful vows. This ceremony was successively performed for all,
or at least, for the illustrious persons of the assembly; and a
considerable time must have been consumed, since it was thrice repeated
as each course or service was placed on the table. But the wine still
remained after the meat had been removed; and the Huns continued to
indulge their intemperance long after the sober and decent ambassadors
of the two empires had withdrawn themselves from the nocturnal banquet.
Yet before they retired, they enjoyed a singular opportunity of
observing the manners of the nation in their convivial amusements. Two
Scythians stood before the couch of Attila, and recited the verses which
they had composed, to celebrate his valor and his victories.

A profound silence prevailed in the hall; and the attention of the
guests was captivated by the vocal harmony, which revived and
perpetuated the memory of their own exploits; a martial ardor flashed
from the eyes of the warriors, who were impatient for battle; and the
tears of the old men expressed their generous despair, that they could
no longer partake the danger and glory of the field. This entertainment,
which might be considered as a school of military virtue, was succeeded
by a farce, that debased the dignity of human nature. A Moorish and a
Scythian buffoon successively excited the mirth of the rude spectators,
by their deformed figure, ridiculous dress, antic gestures, absurd
speeches, and the strange, unintelligible confusion of the Latin, the
Gothic, and the Hunnic languages; and the hall resounded with loud and
licentious peals of laughter. In the midst of this intemperate riot,
Attila alone, without a change of countenance, maintained his steadfast
and inflexible gravity; which was never relaxed, except on the entrance
of Irnac, the youngest of his sons: he embraced the boy with a smile of
paternal tenderness, gently pinched him by the cheek, and betrayed a
partial affection, which was justified by the assurance of his prophets
that Irnac would be the future support of his family and empire.

Two days afterward, the ambassadors received a second invitation: and
they had reason to praise the politeness, as well as the hospitality, of
Attila. The King of the Huns held a long and familiar conversation with
Maximin; but his civility was interrupted by rude expressions and
haughty reproaches; and he was provoked, by a motive of interest, to
support, with unbecoming zeal, the private claims of his secretary
Constantius. "The Emperor," said Attila, "has long promised him a rich
wife: Constantius must not be disappointed; nor should a Roman emperor
deserve the name of liar." On the third day the ambassadors were
dismissed: the freedom of several captives was granted, for a moderate
ransom, to their pressing entreaties; and, besides the royal presents,
they were permitted to accept from each of the Scythian nobles the
honorable and useful gift of a horse. Maximin returned, by the same
road, to Constantinople; and though he was involved in an accidental
dispute with Beric, the new ambassador of Attila, he flattered himself
that he had contributed, by the laborious journey, to confirm the peace
and alliance of the two nations.[22]

But the Roman ambassador was ignorant of the treacherous design which
had been concealed under the mask of the public faith. The surprise and
satisfaction of Edecon, when he contemplated the splendor of
Constantinople, had encouraged the interpreter Vigilius to procure for
him a secret interview with the eunuch Chrysaphius,[23] who governed the
Emperor and the empire. After some previous conversation, and a mutual
oath of secrecy, the eunuch, who had not from his own feelings or
experience imbibed any exalted notions of ministerial virtue, ventured
to propose the death of Attila as an important service, by which Edecon
might deserve a liberal share of the wealth and luxury which he admired.
The ambassador of the Huns listened to the tempting offer; and
professed, with apparent zeal, his ability, as well as readiness, to
execute the bloody deed: the design was communicated to the master of
the offices, and the devout Theodosius consented to the assassination of
his invincible enemy. But this perfidious conspiracy was defeated by the
dissimulation, or the repentance, of Edecon; and though he might
exaggerate his inward abhorrence for the treason, which he seemed to
approve, he dexterously assumed the merit of an early and voluntary
confession.

If we _now_ review the embassy of Maximin and the behavior of Attila, we
must applaud the Barbarian, who respected the laws of hospitality, and
generously entertained and dismissed the minister of a prince who had
conspired against his life. But the rashness of Vigilius will appear
still more extraordinary, since he returned, conscious of his guilt and
danger, to the royal camp, accompanied by his son, and carrying with him
a weighty purse of gold, which the favorite eunuch had furnished, to
satisfy the demands of Edecon and to corrupt the fidelity of the guards.
The interpreter was instantly seized, and dragged before the tribunal of
Attila, where he asserted his innocence with specious firmness, till the
threat of inflicting instant death on his son extorted from him a
sincere discovery of the criminal transaction. Under the name of ransom,
or confiscation, the rapacious King of the Huns accepted two hundred
pounds of gold for the life of a traitor whom he disdained to punish. He
pointed his just indignation against a nobler object. His ambassadors,
Eslaw and Orestes, were immediately despatched to Constantinople, with a
peremptory instruction, which it was much safer for them to execute than
to disobey.

They boldly entered the Imperial presence, with the fatal purse hanging
down from the neck of Orestes, who interrogated the eunuch Chrysaphius,
as he stood beside the throne, whether he recognized the evidence of his
guilt. But the office of reproof was reserved for the superior dignity
of his colleague, Eslaw, who gravely addressed the Emperor of the East
in the following words: "Theodosius is the son of an illustrious and
respectable parent: Attila likewise is descended from a noble race; and
_he_ has supported, by his actions, the dignity which he inherited from
his father Mundzuk. But Theodosius has forfeited his paternal honors,
and, by consenting to pay tribute, has degraded himself to the condition
of a slave. It is therefore just, that he should reverence the man whom
fortune and merit have placed above him, instead of attempting, like a
wicked slave, clandestinely to conspire against his master." The son of
Arcadius, who was accustomed only to the voice of flattery, heard with
astonishment the severe language of truth: he blushed and trembled, nor
did he presume directly to refuse the head of Chrysaphius, which Eslaw
and Orestes were instructed to demand.

A solemn embassy, armed with full powers and magnificent gifts, was
hastily sent to deprecate the wrath of Attila; and his pride was
gratified by the choice of Nomius and Anatolius, two ministers of
consular or patrician rank, of whom the one was great treasurer, and the
other was master-general of the armies of the East. He condescended to
meet these ambassadors on the banks of the river Drenco; and though he
at first affected a stern and haughty demeanor, his anger was insensibly
mollified by their eloquence and liberality. He condescended to pardon
the Emperor, the eunuch, and the interpreter; bound himself by an oath
to observe the conditions of peace; released a great number of captives;
abandoned the fugitives and deserters to their fate; and resigned a
large territory, to the south of the Danube, which he had already
exhausted of its wealth and inhabitants. But this treaty was purchased
at an expense which might have supported a vigorous and successful war:
and the subjects of Theodosius were compelled to redeem the safety of a
worthless favorite by oppressive taxes, which they would more cheerfully
have paid for his destruction.

FOOTNOTES:

[19] Hungary has been successively occupied by three Scythian colonies:
1. The Huns of Attila; 2. The Abares, in the sixth century; and, 3. The
Turks or Magyars, A.D. 889, the immediate and genuine ancestors of the
modern Hungarians, whose connection with the two former is extremely
faint and remote.

[20] Cherefeddin Ali, his servile panegyrist, would afford us many
horrid examples. In his camp before Delhi, Timur massacred one hundred
thousand Indian prisoners who had _smiled_ when the army of their
countrymen appeared in sight. The people of Ispahan supplied seventy
thousand human skulls for the structure of several lofty towers. A
similar tax was levied on the revolt of Bagdad; and the exact account,
which Cherefeddin was not able to procure from the proper officers, is
stated by another historian (Ahmed Arabsiada) at ninety thousand heads.

[21] The Huns themselves still continued to despise the labors of
agriculture: they abused the privilege of a victorious nation; and the
Goths, their industrious subjects, who cultivated the earth, dreaded
their neighborhood, like that of so many ravenous wolves.

[22] The curious narrative of this embassy, which required few
observations, and was not susceptible of any collateral evidence, may be
found in Priscus. But I have not confined myself to the same order; and
I had previously extracted the historical circumstances, which were less
intimately connected with the journey, and business, of the Roman
ambassadors.

[23] M. de Tillemont has very properly given the succession of
chamberlains who reigned in the name of Theodosius. Chrysaphius was the
last, and, according to the unanimous evidence of history, the worst of
these favorites. His partiality for his godfather, the heresiarch
Eutyches, engaged him to persecute the orthodox party.




THE ENGLISH CONQUEST OF BRITAIN

A.D. 449-579

JOHN R. GREEN CHARLES KNIGHT

     If we look for the fatherland of the English race, we must, as
     modern historians have clearly shown, direct our search "far away
     from England herself." In the fifth century of the Christian era a
     region in what is now called Schleswig was known by the name of
     Anglen (England). But the inhabitants of this district are believed
     to have comprised only a small detached portion of the Engle
     (English), while the great body of this people probably dwelt
     within the limits of the present Oldenburg and lower Hanover.

     On several sides of Anglen were the homes of various tribes of
     Saxons and Jutes, and these peoples were all kindred, being members
     of one branch (Low German) of the Teutonic family. History first
     finds them becoming united through community of blood, of language,
     institutions, and customs, although it was too early yet to justify
     the historian in giving to them the inclusive name of Englishmen.
     They all, however, had part in the conquest of England, and it was
     their union in that land that gave birth to the English people.

     Little is known of the actual character and life of these people
     who made the earliest England, but their Germanic inheritance is
     traceable in their social and political framework, which already
     prefigured the national organization that through centuries of
     gradual development became modern England.

     Out of their early modes grew the forms of English citizenship and
     legislation, and the individual and public freedom which has slowly
     broadened down from generation to generation. Later came the
     modifying, if not transforming, influence of Christianity,
     replacing the ancient nature-worship which they took with them to
     their new home. On these foundations the English race, as it has
     grown up in the land they made their own, and in other lands to
     which like men and institutions have been carried, has reared its
     various structures of nationality.

JOHN R. GREEN

Of the three English tribes the Saxons lay nearest to the empire, and
they were naturally the first to touch the Roman world; before the close
of the third century indeed their boats appeared in such force in the
English Channel as to call for a special fleet to resist them. The
piracy of our fathers had thus brought them to the shores of a land
which, dear as it is now to Englishmen, had not as yet been trodden by
English feet. This land was Britain. When the Saxon boats touched its
coast the island was the westernmost province of the Roman Empire. In
the fifty-fifth year before Christ a descent of Julius Cæsar revealed it
to the Roman world; and a century after Cæsar's landing the emperor
Claudius undertook its conquest. The work was swiftly carried out.
Before thirty years were over the bulk of the island had passed beneath
the Roman sway, and the Roman frontier had been carried to the firths of
Forth and of Clyde. The work of civilization followed fast on the work
of the sword. To the last indeed the distance of the island from the
seat of empire left her less Romanized than any other province of the
west. The bulk of the population scattered over the country seem in
spite of imperial edicts to have clung to their old law as to their old
language, and to have retained some traditional allegiance to their
native chiefs. But Roman civilisation rested mainly on city life, and in
Britain as elsewhere the city was thoroughly Roman. In towns such as
Lincoln or York, governed by their own municipal officers, guarded by
massive walls, and linked together by a network of magnificent roads
which reached from one end of the island to the other, manners,
language, political life, all were of Rome.

For three hundred years the Roman sword secured order and peace without
Britain and within, and with peace and order came a wide and rapid
prosperity. Commerce sprang up in ports among which London held the
first rank; agriculture flourished till Britain became one of the
corn-exporting countries of the world; the mineral resources of the
province were explored in the tin mines of Cornwall, the lead mines of
Somerset or Northumberland, and the iron mines of the Forest of Dean.
But evils which sapped the strength of the whole empire told at last, on
the province of Britain.

Wealth and population alike declined under a crushing system of
taxation, under restrictions which fettered industry, under a despotism
which crushed out all local independence. And with decay within came
danger from without. For centuries past the Roman frontier had held
back the Barbaric world beyond it--the Parthian of the Euphrates, the
Numidian of the African desert, the German of the Danube or the Rhine.
In Britain a wall drawn from Newcastle to Carlisle bridled the British
tribes, the Picts as they were called, who had been sheltered from Roman
conquest by the fastnesses of the Highlands.

It was this mass of savage barbarism which broke upon the empire as it
sank into decay. In its western dominions the triumph of these
assailants was complete. The Franks conquered and colonized Gaul. The
West Goths conquered and colonized Spain. The Vandals founded a kingdom
in Africa. The Burgundians encamped in the borderland between Italy and
the Rhone. The East Goths ruled at last in Italy itself.

It was to defend Italy against the Goths that Rome in the opening of the
fifth century withdrew her legions from Britain, and from that moment
the province was left to struggle unaided against the Picts. Nor were
these its only enemies. While marauders from Ireland, whose inhabitants
then bore the name of Scots, harried the west, the boats of Saxon
pirates, as we have seen, were swarming off its eastern and southern
coasts.

For forty years Britain held bravely out against these assailants; but
civil strife broke its powers of resistance, and its rulers fell back at
last on the fatal policy by which the empire invited its doom while
striving to avert it, the policy of matching barbarian against
barbarian. By the usual promises of land and pay a band of warriors was
drawn for this purpose from Jutland in 449 with two ealdormen, Hengist
and Horsa, at their head.

If by English history we mean the history of Englishmen in the land
which from that time they made their own, it is with this landing of
Hengist's war band that English history begins. They landed on the
shores of the Isle of Thanet at a spot known since as Ebbsfleet. No spot
can be so sacred to Englishmen as the spot which first felt the tread of
English feet. There is little to catch the eye in Ebbsfleet itself, a
mere lift of ground with a few gray cottages dotted over it, cut off
nowadays from the sea by a reclaimed meadow and a sea-wall.

But taken as a whole the scene has a wild beauty of its own. To the
right the white curve of Ramsgate cliffs looks down on the crescent of
Pegwell Bay; far away to the left across gray marsh levels where smoke
wreaths mark the site of Richborough and Sandwich the coast line trends
dimly toward Deal. Everything in the character of the spot confirms the
national tradition which fixed here the landing-place of our fathers;
for the physical changes of the country since the fifth century have
told little on its main features. At the time of Hengist's landing a
broad inlet of sea parted Thanet from the mainland of Britain; and
through this inlet the pirate boats would naturally come sailing with a
fair wind to what was then the gravel spit of Ebbsfleet.

The work for which the mercenaries had been hired was quickly done; and
the Picts are said to have been scattered to the winds in a battle
fought on the eastern coast of Britain. But danger from the Pict was
hardly over when danger came from the jutes themselves. Their
fellow-pirates must have flocked from the channel to their settlement in
Thanet; the inlet between Thanet and the mainland was crossed, and the
Englishmen won their first victory over the Britons in forcing their
passage of the Medway at the village of Aylesford.

A second defeat at the passage of the Cray drove the British forces in
terror upon London; but the ground was soon won back again, and it was
not till 465 that a series of petty conflicts which had gone on along
the shores of Thanet made way for a decisive struggle at Wippedsfleet.
Here however the overthrow was so terrible that from this moment all
hope of saving northern Kent seems to have been abandoned, and it was
only on its southern shore that the Britons held their ground. Ten years
later, in 475, the long contest was over, and with the fall of Lymne,
whose broken walls look from the slope to which they cling over the
great flat of Romney Marsh, the work of the first English conqueror was
done.

The warriors of Hengist had been drawn from the Jutes, the smallest of
the three tribes who were to blend in the English people. But the greed
of plunder now told on the great tribe which stretched from the Elbe to
the Rhine, and in 477 Saxon invaders were seen pushing slowly along the
strip of land which lay westward of Kent between the weald and the sea.
Nowhere has the physical aspect of the country more utterly changed. A
vast sheet of scrub, woodland, and waste which then bore the name of the
Andredsweald stretched for more than a hundred miles from the borders of
Kent to the Hampshire Downs, extending northward almost to the Thames
and leaving only a thin strip of coast which now bears the name of
Sussex between its southern edge and the sea.

This coast was guarded by a fortress which occupied the spot now called
Pevensey, the future landing-place of the Norman Conqueror; and the fall
of this fortress of Anderida in 491 established the kingdom of the South
Saxons. "Ælle and Cissa beset Anderida," so ran the pitiless record of
the conquerors, "and slew all that were therein, nor was there afterward
one Briton left."

But Hengist and Ælle's men had touched hardly more than the coast, and
the true conquest of Southern Britain was reserved for a fresh band of
Saxons, a tribe known as the Gewissas, who landed under Cerdic and
Cynric on the shores of the Southampton Water, and pushed in 495 to the
great downs or Gwent where Winchester offered so rich a prize. Nowhere
was the strife fiercer than here; and it was not till 519 that a
decisive victory at Charford ended the struggle for the "Gwent" and set
the crown of the West Saxons on the head of Cerdic. But the forest belt
around it checked any further advance; and only a year after Charford
the Britons rallied under a new leader, Arthur, and threw back the
invaders as they pressed westward through the Dorsetshire woodlands in a
great overthrow at Badbury or Mount Badon. The defeat was followed by a
long pause in the Saxon advance from the southern coast, but while the
Gewissas rested, a series of victories whose history is lost was giving
to men of the same Saxon tribe the coast district north of the mouth of
the Thames.

It is probable, however, that the strength of Camulodunum, the
predecessor of our modern Colchester, made the progress of these
assailants a slow and doubtful one; and even when its reduction enabled
the East Saxons to occupy the territory to which they have given their
name of Essex a line of woodland which has left its traces in Epping and
Hainault forests checked their farther advance into the island.

Though seventy years had passed since the victory of Aylesford only the
outskirts of Britain were won. The invaders were masters as yet but of
Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, and Essex. From London to St. David's Head,
from the Andredsweald to the Firth of Forth the country still remained
unconquered, and there was little in the years which followed Arthur's
triumph to herald that onset of the invaders which was soon to make
Britain England. Till now its assailants had been drawn from two only of
the three tribes whom we saw dwelling by the northern sea, from the
Saxons and the jutes. But the main work of conquest was to be done by
the third, by the tribe which bore that name of Engle or Englishmen
which was to absorb that of Saxon or Jute and to stamp itself on the
people which sprang from the union of the conquerors as on the land that
they won.

The Engle had probably been settling for years along the coast of
Northumbria and in the great district which was cut off from the rest of
Britain by the Wash and the Fens, the later East Anglia. But it was not
till the moment we have reached that the line of defences which had
hitherto held the invaders at bay was turned by their appearance in the
Humber and the Trent. This great river line led like a highway into the
heart of Britain; and civil strife seems to have broken the strength of
British resistance. But of the incidents of this final struggle we know
nothing. One part of the English force marched from the Humber over the
Yorkshire wolds to found what was called the kingdom of the Deirans.

Under the empire political power had centred in the district between the
Humber and the Roman wall; York was the capital of Roman Britain; villas
of rich land-owners studded the valley of the Ouse; and the bulk of the
garrison maintained in the island lay camped along its northern border.
But no record tells us how Yorkshire was won, or how the Engle made
themselves masters of the uplands about Lincoln. It is only by their
later settlements that we follow their march into the heart of Britain.
Seizing the valley of the Don and whatever breaks there were in the
woodland that then filled the space between the Humber and the Trent,
the Engle followed the curve of the latter river, and struck along the
line of its tributary the Soar. Here round the Roman Ratæ, the
predecessor of our Leicester, settled a tribe known as the Middle
English, while a small body pushed farther southward, and under the name
of "South Engle" occupied the oölitic upland that forms our present
Northamptonshire.

But the mass of the invaders seem to have held to the line of the Trent
and to have pushed westward to its head-waters. Repton, Lichfield, and
Tamworth mark the country of these western Englishmen, whose older name
was soon lost in that of Mercians, or Men of the March. Their settlement
was in fact a new march or borderland between conqueror and conquered;
for here the impenetrable fastness of the Peak, the mass of Cannock
Chase, and the broken country of Staffordshire enabled the Briton to
make a fresh and desperate stand.

It was probably this conquest of Mid-Britain by the Engle that roused
the West Saxons to a new advance. For thirty years they had rested
inactive within the limits of the Gwent, but in 552 their capture of the
hill fort of Old Sarum threw open the reaches of the Wiltshire downs,
and a march of King Cuthwulf on the Thames made them masters in 571 of
the districts which now form Oxfordshire and Berkshire.

Pushing along the upper valley of Avon to a new battle at Barbury Hill
they swooped at last from their uplands on the rich prey that lay along
the Severn. Gloucester, Cirencester, and Bath, cities which had leagued
under their British kings to resist this onset, became in 577 the spoil
of an English victory at Deorham, and the line of the great western
river lay open to the arms of the conquerors. Once the West Saxons
penetrated to the borders of Chester, and Uriconium, a town beside the
Wrekin which has been recently brought again to light, went up in
flames. The raid ended in a crushing defeat which broke the West-Saxon
strength, but a British poet in verses still left to us sings piteously
the death song of Uriconium, "the white town in the valley," the town of
white stone gleaming among the green woodlands. The torch of the foe had
left it a heap of blackened ruins where the singer wandered through
halls he had known in happier days, the halls of its chief Kyndylan,
"without fire, without light, without song," their stillness broken only
by the eagle's scream, the eagle who "has swallowed fresh drink,
heart's blood of Kyndylan the fair."

With the victory of Deorham the conquest of the bulk of Britain was
complete. Eastward of a line which may be roughly drawn along the
moorlands of Northumberland and Yorkshire through Derbyshire and the
Forest of Arden to the Lower Severn, and thence by Mendip to the sea,
the island had passed into English hands. Britain had in the main become
England. And within this new England a Teutonic society was settled on
the wreck of Rome. So far as the conquest had yet gone it had been
complete. Not a Briton remained as subject or slave on English ground.
Sullenly, inch by inch, the beaten men drew back from the land which
their conquerors had won; and eastward of the border line which the
English sword had drawn all was now purely English.


CHARLES KNIGHT

"They" [the Romans], says Bede, "resided within the rampart that Severus
made across the island, on the south side of it; as the cities, temples,
bridges, and paved ways do testify to this day." On the north of the
wall were the nations that no severity had reduced to subjection, and no
resistance could restrain from plunder. At the extreme west of England
were the people of Cornwall, or little Wales, as it was called; having
the most intimate relations with the people of Britannia Secunda, or
Wales; and both connected with the colony of Armorica. The inhabitants
of Cornwall and Wales, we may assume, were almost exclusively of the old
British stock. The abandonment of the country by the Romans had affected
them far less than that change affected the more cultivated country,
that had been the earliest subdued, and for nearly four centuries had
received the Roman institutions and adopted the Roman customs.

But in the chief portion of the island, from the southern and eastern
coasts to the Tyne and the Solway, there was a mixed population, among
whom it would be difficult to trace that common bond which would
constitute nationality. The British families of the interior had become
mingled with the settlers of Rome and its tributaries to whom grants of
land had been assigned as the rewards of military service; and the
coasts from the Humber to the Exe had been here and there peopled with
northern settlers, who had gradually planted themselves among the
Romanized British; and were, we may well believe, among the most active
of those who carried forward the commercial intercourse of Britain with
Gaul and Italy.

When, therefore, we approach the period of what is termed the Saxon
invasion, and hear of the decay, the feebleness, the cowardice, and the
misery of the Britons--all which attributes have been somewhat too
readily bestowed upon the population which the Romans had left
behind--it would be well to consider what these so-called Britons really
were, to enable us properly to understand the transition state through
which the country passed.

Our first native historian is Gildas, who lived in the middle of the
sixth century. "From the early part of the fifth century, when the Greek
and Roman writers cease to notice the affairs of Britain, his narrative,
on whatever authority it may have been founded, has been adopted without
question by Bede and succeeding authors, and accepted, notwithstanding
its barrenness of facts and pompous obscurity, by all but general
consent, as the basis of early English history." Gibbon has justly
pointed out his inconsistencies, his florid descriptions of the
flourishing condition of agriculture and commerce after the departure of
the Romans, and his denunciations of the luxury of the people; when he,
at the same time, describes a race who were ignorant of the arts,
incapable of building walls of defence, or of arming themselves with
proper weapons. When "this monk," as Gibbon calls him, "who, in the
profound ignorance of human life, presumes to exercise the office of
historian," tells us that the Romans, who were occasionally called in to
aid against the Picts and Scots, "give energetic counsel to the timorous
natives, and leave them patterns by which to manufacture arms," we seem
to be reading an account of some remote tribe, to whom the Roman sword
and buckler were as unfamiliar as the musket was to the Otaheitans when
Cook first went among them.

When Gildas describes the soldiers on the wall as "equally slow to fight
and ill-adapted to run away"; and tells the remarkable incident which
forms part of every schoolboy's belief, that the defenders of the wall
were pulled down by great hooked weapons and dashed against the ground,
we feel a pity akin to contempt for a people so stupid and passive, and
are not altogether sorry that the Picts and Scots, "differing one from
another in manners, but inspired with the same avidity for blood," had
come with their bushy beards and their half-clothed bodies, to supplant
so effeminate a race. When he makes this feeble people send an embassy
to a Roman in Gaul to say, "The barbarians drive us to the sea; the sea
throws us back on the barbarians: thus two modes of death await us; we
are either slain or drowned," we must wonder at the very straitened
limits in which this unhappy people were shut up.

Surely much of this is little more than the tumid rhetoric of the
cloister; for all the assumptions that have been raised of the physical
degeneracy of the people are quite unsupported by any real historical
evidence. M. Guizot considers it unjust and cruel to view their humble
supplications, so declared by Gildas, to Rome for aid, as evidences of
the effeminacy of that nation, whose resistance to the Saxons has given
a chapter to history at a time when history has few traces of Italians,
Spaniards, and Gauls.

That the representations of Gildas could only be partially true, as
applied to some particular districts, is sufficiently proved, by the
undoubted fact that within little more than twenty years from the date
of these cowardly demonstrations Anthemius, the Emperor, solicited the
aid of the Britons against the Visigoths; and twelve thousand men from
this island, under one of the native chieftains, Rhiothimus, sailed up
the Loire, and fought under the Roman command. They are described by a
contemporary Roman writer as quick, well-armed; turbulent and
contumacious from their bravery, their numbers, and their common
agreement. These were not the people who were likely to have stood upon
a wall to be pulled down by hooked weapons. They might have been the
people who had clung, more than the other inhabitants of the Roman
provinces, to their original language and customs; but it is not
improbable that they would have been of the mixed races with whom Rome
had been in more intimate relations, and to whom she continued to render
offices of friendship after the separation of the island province from
her empire.

Amid all this conflict of testimony there is the undoubted fact that
out of the Roman municipal institutions had risen the establishment of
separate sovereignties, as Procopius relates. Britain, according to St.
Jerome, was "a province fertile in tyrants." The Roman municipal
government was kept compact and uniform under a great centralizing
power. It fell to pieces here, as in Gaul, when that power was
withdrawn. It resolved itself into a number of local governments without
any principle of cohesion. The vicar of the municipium became an
independent ruler and head of a little republic; and that his authority
was contested by some who had partaken of his delegated dignity may be
reasonably inferred.

The difference of races would also promote the contests for command. If
East Anglia contained a preponderance of one race of settlers, and Kent
and Sussex of another, they might well quarrel for supremacy. But when
all the settlers on the Saxon shore had lost the control and protection
of the Count who once governed them, it may also be imagined that the
more exclusively British districts would not readily coöperate for
defence with those who were more strange to their kindred even than the
Roman. All the European Continent was in a state of political
dislocation; and we may safely conclude that when the great power was
shattered that had so long held the government of the world, the more
distant and subordinate branch of its empire would resolve itself into
some of the separate elements of authority and of imperfect obedience by
which a clan is distinguished from a nation.

Nor was the power of the Christian Church in Britain of a more united
character than that of the civil rulers. No doubt a church had been
formed and organized. There were bishops, so called, in the several
cities; but their authority was little concentrated and their tenets
were discordant. Pilgrimages were even made to the sacred places of
Palestine; and at a very early period monasteries were founded. That of
Bangor, or the Great Circle, seems to have had some relation to the
ancient Druidical worship, upon which it was probably engrafted in that
region where Druidism had long flourished. There were British versions
of the Bible. But that the church had no sustaining power at the period
when civil society was so wholly disorganized, may be inferred from
circumstances which preceded the complete overthrow of Christian rites
by Saxon heathendom.

Bede devotes several chapters of his _Ecclesiastical History_ to the
actions of St. Germanus, who came expressly to Britain to put down the
Pelagian heresy; and, amid the multitude of miraculous circumstances,
records how "the authors of the perverse notions lay hid, and, like the
evil spirits, grieved for the loss of the people that was rescued from
them. At length, after mature deliberation, they had the boldness to
enter the lists, and appeared, being conspicuous for riches, glittering
in apparel, and supported by the flatteries of many." The people,
according to Bede, were the judges of this great controversy, and gave
their voices for the orthodox belief.

Whether the Pelagians were expelled from Britain by reason or by force,
it is evident that, in the middle of the fifth century, there was a
strong element of religious disunion very generally prevailing; and that
at a period when the congregations were in a great degree independent of
each other, and therefore difficult of subjection to a common authority,
the rich and the powerful had adopted a creed which was opposed to the
centralizing rule of the Roman Church, and were arguing about points of
faith as strongly as they were contesting for worldly supremacy. Dr.
Lappenberg justly points out this celebrated controversy in our country
as "indicating the weakness of that religious connection which was so
soon to be totally annihilated." We may, in some degree, account for the
reception of the doctrine of Pelagius by knowing that he was a Briton,
whose plain unlatinized name was Morgan.

Macaulay has startled many a reader of the most familiar histories of
England, in saying, "Hengist and Horsa, Vortigern and Rowena, Arthur and
Mordred, are mythical persons, whose very existence may be questioned,
and whose adventures must be classed with those of Hercules and
Romulus." It is difficult to write of a period of which the same writer
has said, "an age of fable completely separates two ages of truth." Yet
no one knew better than this accomplished historian himself that an age
of fable and an age of truth cannot be distinguished with absolute
precision. It is not that what is presented to us through the haze of
tradition must necessarily be unreal, any more than that what comes to
us in an age of literature must be absolutely true. An historical fact,
a real personage, may be handed down from a remote age in the songs of
bards; but it is not therefore to be inferred that these national lyrics
are founded upon pure invention. It is curious to observe that,
wandering amid these traces of events and persons that have been shaped
into history, how ready we are to walk in the footsteps of some
half-fabulous records, and wholly to turn away from others which seem as
strongly impressed upon the shifting sands of national existence.

We derive Hengist and Horsa from the old Anglo-Saxon authorities; and
modern history generally adopts them. Arthur and Mordred have a Celtic
origin, and they are as generally rejected as "mythical persons." It
appears to us that it is as precipitate wholly to renounce the one as
the other, because they are both surrounded with an atmosphere of the
fabulous. Hengist and Horsa come to us encompassed with Gothic
traditions that belong to other nations. Arthur presents himself with
his attributes of the magician Merlin, and the knights of the Round
Table. But are we therefore to deny altogether their historical
existence? In following the _ignis fatuus_ of tradition, the credulous
annalists of the monastic age were lost in the treacherous ground over
which it led them. The more patient research of a critical age sees in
that doubtful light a friendly warning of what to avoid, and hence a
guide to more stable pathways.

Hengist and Horsa--who, according to the Anglo-Saxon historians, landed
in the year 449 on the shore which is called Ebbsfleet--were personages
of more than common mark. "They were the sons of Wihtgils; Wihtgils son
of Witta, Witta of Wecta, Wecta of Woden." So says the _Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle_, and adds, "From this Woden sprang all our royal families."
These descendants, in the third generation from the great Saxon
divinity, came over in three boats. They came by invitation of
Wyrtgeone--Vortigern--King of the Britons. The King gave them land in
the southeast of the country, on condition that they should fight
against the Picts; and they did fight, and had the victory wheresoever
they came. And then they sent for the Angles, and told them of the
worthlessness of the people and the excellences of the land. This is the
Saxon narrative. The seductive graces of Rowena, the daughter of Horsa,
who corrupted the King of the Britons by love and wine, is an
embellishment of the British traditions.

Then came the great battles for possession of the land. At Aylesford and
Crayford the Kentish Britons were overthrown. Before the Angles the
Welsh fled like fire. These events occupy a quarter of a century. While
they are going on, the Roman Emperor, as we have mentioned upon
indubitable authority, receives an auxiliary force of twelve thousand
men from Britain. We cannot rely upon narratives that tell us of _the_
king of the Britons, when we learn from no suspicious sources that the
land was governed by many separate chiefs; and which represent a petty
band of fugitives as gaining mighty triumphs for a great ruler, and then
subduing him themselves in a wonderfully short time.

The pretensions of Hengist and Horsa to be the immediate descendants of
Woden would seem to imply their mythical origin. But many Saxon chiefs
of undoubted reality rested their pretensions upon a similar genealogy.
The myth was as flattering to the Anglo-Saxon pride of descent as the
corresponding myth that the ancient inhabitants of the island were
descended from the Trojan Brute was acceptable to the British race. But
amid much of fable there is the undoubted fact that Germanic tribes were
gradually possessing themselves of the fairest parts of Britain--a
progressive usurpation, far different from a sudden conquest. Amid the
wreck of the social institutions left by Rome, when all that remained of
a governing power was centred in the towns, it may be readily conceived
that the rich districts of the eastern and southern coasts would be
eagerly peopled by new settlers, whose bond of society was founded upon
the occupation of the land; and who, extending the area of their
occupation, would eventually come into hostile conflict with the
previous possessors.

For a century and a half a thick darkness seems to overspread the
history of our country. In the Anglo-Saxon writers we can trace little,
with any distinctness, beyond the brief and monotonous records of
victories and slaughters. Hengist and Æsc slew four troops of Britons
with the edge of the sword. Hengist then vanishes, and Ælla comes with
his three sons. In 491 they besieged Andres-cester, "and slew all that
dwelt therein, so that not a single Briton was there left." Then come
Cerdic and Cynric his son; then Port and his two sons, and land at
Portsmouth; and so we reach the sixth century. Cerdic and Cynric now
stand foremost among the slaughterers, and they establish the kingdom of
the West Saxons and conquer the Isle of Wight.

In the middle of the century Ida begins to reign, from whom arose the
royal race of North-humbria. In 565 Ethelbert succeeded to the kingdom
of the Kentish-men, and held it fifty-three years. The war goes on in
the south-midland counties, where Cuthwulf is fighting; and it reaches
the districts of the Severn, where Cuthwine and Ceawlin slay great
kings, and take Gloucester and Cirencester and Bath. One of these fierce
brethren is killed at last, and Ceawlin, "having taken many spoils and
towns innumerable, wrathful returned to his own." Where "his own" was we
are not informed.

We reach, at length, the year 596, when "Pope Gregory sent Augustin to
Britain, with a great many monks, who preached the word of God to the
nation of the Angles." Bede very judiciously omits all such details. He
tells us that "they carried on the conflagration from the eastern to the
western sea, without any opposition, and almost covered all the
superfices of the perishing island. Public as well as private structures
were overturned; the priests were everywhere slain before the altars;
the prelates and the people, without any respect of persons, were
destroyed with fire and sword." There is little to add to these
impressive words, which no doubt contain the general truth. But if we
open the British history of Geoffrey of Monmouth, we find ourselves
relieved from the thick darkness of the Anglo-Saxon records, by the blue
lights and red lights of the most wondrous romance. Rowena comes with
her golden wine-cup. Merlin instructs Vortigern how to discover the two
sleeping dragons who hindered the foundation of his tower. Aurelius, the
Christian King, burns Vortigern in his Cambrian city of refuge. Eldol
fights a duel with Hengist, cuts off his head, and destroys the Saxons
without mercy. Merlin the magician, and Uther Pendragon, with fifteen
thousand men, bring over "the Giant's Dance" from Ireland, and set it up
in Salisbury Plain. Uther Pendragon is made the Christian king over all
Britain.

At length we arrive at Arthur, the son of Uther. To him the entire
monarchy of Britain belonged by hereditary right. Hoel sends him fifteen
thousand men from Armorica, and he makes the Saxons his tributaries; and
with his own hand kills four hundred and seventy in one battle. He not
only conquers the Saxons, but subdues Gaul, among other countries, and
holds his court in Paris. His coronation at the City of the Legions
(Caer-Leon) is gorgeous beyond all recorded magnificence; and the
general state of the country, in these days of Arthur, before the middle
of the sixth century, is thus described: "At that time, Britain had
arrived at such a pitch of grandeur that in abundance of riches, luxury
of ornaments, and politeness of inhabitants, it far surpassed all other
kingdoms." Mordred, the wicked traitor, at length disturbs all this
tranquillity and grandeur, and brings over barbarous people from
different countries. Arthur falls in battle. The Saxons prevail, and the
Britons retire into Cornwall and Wales.

Amid the bewildering mass of the obscure and the fabulous which our
history presents of the first century and a half of the Saxon
colonization, there are some well-established facts which are borne out
by subsequent investigations. Such is Bede's account of the country of
the invaders, and the parts in which they settled. This account,
compared with other authorities, gives us the following results. They
consisted of "the three most powerful nations of Germany--Saxons,
Angles, and Jutes." The Saxons came from the parts which, in Bede's
time, were called the country of the Old Saxons. That country is now
known as the duchy of Holstein. These, under Ella, founded the kingdom
of the South Saxons--our present Sussex. Later in the fifth century, the
same people, under Cerdic, established themselves in the district
extending from Sussex to Devonshire and Cornwall, which was the kingdom
of the West Saxons.

Other Saxons settled in Essex and Middlesex. The Angles, says Bede, came
from "the country called Angelland, and it is said from that time to
remain desert to this day." There is a part of the duchy of Schleswig,
to the north of Holstein, which still bears the name of Anglen. These
people gave their name to the whole country, Engla-land, or Angla-land,
from the greater extent of territory which they permanently occupied. As
the Saxons possessed themselves of the southern coasts, the Angles
established themselves on the northeastern. Their kingdom of East Anglia
comprised Norfolk and Suffolk, as well as part of Cambridgeshire; and
they extended themselves to the north of the Humber, forming the
powerful state of Northumbria, and carrying their dominion even to the
Forth and the Clyde.

The Jutes came from the country north of the Angles, which is in the
upper part of the present Schleswig; and they occupied Kent and the Isle
of Wight, with that part of Hampshire which is opposite the island. Sir
Francis Palgrave is of opinion that "the tribes by whom Britain was
invaded appear principally to have proceeded from the country now called
Friesland; for of all the continental dialects the ancient Frisick is
the one which approaches most nearly to the Anglo-Saxon of our
ancestors." Mr. Craik has pointed out that "the modern kingdom of
Denmark comprehends all the districts from which issued, according to
the old accounts, the several tribes who invaded Britain upon the fall
of the Roman Empire. And the Danes proper (who may be considered to
represent the Jutes); the Angles, who live between the Bight of
Flensborg and the river Schley on the Baltic; the Frisons, who inhabit
the islands along the west coast of Jutland, with a part of the
bailiwick of Husum in Schleswig; and the Germans of Holstein (Bede's Old
Saxons) are still all recognized by geographers and ethnographers as
distinct races."




ATTILA INVADES WESTERN ROME

BATTLE OF CHÂLONS

A.D. 451

CREASY GIBBON


     After Attila had conquered and laid waste the provinces of the
     Eastern Empire south of the Danube and exacted heavy tribute from
     Theodosius II, he turned his attention to the subjugation of the
     Slavic and Germanic tribes who still remained independent. These,
     with one exception, he overcame and placed under the sovereignty of
     his son. He laid claim to one-half of the Western Empire, as the
     betrothed husband of Valentinian's sister Honoria, from whom he had
     years before received the offer of her hand in marriage.

     In 451, with Genseric, King of the Vandals, for his ally, he
     invaded Gaul. Before his advance the cities hastened to capitulate,
     and so complete was his devastation of the country that it came to
     be a saying that the grass never grew where his horses had trod.
     But in Aetius, their commander-in-chief under Valentinian III, the
     Romans had an able general, who was aided by the West Gothic king
     Theodoric. The West Goths and the Franks, the former from the
     South, the latter from the North of Gaul, joined him in large
     numbers, and the allied forces drove the Huns from the walls of
     Orleans, which he had besieged. From there he retreated to Châlons,
     where his westward movement was to receive its final check. This
     decisive event was, in the words of Herbert, "the discomfiture of
     the mighty attempt of Attila to found a new anti-Christian dynasty
     upon the wreck of the temporal power of Rome, at the end of the
     term of twelve hundred years, to which its duration had been
     limited by the forebodings of the heathen."


SIR EDWARD SHEPHERD CREASY

A broad expanse of plains, the Campi Catalaunici of the ancients,
spreads far and wide around the city of Châlons, in the northeast of
France. The long rows of poplars, through which the river Marne winds
its way, and a few thinly scattered villages, are almost the only
objects that vary the monotonous aspect of the greater part of this
region. But about five miles from Châlons, near the little hamlets of
Chape and Cuperly, the ground is indented and heaped up in ranges of
grassy mounds and trenches, which attest the work of man's hands in ages
past, and which, to the practised eye, demonstrate that this quiet spot
has once been the fortified position of a huge military host.

Local tradition gives to these ancient earthworks the name of Attila's
Camp. Nor is there any reason to question the correctness of the title,
or to doubt that behind these very ramparts it was that fourteen hundred
years ago the most powerful heathen king that ever ruled in Europe
mustered the remnants of his vast army, which had striven on these
plains against the Christian soldiery of Toulouse and Rome. Here it was
that Attila prepared to resist to the death his victors in the field;
and here he heaped up the treasures of his camp in one vast pile, which
was to be his funeral pyre should his camp be stormed. It was here that
the Gothic and Italian forces watched, but dared not assail their enemy
in his despair, after that great and terrible day of battle when

                     "The sound
    Of conflict was o'erpast, the shout of all
    Whom earth could send from her remotest bounds,
    Heathen or faithful; from thy hundred mouths,
    That feed the Caspian with Riphean snows.
    Huge Volga! from famed Hypanis, which once
    Cradled the Hun; from all the countless realms
    Between Imaus and that utmost strand
    Where columns of Herculean rock confront
    The blown Altantic; Roman, Goth, and Hun,
    And Scythian strength of chivalry, that tread
    The cold Codanian shore or what far lands
    Inhospitable drink Cimmerian floods,
    Franks, Saxons, Suevic, and Sarmatian chiefs,
    And who from green Armorica or Spain
    Flocked to the work of death."

The victory which the Roman general Aetius, with his Gothic allies, had
then gained over the Huns, was the last victory of imperial Rome. But
among the long fasti of her triumphs, few can be found that, for their
importance and ultimate benefit to mankind, are comparable with this
expiring effort of her arms. It did not, indeed, open to her any new
career of conquest--it did not consolidate the relics of her power--it
did not turn the rapid ebb of her fortunes. The mission of imperial
Rome was, in truth, already accomplished. She had received and
transmitted through her once ample dominion the civilization of Greece.
She had broken up the barriers of narrow nationalities among the various
states and tribes that dwelt around the coasts of the Mediterranean. She
had fused these and many other races into one organized empire, bound
together by a community of laws, of government and institutions. Under
the shelter of her full power the true faith had arisen in the earth,
and during the years of her decline it had been nourished to maturity,
it had overspread all the provinces that ever obeyed her sway. For no
beneficial purpose to mankind could the dominion of the seven-hilled
city have been restored or prolonged. But it was all-important to
mankind what nations should divide among them Rome's rich inheritance of
empire. Whether the Germanic and Gothic warriors should form states and
kingdoms out of the fragments of her dominions, and become the free
members of the Commonwealth of Christian Europe, or whether pagan
savages, from the wilds of central Asia, should crush the relics of
classic civilization and the early institutions of the Christianized
Germans in one hopeless chaos of barbaric conquest. The Christian
Visigoths of King Theodoric fought and triumphed at Châlons side by side
with the legions of Aetius. Their joint victory over the Hunnish host
not only rescued for a time from destruction the old age of Rome, but
preserved for centuries of power and glory the Germanic element in the
civilization of modern Europe.

In order to estimate the full importance to mankind of the battle of
Châlons we must keep steadily in mind who and what the Germans were, and
the important distinctions between them and the numerous other races
that assailed the Roman Empire; and it is to be understood that the
Gothic and Scandinavian nations are included in the German race. Now,
"in two remarkable traits the Germans differed from the Sarmatic as well
as from the Slavic nations, and, indeed, from all those other races to
whom the Greeks and Romans gave the designation of barbarians. I allude
to their personal freedom and regard for the rights of men; secondly, to
the respect paid by them to the female sex, and the chastity for which
the latter were celebrated among the people of the North. These were
the foundations of that probity of character, self-respect, and purity
of manners which may be traced among the Germans and Goths even during
pagan times, and which, when their sentiments were enlightened by
Christianity, brought out those splendid traits of character which
distinguish the age of chivalry and romance."

What the intermixture of the German stock with the classic, at the fall
of the Western Empire, has done for mankind may be best felt by
watching, with Arnold, over how large a portion of the earth the
influence of the German element is now extended.

"It affects, more or less, the whole west of Europe, from the head of
the Gulf of Bothnia to the most southern promontory of Sicily, from the
Oder and the Adriatic to the Hebrides and to Lisbon. It is true that the
language spoken over a large portion of this place is not predominantly
German; but even in France and Italy, and Spain, the influence of the
Franks, Burgundians, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, and Lombards while it has
colored even the language, has in blood and institutions left its mark
legibly and indelibly. Germany, the Low Countries, Switzerland, for the
most part Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, and our own islands are all in
language, in blood, and in institutions German most decidedly. But all
South America is peopled with Spaniards and Portuguese; all North
America and all Australia with Englishmen. I say nothing of the
prospects and influence of the German race in Africa and in India; it is
enough to say that half of Europe and all America and Australia are
German, more or less completely, in race, in language, or in
institutions, or in all."

By the middle of the fifth century Germanic nations had settled
themselves in many of the fairest regions of the Roman Empire, had
imposed their yoke on the provincials, and had undergone, to a
considerable extent, that moral conquest which the arts and refinements
of the vanquished in arms have so often achieved over the rough victor.
The Visigoths held the North of Spain, and Gaul south of the Loire.
Franks, Alemanni, Alans, and Burgundians had established themselves in
other Gallic provinces, and the Suevi were masters of a large southern
portion of the Spanish peninsula. A king of the Vandals reigned in
North Africa; and the Ostrogoths had firmly planted themselves in the
provinces north of Italy. Of these powers and principalities, that of
the Visigoths, under their king Theodoric, son of Alaric, was by far the
first in power and in civilization.

The pressure of the Huns upon Europe had first been felt in the fourth
century of our era. They had long been formidable to the Chinese empire,
but the ascendency in arms which another nomadic tribe of Central Asia,
the Sienpi, gained over them, drove the Huns from their Chinese conquest
westward; and this movement once being communicated to the whole chain
of barbaric nations that dwelt northward of the Black Sea and the Roman
Empire, tribe after tribe of savage warriors broke in upon the barriers
of civilized Europe. The Huns crossed the Tanais into Europe in 375, and
rapidly reduced to subjection the Alans, the Ostrogoths, and other
tribes that were then dwelling along the course of the Danube. The
armies of the Roman Emperor that tried to check their progress were cut
to pieces by them, and Pannonia and other provinces south of the Danube
were speedily occupied by the victorious cavalry of these new invaders.
Not merely the degenerate Romans, but the bold and hardy warriors of
Germany and Scandinavia, were appalled at the number, the ferocity, the
ghastly appearance, and the lightning-like rapidity of the Huns. Strange
and loathsome legends were coined and credited, which attributed their
origin to the union of

    "Secret, black, and midnight hags"

with the evil spirits of the wilderness.

Tribe after tribe and city after city fell before them. Then came a
pause in their career of conquest in Southwestern Europe, caused
probably by dissensions among their chiefs, and also by their arms being
employed in attacks upon the Scandinavian nations. But when Attila--or
Atzel, as he is called in the Hungarian language--became their ruler,
the torrent of their arms was directed with augmented terrors upon the
West and the South, and their myriads marched beneath the guidance of
one master-mind to the overthrow both of the new and the old powers of
the earth.

Recent events have thrown such a strong interest over everything
connected with the Hungarian name that even the terrible renown of
Attila now impresses us the more vividly through our sympathizing
admiration of the exploits of those who claim to be descended from his
warriors, and "ambitiously insert the name of Attila among their native
kings." The authenticity of this martial genealogy is denied by some
writers and questioned by more. But it is at least certain that the
Magyars of Arpad, who are the immediate ancestors of the bulk of the
modern Hungarians, and who conquered the country which bears the name of
Hungary in A.D. 889, were of the same stock of mankind as were the Huns
of Attila, even if they did not belong to the same subdivision of that
stock. Nor is there any improbability in the tradition that after
Attila's death many of his warriors remained in Hungary, and that their
descendants afterward joined the Huns of Arpad in their career of
conquest. It is certain that Attila made Hungary the seat of his empire.
It seems also susceptible of clear proof that the territory was then
called Hungvar, and Attila's soldiers Hungvari. Both the Huns of Attila
and those of Arpad came from the family of nomadic nations whose
primitive regions were those vast wildernesses of High Asia which are
included between the Altaic and the Himalayan mountain chains.

The inroads of these tribes upon the lower 

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