Theodoric the Goth: Barbarian Champion of Civilisation
by Thomas Hodgkin · English · Gutenberg #20063 · 722,638 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Theodoric the Goth: Barbarian Champion of Civilisation
Author: Thomas Hodgkin
Release date: December 9, 2006 [eBook #20063]
Language: English
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HEROES OF THE NATIONS
EDITED BY
EVELYN ABBOTT, M.A.
FELLOW OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD
FACTA CUCIS VIVENT OPEROSAQUE
GLORIA RERUM--OVID, IN LIVIAM, 255
THE HERO'S DEEDS AND HARD-WON
FAME SHALL LIVE
[Illustration]
THEODORIC THE GOTH
THE BARBARIAN CHAMPION OF CIVILISATION
BY THOMAS HODGKIN, D.C.L.
FELLOW OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON; AUTHOR OF
"ITALY AND HER INVADERS, A.D. 376-553", ETC., ETC.
G.P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK.
27 W. TWENTY-THIRD STREET
LONDON.
24 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND
THE KNICKERBOCKER PRESS.
1897
COPYRIGHT, 1891, BY
Entered at Stationers' Hall, London
By G. P. Putnam's Sons.
Electrotyped, Printed, and Bound by
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
G.P. Putnam's Sons.
[Illustration]
PREFACE
In the following pages I have endeavoured to portray the life and
character of one of the most striking figures in the history of the
Early Middle Ages, Theodoric the Ostrogoth. The plan of the series, for
which this volume has been prepared, does not admit of minute discussion
of the authorities on which the history rests. In my case the omission
is of the less consequence, as I have treated the subject more fully in
my larger work, "Italy and her Invaders", and as also the chief
authorities are fully enumerated in that book which is or ought to be in
the library of every educated Englishman and American, Gibbon's "History
of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire".
The fifth and sixth centuries do not supply us with many materials for
pictorial illustrations, and I do not know where to look for authentic
and contemporary representations of the civil or military life of
Theodoric and his subjects. We have, however, a large and interesting
store of nearly contemporary works of art at Ravenna, illustrating the
ecclesiastical life of the period, and of these the engraver has made
considerable use. The statue of Theodoric at Innsbruck, a representation
of which is included with the illustrations, possesses, of course, no
historical value, but is interesting as showing how deeply the memory of
Theodoric's great deeds had impressed itself on the mind of the Middle
Ages.
And here I will venture on a word of personal reminiscence. The figure
of Theodoric the Ostrogoth has been an interesting and attractive one to
me from the days of my boyhood. I well remember walking with a friend on
a little hill (then silent and lonely, now covered with houses), looking
down on London, and discussing European politics with the earnest
interest which young debaters bring to such a theme. The time was in
those dark days which followed the revolutions of 1848, when it seemed
as if the life of the European nations would be crushed out under the
heel of returned and triumphant despotism. For Italy especially, after
the defeat of Novara, there seemed no hope. We talked of Mazzini,
Cavour, Garibaldi, and discussed the possibility--which then seemed so
infinitely remote--that there might one day be a free and united Italy.
We both agreed that the vision was a beautiful one, but was there any
hope of it ever becoming a reality? My friend thought there was not, and
argued from the fact of Italy's divided condition in the past, that she
must always be divided in the future. I, who was on the side of hope,
felt the weakness of my position, and was driven backward through the
centuries, till at length I took refuge in the reign of Theodoric.
Surely, under the Ostrogothic king, Italy had been united, strong, and
prosperous. My precedent was a remote one, but it was admitted, and it
did a little help my cause.
Since that conversation more than forty years have passed. The beautiful
land is now united, free, and mighty; and a new generation has arisen,
which, though aware of the fact that she was not always thus, has but a
faint conception how much blood and how many tears, what thousands of
broken hearts and broken lives went to the winning of Italy's freedom.
I, too, with fuller knowledge of her early history, am bound to confess
that her unity even under Theodoric was not so complete as I then
imagined it. But still, as I have more than once stated in the following
pages, I look upon his reign as a time full of seeds of promise for
Italy and the world, if only these seeds might have had time to
germinate and ripen into harvest. Closer study has only confirmed me in
the opinion that the Ostrogothic kingdom was one of the great
"Might-have-beens" of History.
THOMAS HODGKIN.
NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE,
January 25, 1891.
CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I.
THEODORIC'S ANCESTORS
Ostrogoths and Visigoths--Nations forming the Gothic Confederacy--Royal
family of the Amals--Gothic invasion in the Second Century--Hermanic the
Ostrogoth--Inroad of the Huns--Defeat of the Ostrogoths--Defeat of the
Visigoths--The Visigoths within the Empire--Battle of Adrianople--Alaric
in Rome.
CHAPTER II.
THE MIGHT OF ATTILA
The Ostrogoths under the Huns--The three royal brothers--Attila, king of
the Huns--He menaces the Eastern Empire--He strikes at Gaul--Battle of
the Catalaunian plains--Invasion of Italy--Destruction of Aquileia--Death
of Attila and disruption of his Empire--Settlement of the Ostrogoths in
Pannonia.
CHAPTER III.
THEODORIC'S BOYHOOD
Inroad of the Huns--Their defeat by Walamir--Birth of Theodoric--War
with the Eastern Empire--Theodoric a hostage--Description of
Constantinople--Its commerce and its monuments.
CHAPTER IV.
THE SOUTHWARD MIGRATION
Struggles with the Swabians, Sarmatians, Scyri, and Huns--Death of
Walamir--Theudemir becomes king--Theodoric defeats Babai--The Teutonic
custom of the Comitatus--An Ostrogothic Folc-mote--Theudemir invades the
Eastern Empire--Macedonian settlement of the Ostrogoths.
CHAPTER V.
STORM AND STRESS
Death of Theudemir, and accession of Theodoric--Leo the Butcher--The
Emperor Zeno--The march of Theodoric against the son of Triarius--His
invasion of Macedonia--Defeat of his rear-guard--His compact with the
Emperor.
CHAPTER VI.
ITALY UNDER ODOVACAR
Condition of Italy--End of the line of Theodosius--Ricimer the
Patrician--Struggles with the Vandals--Orestes the Patrician makes his
son Emperor, who is called Augustulus--The fall of the Western Empire
and elevation of Odovacar--Embassies to Constantinople.
CHAPTER VII.
THE CONQUEST OF ITALY
Odovacar invades Dalmatia--Conducts a successful campaign against the
Rugians--Theodoric accepts from Zeno the commission to overthrow
Odovacar--He invades Italy, overthrowing the Gepidae, who attempt to bar
his passage--Battles of the Isonzo and Verona--Odovacar takes refuge in
Ravenna--The treachery of Tufa--Gundobad, king of the Burgundians, comes
to Italy to oppose Theodoric, while Alaric II, king of the Visigoths,
comes as his ally--The battle of the Adda, and further defeat of
Odovacar--Surrender of Ravenna--Assassination of Odovacar.
CHAPTER VIII.
CIVILITAS
Transformation in the character of Theodoric--His title--Embassies to
Zeno and Anastasius--Theodoric's care for the rebuilding of cities and
repair of aqueducts--Encouragement of commerce and manufactures--Revival
of agriculture--Anecdotes of Theodoric.
CHAPTER IX.
ROMAN OFFICIALS--CASSIODORUS
The government of Italy still carried on according to Roman
precedents--Classification of the officials--The Consulship and the
Senate--Cassiodorus, his character and his work--His history of the
Goths--His letters and state papers.
CHAPTER X.
THE ARIAN LEAGUE 175
Political bearings of the Arianism of the German invaders of the
Empire--Vandals, Suevi, Visigoths, Burgundians--Uprise of the power of
Clovis--His conversion to Christianity--His wars with Gundobad, king of
the Burgundians--With Alaric II, king of the Visigoths--Downfall of the
monarchy of Toulouse--Usurpation of Gesalic--Theodoric governs Spain as
guardian of his grandson Amalaric.
CHAPTER XI.
ANASTASIUS
Anastasius, the Eastern Emperor--His character--His disputes with his
subjects--Theodoric and the king of the Gepidae--War of Sirmium and its
consequences--Raid on the coast of Italy--Reconciliation between the
courts of Ravenna and Constantinople--Anastasius confers on Clovis the
title of Consul--Clovis removes many of his rivals--Death of
Clovis--Death of Anastasius.
CHAPTER XII.
ROME AND RAVENNA
Theodoric's visit to Rome--Disputed Papal election--Theodoric's speech
at the Golden Palm--The monk Fulgentius--Bread distributions--Races in
the Circus--Conspiracy of Odoin--Return to Ravenna--Marriage festivities
of Amalaberga--Description of Ravenna--Mosaics in the churches--S.
Apollinare Dentro--Processions of virgins and martyrs--Arian
baptistery--So-called palace of Theodoric--Vanished statues.
CHAPTER XIII.
BOETHIUS
Clouds in the horizon--Anxiety as to the succession--Death of Eutharic,
son-in-law of Theodoric--His son Athalaric proclaimed as Theodoric's
heir--Pope and Emperor reconciled--Anti-Jewish riot at Ravenna--Strained
relations of Theodoric and his Catholic subjects--- Leaders of the Roman
party--Boethius and Symmachus--Break-down of the Arian leagues--Cyprian
accuses Albinus of treason--Boethius, interposing, is included in the
charge--His trial, condemnation and death--The "Consolation of
Philosophy".
CHAPTER XIV.
THEODORIC'S TOMB
Embassy of Pope John to Constantinople--His imprisonment and
death--Execution of Symmachus--Opportune death of Theodoric--Various
stories respecting it--His mausoleum--- Ultimate fate of his remains.
CHAPTER XV.
AMALASUENTHA
Accession of the Emperor Justinian--His place in history--Overthrow of
the Vandal kingdom in Africa by Belisarius--Battles of Ad Decimum and
Tricamaron--Belisarius' triumph--Fall of the Burgundian kingdom--Death
of Amalaric king of Spain--Amalasuentha's troubles with her subjects as
to her son's education--Secret negotiations with Justinian--Death of
Athalaric--Theodahad made partner in the throne--Murder of
Amalasuentha--Justinian declares war.
CHAPTER XVI.
BELISARIUS
Justinian begins his great Gothic war--Dalmatia recovered for the
Empire--Belisarius lands in Sicily--Siege of Palermo--The south of Italy
overrun--Naples taken by a stratagem--Theodahad deposed by the
Goths--Witigis elected king--The Goths evacuate Rome--Belisarius enters
it--The long siege of Rome by the Goths who fail to take it--Belisarius
marches northward and captures Ravenna.
CHAPTER XVII.
TOTILA
Misgovernment of Italy by Justinian's officers--The Gothic cause
revives--Accession of Ildibad--Of Eraric--Of Totila--Totila's character
and policy--His victorious progress--Belisarius sent again to Italy to
oppose him--Siege and capture of Rome by the Goths--The fortifications
of the City dismantled--Belisarius reoccupies it and Totila besieges it
in vain--General success of the Gothic arms--Belisarius returns to
Constantinople--His later fortunes--Never reduced to beggary.
CHAPTER XVIII.
NARSES
Totila again takes Rome--High-water mark of the success of the Gothic
arms--Narses, the Emperor's chamberlain, appointed to command another
expedition for the recovery of Italy--His character--His semi-barbarous
army--Enters Italy--Battle of the Apennines--Totila slain--End of the
Gothic dominion in Italy.
CHAPTER XIX.
THE THEODORIC OF SAGA 370
The fame of Theodoric attested by the Saga dealing with his name,
utterly devoid as they are of historic truth--The Wilkina Saga--Story of
Theodoric's ancestors--His own boyhood--His companions, Master
Hildebrand, Heime, and Witig--Death of his father and his succession to
the throne--Herbart wooes King Arthur's daughter, first for Theodoric
and then for himself--Hermanric, his uncle, attacks Theodoric--Flight
and exile at the Court of Attila--Attempt to return--Attila's sons slain
in battle--The tragedy of the Nibelungs--Theodoric returns to his
kingdom--His mysterious end.
INDEX
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
ILLUSTRATIONS.
STATUE OF THEODORIC IN THE CHURCH OF THE FRANCISCANS AT INNSBRUCK--TOMB
OF MAXIMILIAN _Frontispiece._
[1]MAP OF EUROPE A.D. 493
THE BURNT COLUMN, CONSTANTINOPLE
OBELISK OF THEODOSIUS IN THE HIPPODROME AT CONSTANTINOPLE
PEDESTAL OF THE OBELISK OF THEODOSIUS
[1]MAP OF THRACIA, DACIA, AND MACEDONIA IN THE 5TH CENTURY
GOLDEN SOLIDUS, LEO II., ZENO
HALF-SILIQUA OF SILVER, ODOVACAR
[1]MAP OF ITALY UNDER THE OSTROGOTHS
THE ARENA OF VERONA, PRESENT CONDITION
HALF-SILIQUA OF THEODORIC (SILVER), BEARING THE HEAD OF ANASTASIUS
[2] A PAGE OF THE GOTHIC GOSPELS (CODEX ARGENTEUS), MARK VII., 3-7
[1] MAP OF GAUL A.D. 500-523
COIN OF THE GOTHIC KINGDOM IN ITALY
COPPER COIN OF ANASTASIUS (FORTY NUMMI)
PINE FOREST, RAVENNA
INTERIOR OF BASILICA, IN RAVENNA
MOSAIC IN THE CHURCH OF ST. APOLLINARE NUOVO AT RAVENNA, SHOWING THE
PORT OF CLASSIS
PROCESSION OF MARTYRS, MOSAIC FROM ST. APOLLINARE NUOVO IN RAVENNA
PALACE OF THEODORIC, SIDE VIEW
COIN OF THE GOTHIC KINGDOM IN ITALY
VIEW OF MODERN CONSTANTINOPLE
COPPER PIECE OF ATHALARIC, TEN NUMMI (HEAD OF JUSTINIAN?)
[3]THE TOMB OF THEODORIC, RAVENNA
CUIRASS OF THEODORIC (?) IN THE MUSEUM AT RAVENNA
[3]JUSTINIAN AND HIS NOBLES, FROM THE MOSAICS AT RAVENNA
PIECE OF FORTY NUMMI OF THEODAHAD
COPPER SOLIDUS, JUSTIN I. AND JUSTINIAN
COIN OF BADUILA (TOTILA)
COIN OF TEIAS, SUCCESSOR OF TOTILA
VERONA, FROM PONTE VECCHIO, SITE OF PALACE OF THEODORIC IN THE DISTANCE
COIN OF WITIGIS, WITH HEAD OF ANASTASIUS
[Footnote 1: Based upon map from Hodgkin's _Italy and Her Invaders._]
[Footnote 2: Bradley's _Story of the Goths._]
[Footnote 3: Bradley's Story of the Goths.]
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
THEODORIC THE GOTH.
INTRODUCTION.
[Illustration]
Theodoric the Ostrogoth is one of those men who did great deeds and
filled a large space in the eyes of their contemporaries, but who, not
through their own fault, but from the fact that the stage of the world
was not yet ready for their appearance, have failed to occupy the very
first rank among the founders of empires and the moulders of the
fortunes of the human race.
He was born into the world at the time when the Roman Empire in the West
was staggering blindly to ruin, under the crushing blows inflicted upon
it by two generations of barbarian conquerors. That Empire had been for
more than six centuries indisputably the strongest power in Europe, and
had gathered into its bosom all that was best in the civilisation of the
nations that were settled round the Mediterranean Sea. Rome had given
her laws to all these peoples, had, at any rate in the West, made their
roads, fostered the growth of their cities, taught them her language,
administered justice, kept back the barbarians of the frontier, and for
great spaces of time preserved "the Roman peace" throughout their
habitations. Doubtless there was another side to this picture: heavy
taxation, corrupt judges, national aspirations repressed, free peasants
sinking down into hopeless bondage. Still it cannot be denied that
during a considerable part of its existence the Roman Empire brought, at
least to the western half of Europe, material prosperity and enjoyment
of life which it had not known before, and which it often looked back to
with vain regrets when the great Empire had fallen into ruins. But now,
in the middle of the fifth century, when Theodoric was born amid the
rude splendour of an Ostrogothic palace, the unquestioned ascendancy of
Rome over the nations of Europe was a thing of the past. There were
still two men, one at the Old Rome by the Tiber, and the other at the
New Rome by the Bosphorus, who called themselves August, Pious, and
Happy, who wore the diadem and the purple shoes of Diocletian, and
professed to be joint lords of the universe. Before the Eastern Augustus
and his successors there did in truth lie a long future of dominion, and
once or twice they were to recover no inconsiderable portion of the
broad lands which had formerly been the heritage of the Roman people.
But the Roman Empire at Rome was stricken with an incurable malady. The
three sieges and the final sack of Rome by Alaric (410) revealed to the
world that she was no longer "Roma Invicta", and from that time forward
every chief of Teutonic or Sclavonic barbarians who wandered with his
tribe over the wasted plains between the Danube and the Adriatic, might
cherish the secret hope that he, too, would one day be drawn in triumph
up the Capitolian Hill, through the cowed ranks of the slavish citizens
of Rome, and that he might be lodged on the Palatine in one of the
sumptuous palaces which had been built long ago for "the lords of the
world".
Thus there was everywhere unrest and, as it were, a prolonged moral
earthquake. The old order of things was destroyed, and none could
forecast the shape of the new order of things that would succeed to it.
Something similar has been the state of Europe ever since the great
French Revolution; only that her barbarians threaten her now from
within, not from without. The social state which had been in existence
for centuries, and which had come to be accepted as if it were one of
the great ordinances of nature, is either menaced or is actually broken
up, and how the new democracy will rearrange itself in the seats of the
old civilisation the wisest statesman cannot foretell.
But to any "shepherd of his people", barbarian or Roman, who looked with
foreseeing eye and understanding heart over the Europe of the fifth
century, the duty of the hour was manifest. The great fabric of the
Roman Empire must not be allowed to go to pieces in hopeless ruin. If
not under Roman Augusti, under barbarian kings bearing one title or
another, the organisation of the Empire must be preserved. The
barbarians who had entered it, often it must be confessed merely for
plunder, were remaining in it to rule, and they could not rule by their
own unguided instincts. Their institutions, which had answered well
enough for a half-civilised people, leading their simple, primitive life
in the clearings of the forest of Germany, were quite unfitted for the
complicated relations of the urban and social life of the Mediterranean
lands. There is one passage[4] which has been quoted almost to
weariness, but which it seems necessary to quote again, in order to show
how an enlightened barbarian chief looked upon the problem with which he
found himself confronted, as an invader of the Empire. Ataulfus,
brother-in-law and successor of Alaric, the first capturer of Rome, "was
intimate with a certain citizen of Narbonne, a grave, wise, and
religious person who had served with distinction under Theodosius, and
often remarked to him that in the first ardour of his youth he had
longed to obliterate the Roman name and turn all the Roman lands into an
Empire which should be, and should be called, the Empire of the Goths,
so that what used to be commonly known as Romania should now be
'Gothia,' and that he, Ataulfus, should be in the world what Caesar
Augustus had been. But now that he had proved by long experience that
the Goths, on account of their unbridled barbarism, could not be
induced to obey the laws, and yet that, on the other hand, there must be
laws, since without them the Commonwealth would cease to be a
Commonwealth, he had chosen, for his part at any rate, that he would
seek the glory of renewing and increasing the Roman name by the arms of
his Gothic followers, and would be remembered by posterity as the
restorer of Rome, since he could not be its changer".
[Footnote 4: Orosius Histor., vii., 43.]
This conversation will be found to express the thoughts of Theodoric the
Ostrogoth, as well as those of Ataulfus the Visigoth, Theodoric also, in
his hot youth, was the enemy of the Roman name and did his best to
overturn the Roman State. But he, too, saw that a nobler career was open
to him as the preserver of the priceless blessings of Roman
civilisation, and he spent his life in the endeavour to induce the Goths
to copy those laws, without which a Commonwealth ceases to be a
Commonwealth. In this great and noble design he failed, as has been
already said, because the times were not ripe for it, because a
continuation of adverse events, which we should call persistent ill-luck
if we did not believe in an overruling Providence, blighted and blasted
his infant state before it had time to root itself firmly in the soil.
None the less, however, does Theodoric deserve credit for having seen
what was the need of Europe, and pre-eminently of Italy, and for having
done his best to supply that need. The great work in which he failed was
accomplished three centuries later by Charles the Frank, who has won for
himself that place in the first rank of world-moulders which Theodoric
has missed. But we may fairly say that Theodoric's designs were as noble
and as statesmanlike as those of the great Emperor Charles, and that if
they had been crowned with the success which they deserved, three
centuries of needless barbarism and misery would have been spared to
Europe.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER I.
THEODORIC'S ANCESTORS.
Ostrogoths and Visigoths--Nations forming the Gothic Confederacy--Royal
family of the Amals--Gothic invasion in the Second Century--Hermanric
the Ostrogoth--Inroad of the Huns--Defeat of the Ostrogoths--Defeat of
the Visigoths--The Visigoths within the Empire--Battle of
Adrianople--Alaric in Rome.
[Illustration]
Towards the end of the second century of the Christian Era a great
confederacy of Teutonic nations occupied those vast plains in the south
of Russia which are now, and have been for more than a thousand years,
the homes of Sclavonic peoples. These nations were the Ostrogoths, the
Visigoths, and the Gepidae. Approximately we may say that the Ostrogoths
(or East Goths) dwelt from the Don to the Dnieper, the Visigoths (or
West Goths) from the Dnieper to the Pruth, and the Gepidae to the north
of both, in the district which has since been known as Little Russia.
These three nations were, as has been said, Teutons, and they belonged
to that division of the Teutonic race which is called Low-German, man;
that is to say, that they were more nearly allied to the Frisians, the
Dutch, and to our own Saxon forefathers than they were to the ancestors
of the modern Swabian, Bavarian, and Austrian. They worshipped Odin and
Thunnor; they wrote the scanty records of their race in Runic
characters; they were probably chiefly a pastoral folk, but may have
begun to practise agriculture in the rich cornlands of the Ukraine. They
were essentially a monarchic people, following their kings, whom they
believed to be sprung from the seed of gods, loyally to the field, and
shedding their blood with readiness at their command; but their monarchy
was of the early Teutonic type, always more or less limited by the
deliberations of the great armed assembly of the nation, which (in some
tribes at least) was called the Folc-mote or the Folc-thing; and there
were no strict rules of hereditary succession, the crown being elective
but limited in practice to the members of one ruling and
heaven-descended family.
This family, sprung from the seed of gods, but ruling by the popular
will over the Ostrogothic people, was known as the family of the Amals.
It is true that the divine and exclusive prerogatives of the family have
been somewhat magnified by the minstrels who sang in the courts of their
descendants, for there are manifest traces of kings ruling over the
Ostrogothic people, who are not included in the Amal genealogy. Still,
as far as we can peer through the obscurity of the early history of the
people, we may safely say that there was no other family of higher
position than the Amals, and that gradually all that consciousness of
national life and determination to cherish national unity, which among
the Germanic peoples was inseparably connected with the institution of
royalty, centred round the race of the divine Amala.
The following is the pedigree of this royal clan, as given by the
historian of the Goths,[5] and with those epithets which the secretary
of Theodoric[6] attached to the names of some of the ancestors of his
lord. (The names of those who wore the crown are marked in italics.)
Gapt (possibly=Gaut, the eponymous
| hero of the Gothic nation)
Hulmul
|
Augis
|
Amal ("the fortunate")
|
Hisarna (=the man of iron)
|
_OSTROGOTHA_ ("the patient")
|
Hunuil
|
Athal ("the mild")
|________________________________
| |
Achiulf Odwulf
|
______________________________|________________________________
| | | |
Ansila Ediulf Vultwulf _Hermanric_
| |
Walaravans _Hunimund_
| ("the beautiful")
| |
Winithar_ ("the just") _Thorismund_
| ("the chaste")
_Wideric_
|
Wandalar
__________________________|__________________________
| | |
_Walamir_ _Theudemir_ _Widemir_
("the faithful") ("the affectionate")
|
THEODORIC.
[Footnote 5: Jordanes.]
[Footnote 6: Cassiodorus.]
These fifteen generations, which should carry back the Amal ancestry
four hundred and fifty years, or almost precisely to the Christian Era,
seem to have marked the utmost limit to which the memory of the Gothic
heralds, aided by the songs of the Gothic minstrels, could reach. The
forms of many of the names, the initial "Wala" and "Theude", the
terminal "wulf", "mir", and "mund" will be at once recognised as purely
Teutonic, recalling many similar names in the royal lines of the Franks,
the Visigoths and the Vandals, and the West Saxons.
In the great, loosely knit confederacy which has been described as
filling the regions of Southern Russia in the third and fourth centuries
of our Era, the predominant power seems to have been held by the
Ostrogothic nation. In the third century, when a succession of weak
ephemeral emperors ruled and all but ruined the Roman State, the Goths
swarmed forth in their myriads, both by sea and land, to ravage the
coast of the Euxine and the AEgean, to cross the passes of the Balkans,
to make their desolating presence felt at Ephesus and at Athens. Two
great Emperors of Illyrian origin, Claudius and Aurelian, succeeded, at
a fearful cost of life, in repelling the invasion and driving back the
human torrent. But it was impossible to recover from the barbarians
Trajan's province of Dacia, which they had overrun, and the Emperors
wisely compromised the dispute by abandoning to the Goths and their
allies all the territory north of the Danube. This abandoned province
was chiefly occupied by the Visigoths, the Western members of the
confederacy, who for the century from 275 to 375 were the neighbours,
generally the allies, by fitful impulses the enemies, of Rome. With
Constantine the Great especially the Visigoths came powerfully in
contact, first as invaders and then as allies (_foederati_) bound to
furnish a certain number of auxiliaries to serve under the eagles of the
Empire.
Meanwhile the Ostrogoths, with their faces turned for the time northward
instead of southward, were battling daily with the nations of Finnish or
Sclavonic stock that dwelt by the upper waters of the Dnieper, the Don,
and the Volga, and were extending their dominion over the greater part
of what we now call Russia-in-Europe. The lord of this wide but most
loosely compacted kingdom, in the middle of the fourth century, was a
certain Hermanric, whom his flatterers, with some slight knowledge of
the names held in highest repute among their Southern neighbours,
likened to Alexander the Great for the magnitude of his conquests.
However shadowy some of these conquests may appear in the light of
modern criticism, there can be little doubt that the Visigoths owned his
over-lordship, and that when Constantius and Julian were reigning in
Constantinople, the greatest name over a wide extent of territory north
of the Black Sea was that of Hermanric the Ostrogoth.
When this warrior was in extreme old age, a terrible disaster befell his
nation and himself. It was probably about the year 374 that a horde of
Asiatic savages made their appearance in the south-eastern corner of his
dominions, having, so it is said, crossed the Sea of Azof in its
shallowest part by a ford. These men rode upon little ponies of great
speed and endurance, each of which seemed to be incorporated with its
rider, so perfect was the understanding between the horseman, who spent
his days and nights in the saddle, and the steed which he bestrode.
Little black restless eyes gleamed beneath their low foreheads and
matted hair; no beard or whisker adorned their uncouth yellow faces; the
Turanian type in its ugliest form was displayed by these Mongolian sons
of the wilderness. They bore a name destined to be of disastrous and yet
also indirectly of most beneficent import in the history of the world;
for these are the true shatterers of the Roman Empire. They were the
terrible Huns.
Before the impact of this new and strange enemy the Empire of
Hermanric--an Empire which rested probably rather on the reputation of
warlike prowess than on any great inherent strength, military or
political--went down with a terrible crash. Dissimilar as are the times
and the circumstances, we are reminded of the collapse of the military
systems of Austria and Prussia under the onset of the ragged Jacobins of
France, shivering and shoeless, but full of demonic energy, when we read
of the humiliating discomfiture of this stately Ostrogothic
monarchy--doubtless possessing an ordered hierarchy of nobles, free
warriors, and slaves--by the squalid, hard-faring and, so to say,
democratic savages from Asia.
The death of Hermanric, which was evidently due to the Hunnish victory,
is assigned by the Gothic historian to a cause less humiliating to the
national vanity. The king of the Rosomones, "a perfidious nation", had
taken the opportunity of the appearance of the savage invaders to
renounce his allegiance, perhaps to desert his master treacherously on
the field of battle. The enraged Hermanric, unable to vent his fury on
the king himself, caused his wife, Swanhilda, to be torn asunder by wild
horses to whom she was tied by the hands and feet. Her brothers, Sarus
and Ammius, avenged her cruel death by a spear-thrust, which wounded the
aged monarch, but did not kill him outright. Then came the crisis of the
invasion of the Huns under their King Balamber. The Visigoths, who had
some cause of complaint against Hermanric, left him to fight his battle
without their aid; and the old king, in sore pain with his wound and
deeply mortified by the incursion of the Huns, breathed out his life in
the one hundred and tenth year of his age. All of which is probably a
judicious veiling of the fact,[7] that the great Hermanric was defeated
by the Hunnish invaders, and in his despair laid violent hands on
himself.
[Footnote 7: Mentioned by Ammianus Marcellinus.]
The huge and savage horde rolled on over the wide plains of Russia. The
Ostrogothic resistance was at an end; and soon the invaders were on the
banks of the Dniester threatening the kindred nation of the Visigoths.
Athanaric, "Judge" (as he was called) of the Visigoths, a brave, old
soldier, but not a very skilful general, was soon out-manoeuvred by these
wild nomads from the desert, who crossed the rivers by unexpected fords,
and by rapid night-marches turned the flank of his most carefully
chosen positions. The line of the Dniester was abandoned; the line of
the Pruth was lost. It was plain that the Visigoths, like their Eastern
brethren, if they remained in the land, must bow their heads beneath the
Hunnish yoke. To avoid so degrading a necessity, and if they must lose
their independence, to lose it to the stately Emperors of Rome rather
than to the chief of a filthy Tartar horde, the great majority of the
Visigothic nation flocked southward through the region which is now
called Wallachia, and, standing on the northern shore of the Danube,
prayed for admission within the province of Moesia and the Empire of
Rome. In 376 an evil hour for himself Valens, the then reigning Emperor
of the East, granted this petition and received into his dominions the
Visigothic fugitives, a great and warlike nation, without taking any
proper precautions, on the one hand, that they should be disarmed, on
the other, that they should be supplied with food for their present
necessities and enabled for the future to become peaceful cultivators of
the soil. The inevitable result followed. Before many months had elapsed
the Visigoths were in arms against the Empire, and under the leadership
of their hereditary chiefs were wandering up and down through the
provinces of Moesia and Thrace, wresting from the terror-stricken
provincials not only the food which the parsimony of Valens had failed
to supply them with, but the treasures which centuries of peace had
stored up in villa and unwalled town. In 378 they achieved a brilliant,
and perhaps unexpected, triumph, defeating a large army commanded by
the Roman Emperor Valens in person, in a pitched battle near Adrianople.
Valens himself perished on the field of battle, and his unburied corpse
disappeared among the embers of a Thracian hut which had been set fire
to by the barbarians. That fatal day (August 9, 378) was admitted to be
more disastrous for Rome than any which had befallen her since the
terrible defeat of Cannae, and from it we may fitly date the beginning of
that long process of dissolution, lasting, in a certain sense, more than
a thousand years, which we call the Fall of the Roman Empire.
In this long tragedy the part of chief actor fell, during the first act,
to the _Visigothic nation_. With their doings we have here no special
concern. It is enough to say that for one generation they remained in
the lands south of the Danube, first warring against Rome, then, by the
wise policy of their conqueror, Theodosius, incorporated in her armies
under the title of _foederati_ and serving her in the main with zeal and
fidelity. In 395[8] a Visigothic chief, Alaric by name, of the
god-descended seed of Balthae, was raised upon the shield by the warriors
of his tribe and hailed as their king. His elevation seems to have been
understood as a defiance to the Empire and a re-assertion of the old
national freedom which had prevailed on the other side of the Danube. At
any rate the rest of his life was spent either in hostility to the
Empire or in a pretence of friendship almost more menacing than
hostility. He began by invading Greece and penetrated far south into
the Peloponnesus. He then took up a position in the province of
Illyricum--probably in the countries now known as Bosnia and
Servia--from which he could threaten the Eastern or Western Empire at
pleasure. Finally, with the beginning of the fifth century after Christ,
he descended into Italy, and though at first successful only in ravage,
in the second invasion he penetrated to the very heart of the Empire.
His three sieges of Rome, ending in the awful event of the capture and
sack of the Eternal City in 410, are events in the history of the world
with which every student is familiar. Only it may be remarked that the
word awful, which is here used designedly, is not meant to imply that
the loss of life was unusually large or the cruelty of the captors
outrageous; in both respects Alaric and his Goths would compare
favourably with some generals and some armies making much higher
pretensions to civilisation. Nor is it meant that the destruction of the
public buildings of the city was extensive. There can be little doubt
that Paris, on the day after the suppression of the "Commune" in 1871,
presented a far greater appearance of desolation and ruin than Rome in
410, when she lay trembling in the hand of Alaric. But the bare fact
that Rome herself, the Roma AEterna, the Roma Invicta of a thousand coins
of a hundred Emperors,--Rome, whose name for centuries on the shores of
the Mediterranean had been synonymous with worldwide dominion,--should
herself be taken, sacked, dishonoured by the presence of a flaxen-haired
barbarian conqueror from the North, was one of those events apparently
so contrary to the very course of Nature itself, that the nations which
heard the tidings, many of them old and bitter enemies of Rome, now her
subjects and her friends, held their breath with awe at the terrible
recital.
[Footnote 8: Probably. Some historians put the date in 382, others in
400.]
Alaric died shortly after his sack of Rome, and after a few years of
aimless fighting his nation quitted Italy, disappearing over the
north-western Alpine boundary to win for themselves new settlements by
the banks of the Garonne and the Ebro. Their leader was that Ataulfus
whose truly statesmanlike reflections on the unwisdom of destroying the
Roman Empire and the necessity of incorporating the barbarians with its
polity have been already quoted. There, in the south-western corner of
Gaul and the northern regions of Spain, we must for the present leave
the Western branch of the great Gothic nationality, while our narrative
returns to its Eastern representatives.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER II.
THE MIGHT OF ATTILA.
The Ostrogoths under the Huns--The three royal brothers--Attila king of
the Huns--He menaces the Eastern Empire--He strikes at Gaul--Battle of
the Catalaunian plains--Invasion of Italy--Destruction of
Aquileia--Death of Attila and disruption of his Empire--Settlement of
the Ostrogoths in Pannonia.
For eighty years the power of the Ostrogoths suffered eclipse under the
shadow of Hunnish barbarism. As to this period we have little historical
information that is of any value. We hear of resistance to the Hunnish
supremacy vainly attempted and sullenly abandoned. The son and the
grandson of Hermanric figure as the shadowy heroes of this vain
resistance. After the death of the latter (King Thorismund) a strange
story is told us of the nation mourning his decease for forty years,
during all which time they refused to elect any other king to replace
him whom they had lost. There can be little doubt that this legend veils
the prosaic fact that the nation, depressed and dispirited under the
yoke of the conquering Huns, had not energy or patriotism enough to
choose a king; since almost invariably among the Teutons of that age,
kingship and national unity flourished or faded together.
At length, towards the middle of the fifth century after Christ, the
darkness is partially dispelled, and we find the Ostrogothic nation
owning the sovereignty of three brothers sprung from the Amal race, but
not direct descendants of Hermanric, whose names are Walamir, Theudemir,
and Widemir. "Beautiful it was", says the Gothic historian, "to behold
the mutual affection of these three brothers, when the admirable
Theudemir served like a common soldier under the orders of Walamir; when
Walamir adorned him with the crown at the same time that he conveyed to
him his orders; when Widemir gladly rendered his services to both of his
brothers".[9] Theudemir, the second in this royal brotherhood, was the
father of our hero, Theodoric.
[Footnote 9: This is a partly paraphrastic and conjectural translation
of a very obscure sentence of Jordanes.]
The three Ostrogothic brethren, kings towards their own countrymen, were
subjects--almost, we might say, servants--of the wide-ruling king of the
Huns, who was now no longer one of those forgotten chiefs by whom the
conquering tribe had been first led into Europe, but ATTILA, a name of
fear to his contemporaries and long remembered in the Roman world. He,
with his brother Bleda, mounted the barbarian throne in the year 433,
and after twelve years the death of Bleda (who was perhaps murdered by
order of his brother) left Attila sole wielder of the forces which made
him the terror of the world. He dwelt in rude magnificence in a village
not far from the Danube, and his own special dominions seem to have
pretty nearly corresponded with the modern kingdom of Hungary. But he
held in leash a vast confederacy of nations--Teutonic, Sclavonic, and
what we now call Turanian,--whose territories stretched from the Rhine
to the Caucasus, and he is said to have made "the isles of the Ocean",
which expression probably denotes the islands and peninsulas of
Scandinavia, subject to his sway. Neither, however, over the Ostrogoths
nor over any of the other subject nations included in this vast dominion
are we to think of Attila's rule as an organised, all-permeating,
assimilating influence, such as was the rule of a Roman Emperor. It was
rather the influence of one great robber-chief over his freebooting
companions. The kings of the Ostrogoths and Gepidae came at certain times
to share the revelries of their lord in his great log-palace on the
Danubian plain; they received his orders to put their subjects in array
when he would ride forth to war, and woe was unto them if they failed to
stand by his side on the day of battle; but these things being done,
they probably ruled their own peoples with little interference from
their over-lord. The Teutonic members of the confederacy, notably the
Ostrogoths and the kindred tribe of Gepidae seem to have exercised upon
the court and the councils of Attila an influence not unlike that
wielded by German statesmen at the court of Russia during the last
century. The Huns, during their eighty years of contact with Europe, had
lost a little of that utter savageness which they brought with them from
the Tartar deserts. If they were not yet in any sense civilised, they
could in some degree appreciate the higher civilisation of their
Teutonic subjects. A Pagan himself, with scarcely any religion except
some rude cult of the sword of the war-god, Attila seems never to have
interfered in the slightest degree with the religious practices of the
Gepidae or the Ostrogoths, the large majority of whom were by this time
Christians, holding the Arian form of faith. And not only did he not
discourage the finer civilisation which he saw prevailing among these
German subjects of his, but he seems to have had statesmanship enough to
value and respect a culture which he did not share, and especially to
have prized the temperate wisdom of their chiefs, when they helped him
to array his great host of barbarians for war against the Empire.
From his position in Central Europe, Attila, like Alaric before him, was
able to threaten either the Eastern or the Western Empire at pleasure.
For almost ten years (440-450) he seemed to be bent on picking a quarrel
with Theodosius II., the feeble and unwarlike prince who reigned at
Constantinople. He laid waste the provinces south of the Danube with his
desolating raids; he worried the Imperial Court with incessant
embassies, each more exacting and greedy than the last (for the favour
of the rude Hunnish envoy had to be purchased by large gifts from the
Imperial Treasury); he himself insisted on the payment of yearly
_stipendia_ by the Emperor; he constantly demanded that these payments
should be doubled; he openly stated that they were nothing else than
tribute, and that the Roman Augustus who paid them was his slave.
These practices were continued until, in the year 450 the gentle
Theodosius died. He was succeeded by his sister Pulcheria and her
husband Marcian, who soon gave a manlier tone to the counsels of the
Eastern Empire. Attila marked the change and turned his harassing
attentions to the Western State, with which he had always a sufficient
number of pretexts for war ready for use. In fact he had made up his
mind for war, and no concessions, however humiliating, on the part of
Valentinian III., the then Emperor of the West, would have availed to
stay his progress. Not Italy however, to some extent protected by the
barrier of the Alps, but the rich cities and comparatively unwasted
plains of Gaul attracted the royal freebooter. Having summoned his vast
and heterogeneous army from every quarter of Central and North-eastern
Europe, and surrounded himself by a crowd of subject kings, the captains
of his host, he set forward in the spring of 451 for the lands of the
Rhine. The trees which his soldiers felled in the great Hercynian forest
of Central Germany were fashioned into rude rafts or canoes, on which
they crossed the Rhine; and soon the terrible Hun and his "horde of
many-nationed spoilers" were passing over the regions which we now call
Belgium and Lorraine in a desolating stream. The Huns, not only
barbarians, but heathens, seem in this invasion to have been animated by
an especial hatred to Christianity. Many a fair church of Gallia Belgica
was laid in ashes: many a priest was slain before the altar, whose
sanctity was vain for his protection. The real cruelties thus committed
are wildly exaggerated by the mythical fancy of the Middle Ages, and
upon the slenderest foundations of historical fact arose stately
edifices of fable, like the story of the Cornish Princess Ursula, who
with her eleven thousand virgin companions was fabled to have suffered
death at the hands of the Huns in the city of Cologne.
The barbarian tide was at length arrested by the strong walls of
Orleans, whose stubborn defence saved all that part of Gaul which lies
within the protecting curve of the Loire from the horrors of their
invasion. At midsummer Attila and his host were retiring from the
untaken city, and beginning their retreat towards the Rhine, a retreat
which they were not to accomplish unhindered. The extremity of the
danger from these utterly savage foes had welded together the old Empire
and the new Gothic kingdom, the civilised and the half-civilised power,
in one great confederacy, for the defence of all that was worth saving
in human society. The tidings of the approach of the Gothic king had
hastened the departure of Attila from the environs of Orleans, and,
perhaps about a fortnight later, the allied armies of Romans and Goths
came up with the retreating Huns in "the Catalaunian plains" not far
from the city of Troyes. The general of the Imperial army was Aetius;
the general and king of the Visigoths was Theodoric, a namesake of our
hero. Both were capable and valiant soldiers. On the other side,
conspicuous among the subject kings who formed the staff of Attila, were
the three Ostrogothic brethren, and Ardaric, king of the Gepidae. The
loyalty of Walamir, the firm grasp with which he kept his master's
secrets, and Ardaric's resourcefulness in counsel were especially prized
by Attila. And truly he had need of all their help, for, though it is
difficult to ascertain with any degree of accuracy the numbers actually
engaged (162,000 are said to have fallen on both sides), it is clear
that this was a collision of nations rather than of armies, and that it
required greater skill than any that the rude Hunnish leader possessed,
to win the victory for his enormous host. After "a battle ruthless,
manifold, gigantic, obstinate, such as antiquity never described when
she told of warlike deeds, such as no man who missed the sight of that
marvel might ever hope to have another chance of beholding",[10] night
fell upon the virtually defeated Huns. The Gothic king had lost his
life, but Attila had lost the victory. All night long the Huns kept up a
barbarous dissonance to prevent the enemy from attacking them, but their
king's thoughts were of suicide. He had prepared a huge funeral pyre, on
which, if the enemy next day successfully attacked his camp, he was
determined to slay himself amid the kindled flames, in order that
neither living nor dead the mighty Attila might fall into the hands of
his enemies. These desperate expedients, however, were not required. The
death of Theodoric, the caution of Aetius, some jealousy perhaps between
the Roman and the Goth, some anxiety on the part of the eldest Gothic
prince as to the succession to his father's throne,--all these causes
combined to procure for Attila a safe but closely watched return into
his own land.
[Footnote 10: These are the words of the Gothic historian, Jordanes.]
The battle of the Catalaunian plains (usually but not quite correctly
called the battle of Chalons) was a memorable event in the history of
the Gothic race, of Europe, and of the world. It was a sad necessity
which on this one occasion arrayed the two great branches of the Gothic
people, the Visigoths under Theodoric, and the Ostrogoths under Walamir,
in fratricidal strife against each other. For Europe the alliance
between Roman and Goth, between the grandson of Theodosius, Emperor of
Rome, and the successor of Alaric, the besieger of Rome, was of
priceless value and showed that the great and statesmanlike thought of
Ataulfus was ripening in the minds of those who came after him. For the
world, yes even for us in the nineteenth century, and for the great
undiscovered continents beyond the sea, the repulse of the squalid and
unprogressive Turanian from the seats of the old historic civilisation,
was essential to the preservation of whatever makes human life worth
living. Had Attila conquered on the Catalaunian plains, an endless
succession of Jenghiz Khans and Tamerlanes would probably have swept
over the desolated plains of Europe; Paris and Florence would have been
even as Khiva and Bokhara, and the island of Britain would not have yet
attained to the degree of civilisation reached by the peninsula of
Corea.
In the year after the fruitless invasion of Gaul, Attila crossed the
Julian Alps and entered Italy, intending (452) doubtless to rival the
fame of Alaric by his capture of Rome, an operation which would have
been attended with infinitely greater ruin to
"the seven-hilled city's pride",
than any which she had sustained at the hands of the Visigothic leader.
But the Huns, unskilful in siege work, were long detained before the
walls of Aquileia, that great and flourishing frontier city, hitherto
deemed impregnable, which gathered in the wealth of the Venetian
province, and guarded the north-eastern approaches to Italy. At length
by a sudden assault they made themselves masters of the city, which they
destroyed with utter destruction, putting all the inhabitants to the
sword, and then wrapping in fire and smoke the stately palaces, the
wharves, the mint, the forum, the theatres of the fourth city of Italy.
The terror of this brutal destruction took from the other cities of
Venetia all heart for resistance to the terrible invader. From
Concordia, Altino, Padua, crowds of trembling fugitives walked, waded,
or sailed with their hastily gathered and most precious possessions to
the islands, surrounded by shallow lagoons, which fringed the Adriatic
coast, near the mouths of the Brenta and Adige. There at Torcello,
Burano, Rialto, Malamocco, and their sister islets, they laid the humble
foundations of that which was one day to be the gorgeous and
wide-ruling Republic of Venice.
Attila meanwhile marched on through the valley of the Po ravaging and
plundering, but a little slackening in the work of mere destruction, as
the remembrance of the stubborn defence of Aquileia faded from his
memory. Entering Milan as a conqueror, and seeing there a picture
representing the Emperors of the Romans sitting on golden thrones, and
the Scythian barbarians crouching at their feet, he sought out a
Milanese painter, and bade the trembling artist represent him, Attila,
sitting on the throne, and the two Roman Emperors staggering under sacks
full of gold coin, which they bore upon their shoulders, and pouring out
their precious contents at his feet.
This little incident helps us to understand the next strange act in the
drama of Attila's invasion. To enjoy the luxury of humbling the great
Empire, and of trampling on the pride of her statesmen, seems to have
been the sweetest pleasure of his life. This mere gratification of his
pride, the pride of an upstart barbarian, at the expense of the
inheritors of a mighty name and the representatives of venerable
traditions, was the object which took him into Italy, rather than any
carefully prepared scheme of worldwide conquest. Accordingly when that
august body, the Senate of Rome, sent a consul, a prefect, and more than
all a pope, the majestic and fitly-named Leo, to plead humbly in the
name of the Roman people for peace, and to promise acquiescence at some
future day in the most unreasonable of his demands, Attila granted the
ambassadors an interview by the banks of the Mincio, listened with
haughty tranquillity to their petition, allowed himself to be soothed
and, as it were, magnetised by the words and gestures of the venerable
pontiff, accepted the rich presents which were doubtless laid at his
feet, and turning his face homewards recrossed the Julian Alps, leaving
the Apennines untraversed and Rome unvisited.
Even in the act of granting peace Attila used words which showed that it
would be only a truce, and that (452) if there were any failure to abide
by any one of his conditions, he would return and work yet greater
mischief to Italy than any which she had yet suffered at his hands. But
he had missed the fateful moment, and the delight of standing on the
conquered Palatine, and seeing the smoke ascend from the ruined City of
the World, was never to be his. In the year after his invasion of Italy
he died suddenly at night, apparently the victim of the drunken debauch
with which the polygamous barbarian had celebrated the latest addition
to the numerous company of his wives.
With Attila's death the might of the Hunnish Empire was broken. The
great robber-camp needed the ascendancy of one strong chief-robber to
hold it together, and that ascendancy no one of the multitudinous sons
who emerged from the chambers of his harem was able to exert. Unable to
agree as to the succession of the throne, they talked of dividing the
Hunnish dominions between them, and in the discussions which ensued they
showed too plainly that they looked upon the subject nations as their
slaves, to be partitioned as a large household of such domestics would
be partitioned among the heirs of their dead master. The pride of the
Teutons was touched, and they determined to strike a blow for the
recovery of their lost freedom. Ardaric, king of the Gepidae, so long the
trusty counsellor of Attila, was prime mover in the revolt against his
sons. A battle was fought by the banks of the river Nedao[11] between
the Huns (with those subject allies who still remained faithful to them)
and the revolted nations.
[Footnote 11: Situation unknown, except that it was in Pannonia, that
is, probably in Hungary, somewhere between the Save and the Danube.]
Among these revolted nations there can be but little doubt that the
Ostrogoths held a high place, though the matter is not so clearly stated
as we should have expected, by the Gothic historian, and even on his
showing the glory of the struggle for independence was mainly Ardaric's.
After a terrible battle the Gepidae were victorious, and Ellak, eldest
son of Attila, with, it is said, thirty thousand of his soldiers, lay
dead upon the field. "He had wrought a great slaughter of his enemies,
and so glorious was his end", says Jordanes, "that his father might well
have envied him his manner of dying".
The battle of Nedao, whatever may have been the share of the Ostrogoths
in the actual fighting, certainly brought them freedom. From this time
the great Hunnish Empire was at an end, and there was a general
resettlement of territory among the nations which had been subject to
its yoke. While the Huns themselves, abandoning their former
habitations, moved, for the most part, down the Danube, and became the
humble servants of the Eastern Empire, the Gepidae, perhaps marching
southward occupied the great Hungarian plains on the left bank of the
Danube, which had been the home of Attila and his Huns; and the
Ostrogoths going westwards (perhaps with some dim notion of following
their Visigothic kindred) took up their abode in that which had once
been the Roman province of Pannonia, now doubtless known to be
hopelessly lost to the Empire.
Pannonia, the new home of the Ostrogoths, was the name of a region,
rectangular in shape, about two hundred miles from north to south and
one hundred and sixty miles from east to west, whose northern and
eastern sides were washed by the river Danube, and whose north-eastern
corner was formed by the sudden bend to the south which that river
makes, a little above Buda-Pest. This region includes Vienna and the
eastern part of the Archduchy of Austria, Graetz, and the eastern part of
the Duchy of Styria, but it is chiefly composed of the great
corn-growing plain of Western Hungary, and contains the two considerable
lakes of Balaton and Neusiedler See. Here then the three Ostrogothic
brethren took up their abode, and of this province they made a kind of
rude partition between them, while still treating it as one kingdom, of
which Walamir was the head. The precise details of this division of
territory cannot now be recovered,[12] nor are they of much importance,
as the settlement was of short duration. We can only say that Walamir
and Theudemir occupied the two ends of the territory, and Widemir dwelt
between them. What is most interesting to us is the fact that
Theudemir's territory included Lake Balaton (or Platten See), and that
his palace may very possibly have stood upon the shores of that noble
piece of water, which is forty-seven miles in length and varies from
three to nine miles in width. To the neighbourhood of this lake, in the
absence of more precise information, we may with some probability assign
the birth-place and the childish home of Theodoric.[13]
[Illustration: Graphic element.]
[Footnote 12: Jordanes (Getica) says: "Valamer inter Scarniungam et
Aquam Nigram fluvios, Thiudimer juxta lacum Pelsois, Vidimer inter
utrosque manebat". It seems to be hopeless to determine what rivers are
denoted by "Scarniunga" and "Aqua Nigra".]
[Footnote 13: Of course the location of Theudemir's palace on the actual
shore of Lake Balaton can only be treated as a conjecture, but the
pointed way in which Jordanes, in the passage last quoted, speaks of him
as "_juxta_ lacuna Pelsois", seems to make the conjecture a probable
one. Some geographers have identified Pelso Lacus with the Neusiedler
See, but apparently on insufficient grounds.]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER III.
THEODORIC'S BOYHOOD.
Inroad of the Huns--Their defeat by Walamir--Birth of Theodoric--War
with the Eastern Empire--Theodoric a hostage--Description of
Constantinople--Its commerce and its monuments.
The Ostrogoths had yet one or two battles to fight before they were
quite rid of their old masters. The sons of Attila still talked of them
as deserters and fugitive slaves, and a day came when Walamir found
himself compelled to face a sudden inroad of the Huns. He had few men
with him, and being taken unawares, he had no time to summon his
brethren to his aid. But he held his own bravely: the warriors of his
nation had time to gather round him; and at last, after he had long
wearied the enemy with his defensive tactics, he made a sudden onset,
destroyed the greater part of the Hunnish army, and sent the rest
scattered in hopeless flight far into the deserts of Scythia.[14]
[Footnote 14: Jordanes (cap. iii) says that the fugitive Huns "sought
those parts of Scythia past which flow the streams of the river Dnieper
which the Huns in their own tongue call 'Var' (the river)". If this is
correctly stated it is almost certain that it must describe some battle
which happened _before_ the great Western migration of the Ostrogoths,
which was mentioned in the last chapter, for it would be impossible, if
the Gepidae were in Trans-danubian Hungary and the Ostrogoths in Pannonia
that the Ostrogoths should have driven the Huns into the countries
watered by the Dnieper. I am rather inclined to believe that this
reference of the battle to an earlier period may be the correct
explanation. But Danapri (Dnieper) may be only a blunder of Jordanes,
who is often hopelessly wrong in his geography.]
Walamir at once sent tidings of the victory to his brother Theudemir.
The messenger arrived at an opportune moment, for on that very day
Erelieva, the unwedded wife of Theudemir, had given birth to a
man-child. This infant, born on such an auspicious day and looked upon
as a pledge of happy fortunes for the Ostrogothic nation, was named
Thiuda-reiks (the people-ruler), a name which Latin historians,
influenced perhaps by the analogy of Theodosius, changed into
Theodoricus, and which will here be spoken of under the well-known form
THEODORIC.[15]
[Footnote 15: Jordanes wavers between Theod_e_ricus and Theod_o_ricus.
The Greek historians generally use the form (Greek: Theuderichos).
German scholars seem to prefer Theoderich. As it is useless now to try
to revert to the philologically correct Thiuda-reiks, I use that form of
the name with which I suppose English readers to be most
familiar--namely, Theodoric.]
It will be observed that I have spoken of Erelieva as the unwedded wife
of Theudemir. The Gothic historian calls her his concubine,[16] but this
word of reproach hardly does justice to her position. In many of the
Teutonic nations, as among the Norsemen of a later century, there seems
to have been a certain laxity as to the marriage rite, which was
nevertheless coincident with a high and pure morality. It has been
suggested that the severe conditions imposed by the Church on divorces
may have had something to do with the peculiar marital usages of the
Teutonic and Norse chieftains. Reasons of state might require Theudemir
the Ostrogoth, or William Longsword the Norman, to ally himself some day
with a powerful king's daughter, and therefore he would not go through
the marriage rite with the woman, really and truly his wife, but
generally his inferior in social position, who meanwhile governed his
house and bore him children. If the separation never came, and the
powerful king's daughter never had to be wooed, she who was wife in all
but name, retained her position unquestioned till her death, and her
children succeeded without dispute to the inheritance of their father.
The nearest approach to an illustration which the social usages of
modern Europe afford, is probably furnished by the "morganatic
marriages" of modern German royalties and serenities: and we might say
that Theodoric was the offspring of such an union. Notwithstanding the
want of strict legitimacy in his position, I do not remember any
occasion on which the taunt of bastard birth was thrown in his teeth,
even by the bitterest of his foes.
[Footnote 16: "Ipso siquidem die Theodoricus ejus filius quamvis de
Erelieva concubina, bonae tamen spei natus est" (Jordanes: Getica, 52).]
It would be satisfactory if we could fix with exactness the great
Ostrogoth's birth-year, but though several circumstances point to 454
as a probable date, we are not able to define it with greater
precision.[17]
[Footnote 17: If there be any truth in the suggestion made above, that
the Hunnish attack on Walamir was made before the Ostrogothic migration
into Pannonia, the birth-year must be moved up to 452.]
The next event of which we are informed in the history of the
Ostrogothic nation, a war with the Eastern Empire, was one destined to
exert a most important influence on the life of the kingly child, The
Ostrogoths settling in Pannonia, one of the provinces of the Roman
Empire, were in theory allies and auxiliary soldiers[18] of the Emperor.
Similar arrangements had been made with the Visigoths in Spain, with the
Vandals in that very province of Pannonia, probably with many other
barbarian tribes in many other provinces. There was sometimes more,
sometimes less, actual truth in the theoretical relations thus
established, and it was one which in the nature of things was not likely
long to endure: but for the time, so long as the Imperial treasury was
tolerably full and the barbarian allies tolerably amenable to control,
the arrangement suited both parties. In the case before us the position
of the Ostrogoths in Pannonia was legalised by the alliance, and such
portions of the political machinery of the Empire as might still remain
were thereby placed at their disposal. The Emperor, on the other hand,
was able to boast of a province recovered for the Empire, which was now
guarded by the broadswords of his loyal Ostrogoths against the more
savage nations outside, who were ever trying to enter the charmed
circle of the Roman State. But as the Ostrogothic _foederati_ were his
soldiers, there was evidently a necessity that he must send them pay,
and this pay, which was called wages when the Empire was strong, and
tribute when it was weak, consisted, partly at any rate, of heavy chests
of Imperial _aurei_,[19] sent as _strenae_[20] or New Year's presents,
to the barbarian king and his chief nobles.
[Footnote 18: _Foederati_.]
[Footnote 19: The _solidus aureus_, the chief Imperial coin of this
time, was worth about twelve shillings of our money.]
[Footnote 20: The same word as the French _Etrennes_.]
Now, about the year 461, the Emperor Leo (successor of the brave soldier
Marcian), whether from a special emptiness in the Imperial treasury or
from some other cause, omitted to send the accustomed _strenae_ to the
Ostrogothic brother-kings. Much disturbed at the failure of the _aurei_
to appear, they sent envoys to Constantinople, who returned with tidings
which filled the three palaces of Pannonia with the clamour of angry
men. Not only were the _strenae_ withheld, and likely to be still
withheld, but there was another Goth, a low-born pretender, not of Amal
blood, who was boasting of the title of _foederatus_ of the Empire, and
enjoying the _strenae_ which ought to come only to Amal kings and their
nobles. This man, who was destined to cross the path of our Theodoric
through many weary years, was named like him Theodoric, and was surnamed
Strabo (the squinter) from his devious vision, and son of Triarius, from
his parentage. He was brother-in-law, or nephew, of a certain Aspar, a
successful barbarian, who had mounted high in the Imperial service and
had placed two Emperors on the throne. It was doubtless through his
kinsman's influence that the squinting adventurer had obtained a
position in the court of the Roman Augustus so disproportioned to his
birth, and so outrageous to every loyal Ostrogoth.
When the news of these insults to the lineage of the Amals reached
Pannonia, the three brothers in fury snatched up their arms and laid
waste almost the whole province of Illyricum. Then the Emperor changed
his mind, and desired to renew the old friendship. He sent an embassy
bearing the arrears of the past-due _strenae_, those which were then
again falling due, and a promise that all future _strenae_ should be
punctually paid. Only, as a hostage for the observance of peace he
desired that Theudemir's little son, Theodoric, then just entering his
eighth year, should be sent to Constantinople. The fact that this
request or demand was made by the ostensibly beaten side, may make us
doubt whether the humiliation of the Empire was so complete as the
preceding sentences (translated from the words of the Gothic historian)
would lead us to suppose.
Theudemir was reluctant to part with his first-born son, even to the
great Roman Emperor. But his brother Walamir earnestly besought him not
to interpose any hindrance to the establishment of a firm peace between
the Romans and Goths. He yielded therefore, and the little lad, carried
by the returning ambassadors to Constantinople, soon earned the favour
of the Emperor by his handsome face and his winning ways.[21]
[Footnote 21: An expansion of the words of Jordanes, "et quia puerulus
elegans erat meruit gratiam imperialem habere".]
Thus was the young Ostrogoth brought from his home in Pannonia, by the
banks of lonely Lake Balaton, to the New Rome, the busy and stately city
by the Bosphorus, the city which was now, more truly than her worn and
faded mother by the Tiber, the "Lady of Kingdoms" the "Mistress of the
World". Of the Constantinople which the boyish eyes of Theodoric beheld,
scarcely a vestige now remains for the traveller to gaze upon. Let us
try, therefore, to find a contemporary description. These are the words
in which the visit of the Gothic chief Athanaric to that city about
eighty years previously is described by Jordanes:
"Entering the royal city, and marvelling thereat, 'Lo! now I behold,'
said he, 'what I often heard of without believing, the glory of so great
a city.' Then turning his eyes this way and that, beholding the
situation of the city and the concourse of ships, now he marvels at the
long perspective of lofty walls, then he sees the multitudes of various
nations like the wave gushing forth from one fountain which has been fed
by divers springs, then he beholds the marshalled ranks of the soldiery.
'A God,' said he, 'without doubt a God upon Earth is the Emperor of this
realm, and whoso lifts his hand against him, that man's blood be on his
own head."
Still can we behold "the situation of the city", that unrivalled
situation which no map can adequately explain, but which the traveller
gazes upon from the deck of his vessel as he rounds Seraglio Point, and
the sight of which seems to bind together in one, two continents of
space and twenty-five centuries of time. On his right hand Asia with
her camels, on his left Europe with her railroads. Behind him are the
Sea of Marmora and the Dardanelles, with their memories of Lysander and
AEgospotami, of Hero, Leander, and Byron, with the throne of Xerxes and
the tomb of Achilles, and farther back still the island-studded
Archipelago, the true cradle of the Greek nation. Immediately in front
of him is the Golden Horn, now bridged and with populous cities on both
its banks, but the farther shore of which, where Pera and Galata now
stand, was probably covered with fields and gardens when Theodoric
beheld it. There also in front of him, but a little to the right, comes
rushing down the impetuous Bosphorus, that river which is also an arm of
the sea. Lined now with the marble palaces of bankrupt Sultans, it was
once a lonely and desolate strait, on whose farther shore the hapless
Io, transformed into a heifer, sought a refuge from her heaven-sent
tormentor. Up through its difficult windings pressed the adventurous
mariners of Miletus in those early voyages which opened up the Euxine to
the Greeks, as the voyage of Columbus opened up the Atlantic to the
Spaniards. It is impossible now to survey the beautiful panorama without
thinking of that great inland sea which, as we all know, begins but a
few miles to the north of the place where we are standing, and whose
cloudy shores are perhaps concealing in their recesses the future lords
of Constantinople. We look towards that point of the compass, and think
of Sebastopol. The great lords of Theudemir's court, who brought the
young Theodoric to his new patron, may have looked northwards too,
remembering the sagas about the mighty Hermanric, who dwelt where now
the Russians dwell, and the fateful march of the terrible Huns across
the shallows of the Sea of Azof.
The great physical features of the scene are of course unchanged, but
almost everything else, how changed by four centuries and a half of
Ottoman domination! The first view of Stamboul, with its mosques, its
minarets, its latticed houses, its stream of manifold life both
civilised and barbarous, flowing through the streets, is delightful to
the traveller; but if he be more of an archaeologist than an artist, and
seeks to reproduce before his mind's eye something of the Constantinople
of the Caesars rather than the Stamboul of the Sultans, he will
experience a bitter disappointment in finding how little of the former
is left.
He may still see indeed the land-ward walls of the city, and a most
interesting historical relic they are.[22] They stretch for about four
miles, from the Sea of Marmora to the Golden Horn. It is still,
comparatively speaking, all city inside of them, all country on the
outside. There is a double line of walls with towers at frequent
intervals, some square, some octagonal, and deep fosses running along
beside the walls, now in spring often bright green with growing corn.
These walls and towers, seen stretching up hill and down dale, are a
very notable feature in the landscape, and ruinous and dismantled as
they are after fourteen centuries of siege, of earthquake, and of
neglect, they still help us vividly to imagine what they must have
looked like when the young Theodoric beheld them little more than ten
years after their erection.[23]
[Footnote 22: For the fact that these walls are still visible we have to
thank the good offices of a recent British ambassador, I believe Lord
Stratford de Redcliffe. The Sultana Valide (Sultan's mother) had
obtained from her son an order to pull down the walls, and sell the
materials for the benefit of her privy purse. The ambassador, however,
protested against this act of Ottomanism (rather than Vandalism), and
the walls were saved.]
[Footnote 23: The walls of Constantinople were first built in 412, but
having been much injured by an earthquake were rebuilt (we are told in
the short space of sixty days) by the Prefect of the City, Constantine,
at the command of Theodosius II. This rebuilding, which was partly due
to the terror caused by Attila, took place in the year 447.]
Of the gates, some six or seven in number, two are especially
interesting to us. The first is the Tep-Kapou (Cannon Gate), or Porta
Sancti Romani. This was the weakest part of the fortifications of
Constantinople, the "heel of Achilles", as it has been well called,[24]
and here the last Roman Emperor of the East, Constantine Palaeologus,
died bravely in the breach for the cause of Christianity and
civilisation, The other gate is the Porta Aurea, a fine triple gateway,
the centre arch of which rests on two Corinthian pilasters. Through this
gateway--the nearest representative of the Capitoline Hill at Rome--the
Eastern Emperors rode in triumphant procession when a new Augustus had
to be proclaimed, or when an enemy of the Republic had been defeated. It
is possible that Theodoric may have seen Anthemius, the Emperor whom
Constantinople gave to Rome, ride forth through this gate (467) to take
possession of the Western throne: possible too that the great but
unsuccessful expedition planned by the joint forces of the East and West
against the Vandals of Africa may have had its ignominious failure
hidden from the people for a time by a triumphal procession through the
Golden Gate in the following year (468). This gate is now walled up, and
tradition says that the order for its closure was given by Mohammed, the
Conqueror, immediately after his entry into the city, through fear of an
old Turkish prophecy, which declared that through this gate the next
conquerors should enter Constantinople.
[Footnote 24: By Dr. Dethier. "Bosphore et Constantinople", p. 51.]
Of the palace of the Emperor, into which the young Goth was ushered by
the eunuch-chamberlain, no vestige probably now remains. The Seraglio
has replaced the Palation, and is itself now abandoned to loneliness and
decay, being only the recipient of one annual visit from the Sultan,
when he goes in state to kiss the cloak of Mohammed. The great mosque of
St. Sophia on the right is a genuine and a glorious monument of Imperial
Constantinople, but not of Constantinople as Theodoric saw it. The
basilica, in which he probably listened with childish bewilderment to
many a sermon for or against the decrees of the council of Chalcedon,
was burnt down sixty years after his visit in the great Insurrection of
the "Nika", and the noble edifice in which ten thousand Mussulmans now
assemble to listen to the reading of the Koran, while above them the
Arabic names of the companions of the Prophet replace the mosaics of the
Evangelists, is itself the work of the great Emperor Justinian, the
destroyer of the State which Theodoric founded.
But almost between the Church of St. Sophia and the Imperial Palace lay
in old times the Great Hippodrome, centre of the popular life of the
capital, where the excited multitudes cheered with rapture, or howled in
execration, at the victory of the Blue or the Green charioteer; where
many a time the elevation or the deposition of an Emperor was
accomplished by the acclamations of the same roaring throng. Of this
Hippodrome we have still a most interesting memorial in the Atmeidan
(the Place of Horses), which, though with diminished area, still
preserves something of the form of the old racecourse. And here to this
day are two monuments on which the young hostage may have often gazed,
wondering at their form and meaning. The obelisk of Thothmes I., already
two thousand years old when Constantinople was founded, was reared in
the Hippodrome, by order of the great Emperor Theodosius, and some of
the bas-reliefs on its pedestal still explain to us the mechanical
devices by which it was lifted into position, while in others
Theodosius, his wife, his sons, and his colleague sit in solemn state,
but, alas! with grievously mutilated countenances. Near it is a spiral
column of bronze which, almost till our own day, bore three serpents
twined together, whose heads long ago supported a golden tripod. This
bronze monument is none other than the votive offering to the temple of
Apollo at Delphi, presented by the confederated states of Greece, to
celebrate the victory of Plataea. The golden tripod was melted down at
the time of Philip of Macedon, but the twisted serpents, brought by
Constantine to adorn and hallow his new capital by the Bosphorus, bore
and still bear the names, written in archaic characters, of all the
Hellenic states which took part in that great deliverance.
All these monuments are on the first of the seven hills on which
Constantinople is built. On the second hill stands a strange and
blackened pillar, which once stood in the middle of the Forum of
Constantine; and this too was there in the days of Theodoric. It is
called the Burnt Column, because it has been more than once struck by
lightning, and is blackened with the smoke of the frequent fires which
have consumed the wooden shanties at its base. But
"there it stands, as stands a lofty mind,
Worn, but unstooping to the baser crowd".
It was once 150 feet high, but is now 115, and it consists of six huge
cylinders of porphyry, one above another, whose junction is veiled by
sculptured laurel wreaths. On its summit stood the statue of Constantine
with the garb and attributes of the Grecian Sun-God, but having his head
surrounded with the nails of the True Cross, brought from Jerusalem to
serve instead of the golden rays of far-darting Apollo. Underneath the
column was placed (and remains probably to this day) the Palladium, that
mysterious image of Minerva, which AEneas carried from Troy to Alba
Longa, which his descendants removed to Rome, and which was now brought
by Constantine to his new capital, so near to its first legendary home,
to be the pledge of abiding security to the city by the Bosphorus.
These are the chief relics of Constantinople in the fifth century which
are still visible to the traveller. I have described with some little
detail the outward appearance of the city and its monuments, because
these would naturally be the objects which would most attract the
attention of a child brought from such far different scenes into the
midst of so stately a city. But during the ten or eleven years that
Theodoric remained in honourable captivity at the court of Leo, while he
was growing up from childhood to manhood, it cannot be doubted that he
gradually learned the deeper lessons which lay below the glory and the
glitter of the great city's life, and that the knowledge thus acquired
in those years which are so powerful in moulding character, had a mighty
influence on all his subsequent career.
He saw here for the first time, and by degrees he apprehended, the
results of that state of _civilitas_ which in after years he was to be
constantly recommending to his people. Sprung from a race of hunters and
shepherds, having slowly learned the arts of agriculture, and then
perhaps partly unlearned them under the over-lordship of the nomad Huns,
the Ostrogoths at this time knew nothing of a city life. A city was
probably in their eyes little else than a hindrance to their freebooting
raids, a lair of enemies, a place behind whose sheltering walls, so hard
to batter down, cowards lurked in order to sally forth at a favourable
moment and attack brave men in their rear. At best it was a
treasure-house, which valiant Goths, if Fortune favoured them, might
sack and plunder: but Fortune seldom did favour the children of Gaut in
their assaults upon the fenced cities of the Empire.
Now, however, the lad Theodoric began to perceive, as the man Ataulfus
had perceived before him, that the city life upon which all the proverbs
and the songs of his countrymen poured contempt, had its advantages. To
the New Rome came the incessant ships of Alexandria, bringing corn for
the sustenance of her citizens. Long caravans journeyed over the
highlands of Asia Minor loaded with the spices and jewels of India and
the silks of China. Men of every conceivable Asiatic country were drawn
by the irresistible attraction of hoped-for profit to the quays and the
Fora of Byzantium. The scattered homesteads of the Ostrogothic farmers
had no such wonderful power of drawing men over thousands of miles of
land and sea to visit them. Then the bright and varied life of the
Imperial City could not fail to fill the boy's soul with pleasure and
admiration. The thrill of excitement in the Hippodrome as the two
charioteers, Green and Blue, rounded the _spina_, neck and neck, the
tragedies acted in the theatre amid rapturous applause, the strange
beasts from every part of the Roman world that roared and fought in the
Amphitheatre, the delicious idleness of the Baths, the chatter and
bargaining and banter of the Forum,--all this made a day in beautiful
Constantinople very unlike a day in the solemn and somewhat rude palace
by Lake Balaton.
As the boy grew to manhood, the deep underlying cause of this difference
perhaps became clearer to his mind. He could see more or less plainly
that the soul which held all this marvellous body of civilisation
together was reverence for Law. He visited perhaps some of the courts of
law; he may have seen the Illustrious Praetorian Prefect, clothed in
Imperial purple, move majestically to the judgment-seat, amid the
obsequious salutations of the dignified officials,[25] who in their
various ranks and orders surrounded the hall. The costly golden
reed-case, the massive silver inkstand, the silver bowl for the
petitions of suitors, all emblems of his office, were placed solemnly
before him, and the pleadings began. Practised advocates arose to plead
the cause of plaintiff or defendant; busy short-hand writers took notes
of the proceedings; at length in calm and measured words the Prefect
gave his judgment; a judgment which was necessarily based on law, which
had to take account of the sayings of jurisconsults, of the stored-up
wisdom of twenty generations of men; a judgment which, notwithstanding
the venality which was the curse of the Empire, was in most instances in
accordance with truth and justice. How different, must Theodoric often
have thought, in after years, when he had returned to Gothland,--how
different was this settled and orderly procedure from the usage of the
barbarians. With them the "blood-feud", the "wild justice of revenge",
often prolonged from generation to generation, had been long the chief
righter of wrongs done; and if this was now slowly giving place to
judicial trial, that trial was probably a coarse and almost lawless
proceeding, in which the head man of the district, with a hundred
assessors, as ignorant as himself, amid the wild cries of the opposed
parties, roughly fixed the amount of blood-money to be paid by a
murderer, or decided at hap-hazard, often with an obvious reference to
the superior force at the command of one or other of the litigants, some
obscure dispute as to the ownership of a slave or the right to succeed
to a dead man's inheritance.
[Footnote 25: Officium, or Militia Literata.]
Law carefully thought out, systematised, and in the main softened and
liberalised, from generation to generation, was the great gift of the
Roman Empire to the world, and by her strong, and uniform, and, in the
main, just administration of this law, that Empire had kept, and in the
days of Theodoric was still keeping, her hold upon a hundred jarring
nationalities. What hope was there that the German intruders into the
lands of the Mediterranean could ever vie with this great achievement?
Yet if they could not, if it was out of their power to reform and
reinvigorate the shattered state, if they could only destroy and not
rebuild, they would exert no abiding influence on the destinies of
Europe.
I do not say that all these thoughts passed at this time through the
mind of Theodoric, but I have no doubt that the germs of them were sown
by his residence in Constantinople. When he returned, a young man of
eighteen years and of noble presence to the palace of his father, he had
certainly some conception of what the Greeks meant when he heard them
talking about _politeia_, some foreshadowing of what he himself would
mean when in after days he should speak alike to his Goth and Roman
subjects of the blessings of _civilitas_.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER IV.
THE SOUTHWARD MIGRATION.
Struggles with the Swabians, Sarmatians, Scyri, and Huns--Death of
Walamir--Theudemir becomes king--Theodoric defeats Babai--The Teutonic
custom of the comitatus--An Ostrogothic Folc-mote--Theudemir invades the
Eastern Empire--Macedonian settlement of the Ostrogoths.
The young Theodoric, who was now in his nineteenth year, was sent back
by Leo to his father with large presents, and both the recovered son and
the tokens of Imperial favour brought joy to the heart of the father.
There had been some changes in the Ostrogothic kingdom during the boy's
absence. There had been vague and purposeless wars with the savage
nations around them,--Swabians, Sarmatians, Scyri--besides one final
encounter with their old lords, the Huns. These last, we are told, they
had driven forth so hopelessly beaten from their territory, that for a
century from that time all that was left of the Hunnish nation trembled
at the very name of the Goths. But in a battle with another people of
far less renown, the barbarous Scyri beyond the Danube, Walamir, while
cheering on his men to the combat, was thrown from his horse and being
pierced by the lances of the enemy was left dead on the field. His
death, it is said, was avenged most ruthlessly on the Scyri, and
Theudemir, the brother who was next him in age, became chief king of the
Ostrogoths.
Scarcely had Theodoric returned to his home when, without communicating
his purpose to his father, he distinguished himself by a gallant deed of
arms. On the south-east of the Ostrogothic kingdom, in the country which
we now call Servia, there reigned at this time a Sclavonic chief called
Babai, who was full of pride and self-importance because of a victory
which he had lately gained over the forces of the Empire. Theodoric had
probably heard at Constantinople the other side of this story: on his
journey to the north-west he had passed through those regions, and
marked the pride of the insolent barbarian. Sympathy with the humiliated
Empire, but, far more, the young warrior's desire at once to find "a
foeman worthy of his steel", and to win laurels for himself wherewith he
might surprise his father, drove him into his new enterprise. Having
collected some of his father's guardsmen, and those of his people with
whom he was personally popular, or who were dependent upon him, he thus
mustered a little army of six thousand men, with whom he crossed the
Danube.[26] Falling suddenly upon King Babai, he defeated and slew him,
took his family prisoners, and returned with large booty in slaves and
the rude wealth of the barbarian to his surprised but joyful father. The
result of this expedition was the capture of the important frontier city
of Singidunum (whose site is now occupied by Belgrade), a city which
Babai had wrested from the Empire, but which Theodoric, whatever may
have been his inclination to favour Constantinople, did not deem it
necessary to restore to his late host.
[Footnote 26: The words of Jordanes (which are important on account of
their bearing on the passage of Tacitus quoted below) are: "Ascitis
certis ex satellitibus patris et ex populo amatores sibi clientesque
consocians paene sex mille viros cum quibus inscio patre emenso Danubio
super Babai Sarmatarum regem discurrit" (Getica, lv.).]
This incident of the early manhood of Theodoric is a good illustration
of the Teutonic custom which Tacitus describes to us under the name of
the _comitatus_, a custom which was therefore at least four centuries
old (probably far older) in the days of Theodoric, and which, lasting on
for several centuries longer, undoubtedly influenced if it did not
actually create the chivalry of the Middle Ages. The custom was so
important that it will be better to translate the very words of Tacitus
concerning it, though they occur in one of the best-known passages of
the "Germania".
"The Germans transact no business either of a public or private nature
except with arms in their hands. But it is not the practice for any one
to begin the wearing of arms until the State has approved his ability to
wield them. When that is done, in the great Council of the nation one
of the chiefs, perhaps the father or some near relation of the
candidate, equips the youth with shield and spear. This is with them
like the _toga virilis_ with us, the first dignity bestowed on the young
man. Before this he was looked upon as part of his father's
household--now he is a member of the State. Eminently noble birth, or
great merit on the part of their fathers, assigns the dignity of a
chief[27] even to very young men. They are admitted to the fellowship of
other youths stronger than themselves, and already tried in war, nor do
they blush to be seen among the henchmen.[28] There is a gradation in
rank among the henchmen, determined by the judgment of him whom they
follow, and there is a great emulation among the henchmen, who shall
have the highest place under the chief, and among the chiefs who shall
have the most numerous and the bravest henchmen. This is their dignity,
this their strength, to be ever surrounded by a band of chosen youths,
an honour in peace, a defence in battle. And not only in his own nation,
but among the surrounding states also, each chief's name and glory are
spread abroad according to the eminence of his 'train of henchmen'[29]
in number and valour. Chiefs thus distinguished are in request for
embassies, are enriched with costly presents, and often they decide a
war by the mere terror of their name".
[Footnote 27: Dignationem principis; the true rendering of this sentence
is very doubtful.]
[Footnote 28: I think upon the whole "henchmen" is the best translation
of this difficult word "comites", "Companions" is too indefinite;
"comrades" implies too much equality with the chief.]
[Footnote 29: Comitatus.]
"When they stand on the battle-field, it is held a disgraceful thing for
the chief to be surpassed in bravery by his henchmen, for the henchmen
not to equal the valour of their chief. Now too it will mark a man as
infamous, and a target for the scorn of men for all the rest of his
life, if he escapes alive from the battle-field where his chief needed
his help. To defend _him_, the chief; to guard _his_ person; to reckon
up one's own brave deeds as enhancing _his_ glory: this is the
henchman's one great oath of fealty.[30] The chiefs fight for victory,
the henchmen for their chief. If the state in which they are born should
be growing sluggish through ease and a long peace, most of the noble
young men seek of their own accord those nations which are then waging
war, both because a quiet life is hateful to this people, and because
they can more easily distinguish themselves in perilous times, nor can
they keep together a great train of henchmen, except by war and the
strong hand. For it is from the generosity of their chief that each
henchman expects that mighty war-horse which he would bestride, that
gory and victorious spear, which he would brandish. Banquets, too, and
all the rough but plentiful appliances of the feast are taken as part of
the henchman's pay; and the means of supplying all this prodigality must
be sought by war and rapine. You would not so easily persuade them to
plough the fields and wait in patience for a year's harvest, as to
challenge an enemy and earn honourable wounds; since to them it seems
always a slow and lazy process to accumulate by the sweat of your brow
what you might win at once by the shedding of blood".
[Footnote 30: Praecipuum sacramentum.]
These words of Tacitus, written in the year 98 after Christ, describe
with wonderful exactness the state of Ostrogothic society in the year
472. We are not expressly told of Theodoric's assumption of the shield
and spear in the great Council of the nation, but probably this ceremony
immediately followed his return from Constantinople. Then we see the
gathering together of the band of henchmen, the sudden march away from
the peaceful land, growing torpid through two or three years of
warlessness, the surprise of the Sclavonic king, the copious effusion of
blood which was the preferred alternative to the sweat of the
land-tiller, the return to the young chief's own land with spoils
sufficient to support perhaps for many months the "generosity" expected
by the henchmen.
There is one point, however, in which the description of the Germans
given by Tacitus is probably not altogether applicable to the Goths of
the fifth century: and that is, their invincible preference for the life
of the warrior over that of the agriculturist. There are some
indications that the Germans, when Tacitus wrote, had not long exchanged
the nomadic life of a nation of shepherds and herdsmen (such as was led
by the earlier generations of the Israelitish people) for the settled
life which alone is consistent with the pursuits of the tiller of the
soil. Hence the roving instinct was still strong within them, and this
roving instinct easily allied itself with the thirst for battle and the
love of the easy gains of the freebooter. Four centuries, however, of
agriculture and of neighbourhood to the great civilised stable Empire of
Rome had apparently wrought some change in the Goths and in many of the
other Teutonic nations. The work of agriculture was now not altogether
odious in their eyes; they knew something of the joys of the husbandman
as well as of the joys of the warrior; they began to feel something of
that "land-hunger" which is the passion of a young, growing, industrious
people. Still, however, the songs of the minstrels, the sagas of the
bards, the fiery impulses of the young _princeps_ surrounded by his
_comitatus_ pointed to war as the only occupation worthy of freemen.
Hence we can perceive a double current in the ambitions of these nations
which often perplexes the historian now, as it evidently then perplexed
their mighty neighbour, the Roman Augustus, and the generals and lawyers
who counselled him in his consistory. Sometimes the Teutonic king is
roused by some real or imagined insult; the minstrels sing their
battle-songs; the fiery henchmen gather round their chief; the barbarian
tide rolls over the frontier of the Empire: it seems as if it must be a
duel to the death between civilisation and its implacable foes. Then
suddenly
"he sinks
To ashes who was very fire before".
Food, not glory, seems to be the supreme object of the Teuton's
ambition. He begs for land, for seed to sow in it, for a legal
settlement within the limits of the Empire. If only these necessary
things are granted to him, he promises, and not without intending to
keep his promise, to be a peaceable subject, yes and a staunch defender,
of the Roman Augustus. Had the Imperial statesmen truly understood this
strange duality of purpose in the minds of their barbarian visitors, and
had they set themselves loyally and patiently to foster the peaceful
agricultural instincts of the Teuton, haply the Roman Empire might still
be standing. As it was, the statesmen of the day, men of temporary
shifts and expedients, living only as we say "from hand to mouth", saw,
in the changing moods of the Germans, only the faithlessness of
barbarism, which they met with the faithlessness of civilisation, and
between the two the Empire--which no one really wished to destroy--was
destroyed.
Even such a change it was which now came over the minds of the
Ostrogothic people. There was dearth in Pannonia, partly, perhaps, the
consequence of the frequent wars with the surrounding nations which had
occurred during the twenty years of the Ostrogothic settlement. But even
the cessation of those wars brought with it a loss of income to the
warrior class. As the Gothic historian expresses it: "From the
diminution of the spoils of the neighbouring nations the Goths began to
lack food and clothing, and to those men to whom war had long furnished
all their sustenance peace began to be odious, and all the Goths with
loud shouts approached their king Theudemir praying him to lead his
army whither he would, but to lead it forth to war".
Here again it can hardly be doubted that Jordanes, writing about the
fifth century, describes for us the same state of things as Tacitus
writing about the first, and that this loudly shouted demand of the
people for war was expressed in one of those national assemblies--the
"Folc-motes" or "Folc-things" of Anglo-Saxon and German history--which
formed such a real limitation to the power of the early Teutonic kings.
"Concerning smaller matters", says Tacitus,[31] "the chiefs deliberate;
concerning greater matters, the whole nation; but in such wise that even
those things which are in the power of the commonalty are discussed in
detail by the chiefs. They come together, unless any sudden and
accidental emergency have arisen, on fixed days determined by the new or
full moon; for these times they deem the most fortunate for the
transaction of business. An ill consequence flowing from their freedom
is their want of punctuality in assembling; often two or three days are
spent in waiting for the loiterers. When the crowd chooses, they sit
down, arrayed in their armour (and commence business). Silence is called
for by the priests, who have then the power even of keeping order by
force. Then the king or one of the chiefs begins to speak, and is
listened to in right either of his age, or his noble birth, or his glory
in the wars, or his eloquence. In any case, he rather persuades than
commands; not power, but weight of character procures the assent of his
hearers."
[Footnote 31: Germania, xi.]
"If they mislike his sentiments they express their contempt for them by
groans, if they approve, they clash their spears together. Applause thus
expressed by arms is the greatest tribute that can be paid to a
speaker".
Before such an assembly of the nation in arms, the question, not of
Peace or War? but of War with whom? was debated. It was decided that the
Empire should be the victim, and that East and West alike should feel
the heavy hand of the Ostrogoths. The lot was cast (so said the national
legend),[32] and it assigned to Theudemir the harder but, as it seemed,
more profitable task of warring against Constantinople, while his
younger brother Widemir was to attack Rome.
Of Widemir's movements there is little to tell. He died in Italy, not
having apparently achieved any brilliant exploits, and his son and
namesake was easily persuaded to turn aside into Gaul, where he joined
his forces to those of the kindred Visigoths, and became absorbed in
their flourishing kingdom. This branch of Amal royalty henceforward
bears no fruit in history.
More important, at any rate in its ultimate consequences, was the march
of Theudemir and his people into the dominions of the Eastern Caesar.
They crossed the Save, and by their warlike array terrified into
acquiescence the Sclavonic tribes which were settled in the
neighbourhood of Belgrade.
[Footnote 32: Kopke "Anfange des Konigthums", (p. 146) throws doubt on
this story of the decision by lot, and there seems something to be said
on his side.]
Having pushed up the valley of the Morava, they captured the important
city of Naissus (now Nisch), "the first city of Illyricum". Here
Theudemir tarried for a space, sending on his son with a large and eager
_comitatus_ farther up the valley of the Morava. They reached the head
of that valley, they crossed the watershed and the plain of Kossova, and
descended the valley of the Vardar. Monastir in Macedonia, Larissa in
Thessaly were taken and sacked; and a way having thus been made by these
bold invaders into the heart of the Empire, a message was sent to
Theudemir, inviting him to undertake the siege of Thessalonica. Leaving
a few guards in Naissus, the old king moved southward with the bulk of
his army, and was soon standing with his men before the walls of the
Macedonian capital. The Patrician Hilarianus held that city with a
strong force, but when he saw it regularly invested by the Goths and an
earthen rampart drawn all round it, he lost heart, and, despairing of a
successful resistance, opened negotiations with the besiegers. The
result of these negotiations (accompanied by handsome presents to the
king) was that Theudemir abandoned the siege, resumed the often adopted,
perhaps never wholly abandoned, position of a _foederatus_ or sworn
auxiliary of the Empire, and received for himself and his people the
unquestioned possession of six towns[33] and the surrounding country by
the north-east corner of the AEgean, where the Vardar discharges itself
into the Thermaic Gulf.
[Footnote 33: The best known of these towns are Pella, Pydna, and
Bercea.]
Thus ingloriously, thus unprofitably ended the expedition into Romania,
which had been proposed amid such enthusiastic applause at the great
Council of the nation, and pressed with such loud acclamations and such
brandishing of defiant spears upon the perhaps reluctant Theudemir. The
Ostrogoths in 472 were an independent people, practically supreme in
Pannonia. Those broad lands on the south and west of the Danube, rich in
corn and wine, the very kernel of the Austrian monarchy of to-day, were
theirs in absolute possession. Any tie of nominal dependence which
attached Pannonia to the Empire was so merely theoretical, now that the
Hun had ruled and ravaged it for a good part of a century, that it was
not worth taking into consideration; it was in fact rather an excuse for
claiming _stipendia_ from the Emperor than a bond of real vassalage. But
now in 474 this great and proud nation, crowded into a few cities of
Macedonia, with obedient subjects of the Empire all round them, had
practically no choice between the life of peaceful provincials on the
one hand and that of freebooters on the other. If they accepted the
first, they would lose year by year something of their old national
character. The Teutonic speech, the Teutonic customs would gradually
disappear, and in one or two generations they would be scarcely
distinguishable from any of the other oppressed, patient, tax-exhausted
populations of the great and weary Empire. On the other hand, if they
accepted (which in fact they seem to have done) the other alternative,
and became a mere horde of plunderers wandering up and down through the
Empire, seeking what they might destroy, they abandoned the hope of
forming a settled and stable monarchy, and, doing injustice to the high
qualities and capacities for civilisation which were in them, they would
sink lower into the depths of barbarism, and becoming like the Hun, like
the Hun they would one day perish. Certainly, so far, the tumultuous
decision of the Parliament on the shores of Lake Pelso was a false step
in the nation's history.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER V.
STORM AND STRESS.
Death of Theudemir, and accession of Theodoric--Leo the Butcher--The
Emperor Zeno--The march of Theodoric against the son of Trianus--His
invasion of Macedonia--Defeat of his rear guard--His compact with the
Emperor.
The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man
is healthy, but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is
in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the
ambition thick-sighted.--(KEATS, Preface to "Endymion".)
The sentence thus written by the sensitive young poet, a child of London
of the nineteenth century, was eminently exemplified in the history of
the martial chief of the Ostrogoths. The next fourteen years in the life
of Theodoric, which will be described in this chapter, were years of
much useless endeavour, of marches and countermarches, of alliances
formed and broken, of vain animosities and vainer reconciliations, years
in which Theodoric himself seems never to understand his own purpose,
whether it shall be under the shadow of the Empire or upon the ruins of
the Empire, that he will build up his throne. Take the map of what is
now often called "the Balkan peninsula", the region in which these
fourteen years were passed; look at the apparently purpose, less way in
which the mountain ranges of Haemus, Rhodope, and Scardus cross,
intersect, run parallel, approach, avoid one another; look at the
strange entanglement of passes and watersheds and table-lands which
their systems display to us. Even such as the ranges among which he was
manoeuvring--perplexed, purposeless, and sterile--was the early manhood
of Theodoric.
About 474, soon after the great Southward migration, Theudemir died at
Cyrrhus in Macedonia, one of the new settlements of the Ostrogoths. When
he was attacked by his fatal sickness he called his people together and
pointed to Theodoric as the heir of his royal dignity. Kingship at this
time among the Germanic nations was not purely hereditary, the consent
of the people being required even in the most ordinary and natural cases
of succession, such as that of a first-born son, full grown and a tried
soldier succeeding to an aged father. In such cases, however, that
consent was almost invariably given. Theodoric, at any rate, succeeded
without disputes to the doubtful and precarious position of king of the
Ostrogoths.
Almost at the same time a change was being made by death in the wearer
of the Imperial diadem. In order to illustrate the widely different
character of the Roman and the Gothic monarchies it will be well to
cease for a little time to follow the fortunes of Theodoric and to
sketch the history of Leo, the dying Emperor, and of Zeno, who succeeded
him.
Leo I., who reigned at Constantinople from 457 to 474, and who was
therefore Emperor during the whole time that Theodoric dwelt there as
hostage, was not, as far as we can ascertain, a man of any great
abilities in peace or war, or originally of very exalted station. But he
was "curator" or steward in the household of Aspar, the successful
barbarian adventurer who has been already alluded to.[34] As an Arian by
religion, and a barbarian, or the son of a barbarian, by birth, Aspar
could not himself assume the diadem, but he could give it to whom he
would, and Leo the steward was the second of his dependants whom he had
thus honoured. Once placed upon the throne, however, Leo showed himself
less obsequious to his old master than was expected. The post of Prefect
of the City became vacant; Aspar suggested for the office a man who,
like himself, was tainted with the heresy of Arius. At the moment Leo
promised acquiescence, but immediately repented, and in the dead of
night privately conferred the important office on a Senator who
professed the orthodox faith. Aspar in a rage laid a rough hand on the
Imperial purple, saying to Leo: "Emperor! it is not fitting that one who
wears this robe should tell lies". Leo answered with some spirit:
"Neither is it fitting that an Emperor should be bound to do the bidding
of any of his subjects, and so injure the State".
[Footnote 34: See p. 36.]
After this encounter there were thirteen years of feud between
King-maker and King, between Aspar and Leo. At length in 471 Aspar and
his three valiant sons fell by the swords of the Eunuchs of the Palace.
The foul and cowardly deed was perhaps marked by some circumstances of
especial cruelty, which earned for Leo the title by which he was long
after remembered in Constantinople, "The Butcher".[35]
[Footnote 35: Leo Macellus.]
In order to strengthen himself against the adherents of Aspar, Leo
cultivated the friendship of a set of wild, uncouth mountaineers, who at
this time played the same part in Constantinople which the Swiss of the
Middle Ages played in Italy. These were the Isaurians, men from the
rugged highlands of Pisidia, whose lives had hitherto been chiefly spent
either in robbing or in defending themselves from robbery. At their head
was a man named Tarasicodissa,--probably well born, if a chieftain from
the Isaurian highlands could be deemed to be well born by the
contemptuous citizens of Constantinople, no soldier, for we are told
that even the picture of a battle frightened him, but a man whom the
other Isaurians seem to have followed with clannish loyalty, like that
which the Scottish Camerons showed even to the wily and unwarlike Master
of Lovat.
With Tarasicodissa therefore the Emperor Leo entered into a compact of
mutual defence. The Isaurian dropped his uncouth name and assumed the
classical and philosophical-sounding name of Zeno; he received the hand
of Ariadne, daughter of the Emperor, in marriage, and as Leo had no male
offspring, the little Leo, offspring of this marriage and therefore
grandson of the aged Emperor, was, in this monarchy which from elective
was ever becoming more strictly hereditary, generally accepted as his
probable successor.
As it had been planned so it came to pass. Leo the Butcher died (3d Feb.
474); the younger Leo, a child of seven years old, was hailed by Senate
and People as his successor: Zeno came at the head of a brilliant train
of senators, soldiers, and magistrates, to "adore" the new Emperor, and
the child, carefully instructed by his mother in the part which he had
to play, placed on the bowed head of his father the Imperial diadem.
This act of "association" as it was called, generally practised upon a
son or nephew by a veteran Emperor anxious to be relieved from some of
the cares of reigning, required to be ratified by the acclamations of
the soldiery; but no doubt these acclamations, which could generally be
purchased by a sufficiently liberal donative, were not wanting on this
occasion. Zeno, otherwise called Tarasicodissa the Isaurian, was now
Emperor, and nine months after, when his child-partner died, he became
sole ruler of the Roman world, except in so far as his dignity might be
considered to be shared by the phantom Emperors of the West, who at this
time were dethroning and being dethroned with fatal rapidity at Rome
and Ravenna.
Thus mean and devious were the paths by which an adventurer could climb
in the fifth century to that which was still looked upon as the pinnacle
of earthly greatness. For however unworthy a man might feel himself to
be, and however unworthy all his subjects might know him to be of the
highest place in the Empire, when once he had obtained it his power was
absolute and the honours rendered to him were little less than divine.
All laws were passed by his "sacred providence"; all officers, military
and civil, received their authority from him. In the edicts which he put
forth to the world he spoke of himself as "My Eternity", "My Mildness",
"My Magnificence", and of course these expressions, or, if it were
possible, expressions more adulatory than these, were used by his
subjects when they laid their petitions at the footstool of "the sacred
throne". He lived, withdrawn from vulgar eyes, in the innermost recesses
of the palace, a sort of Holy of Holies behind the first and the second
veil. A band of pages, in splendid dress, waited upon his bidding;
thirty stately _silentiarii_, with helmets and brightly burnished
cuirasses, marched backwards and forwards before the second veil, to see
that no importunate petitioner disturbed the silence of "the sacred
cubicle". On the comparatively rare occasions when he showed himself to
his subjects, he wore upon his head the diadem, a band of white linen,
in which blazed the most precious jewels of the Empire. Hung round his
shoulders and reaching down to his feet was that precious purple robe,
for the sake of which so many crimes were committed, and which often
proved itself a very "garment of Nessus" to him who dared to assume it
without force sufficient to render his usurpation legitimate. On the
feet of the Emperor were buskins which, like the diadem, were studded
with precious stones, and like the robe were dyed with the Imperial
purple. Thus gorgeously arrayed he took his place in the _podium,_ the
royal box in the Amphitheatre, and from thence, while gazed upon by his
subjects, gazed himself upon the savage beast-fight, or in the
Hippodrome, with difficulty restraining his eagerness for the success of
the Blue or the Green faction, gave the sign for the chariot races to
begin. Or he sat surrounded by his court in the purple presence-chamber
to consult upon public affairs with his Consistory, a sort of Privy
Council, composed of the great ministers of state. Conspicuous among
these were the fifteen officers of highest rank, Generals, Judges, Grand
Chamberlains, Finance Ministers, who had each the right to be addressed
as "Illustrious". When any subject of the Emperor, were it one of these
Illustrious ones himself, were it the son or brother of his predecessor,
were it even a former patron, like Aspar, by whose favour he had been
selected to wear the purple, was admitted to an audience of "Augustus"
(that great name went as of right with the diadem), the etiquette of the
court required that he should not merely bow nor kneel, but absolutely
prostrate himself before the Sacred Majesty of the Emperor, who, if in a
gracious mood, then with outstretched hand raised him from the earth
and permitted him to kiss his knee or the fringe of his Imperial mantle.
To this dizzy height of greatness--for such, however small Marcian or
Leo or Zeno may now seem to us by the lapse of centuries, it was felt to
be by the contemporary generations--it was possible under the singular
combination of election and inheritance which regulated the succession
to the throne, for almost any citizen of the Empire, if not of barbarian
blood or heretical creed, to aspire. Diocletian, the second founder of
the Empire, was the son of a slave; Justinian--an even greater name--was
the nephew of a Macedonian peasant, who with a sheepskin bag containing
a week's store of biscuit, his only property, tramped down from his
native highlands to seek his fortune in the capital Zeno, as we have
seen, though perhaps better born than either Diocletian or Justinian,
was only a little Isaurian chieftain. Thus the possibilities open to
aspiring ambition were great in the Empire of the Caesars. As any male
citizen of the United States, born between the St. Lawrence and the Rio
Grande, may one day be installed in the White House as President, so any
"Roman" and orthodox inhabitant of the Empire, whether noble, citizen,
or peasant, might flatter himself with the hope that he too should one
day wear the purple of Diocletian, be saluted as Augustus, and see
Prefects and Masters of the Soldiery prostrating themselves before "His
Eternity". This was, in a sense, the better, the democratic side of the
Roman monarchy. Power which was supposed to be conveyed by the will of
the people (as expressed by the acclamations of the army) might be
wielded by the arm of any member of that people. On the other hand there
was an evil in the habit thus engendered in men's minds, of humbling
themselves before mere power without regard to the manner of its
acquirement. When we compare the polity of Rome or Constantinople, where
a century was a long time for the duration of a dynasty, with the far
simpler polities of the Teutonic tribes which invaded the Empire, almost
all of whom had their royal houses, reaching back into and even beyond
the dawn of national history, supposed to be sprung from the loins of
the gods, and rendered illustrious by countless deeds of valour recorded
in song or saga, we see at once that in these ruder states we are in
presence of a principle which the Empire knew not, but which Mediaeval
Europe knew and glorified, the principle of _Loyalty._ This principle,
the same that bound Bayard to the Valois, and Montrose to the Stuart,
has been, with all the follies and even crimes which it may have caused,
an element of strength and cohesion in the states which have arisen on
the ruins of the Roman Empire. The self-respecting but loving loyalty,
with which the Englishman of to-day cherishes the name of the descendant
of Cerdic, of Alfred, and of Edward Plantagenet, who wields the sceptre
of his country, is utterly unlike the slavish homage offered by the
adoring courtiers of Byzantium to the pinchbeck divinity of Zeno
Tarasicodissa.
Raised as Zeno had been to the throne by a mere palace intrigue, and
destitute as he was of any of the qualities of a great statesman or
general, it is no wonder that his reign, which lasted for seventeen
years, was continually disturbed by conspiracies and rebellions. In most
of these rebellions his mother-in-law, Verina, widow of Leo, an
ambitious and turbulent woman, played an important part.
It was only a year after Zeno's accession to sole power by the death of
his son (Nov., 475) when he was surprised by the outbreak of a
conspiracy, hatched by his mother-in-law, the object of which was to
place her brother Basiliscus on the throne. Zeno fled by night, still
wearing the Imperial robes which he had worn, sitting in the Hippodrome,
when the tidings reached him, and crossing the Bosphorus was soon in the
heart of Asia Minor, safe sheltered in his native Isauria.
From thence,(July, 477) after nearly two years of exile, he was by a
strange turn of the wheel of Fortune restored to his throne. Religious
bigotry (for Basiliscus did not belong to the party of strict orthodoxy)
and domestic jealousies and perfidies all contributed to this result.
Zeno, who had fled twenty months before from the Hippodrome, returned to
the Amphitheatre, and there, having commanded that the linen curtain
should be drawn over the circus to exclude the too piercing rays of the
July sun, gave the signal for the games to begin, while the populace
shouted in Latin the regular official congratulations on his elevation
and prayers for his continued triumph.[36]
[Footnote 36: "Zeno Imperator Tu Vincas", would be, as we know from
other similar instances, the most frequently uttered acclamation. It is
a curious instance of "survival" that this was always shouted in Latin,
though Greek was the vernacular tongue of the vast majority of the
inhabitants of Constantinople.]
Meanwhile his fallen rival, less fortunate than Zeno himself in planning
an escape, was crouching in the baptistery of the great Church of Saint
Sophia, whither with his wife and children he had fled for refuge. After
all the emblems of Imperial dignity had been rudely stripped from them,
Basiliscus was induced, by a promise from Zeno, "that their heads should
be safe", to come forth with his family from the sacred asylum. The
Emperor "kept the word of promise to the ear", since no executioner with
drawn sword entered the chamber of his rival. Basiliscus and they that
were with him were sent away to a remote fortress in Cappadocia. The
gate of the fortress was built up, a band of wild Isaurians guarded the
enclosure, suffering no man to enter or to leave it, and in that bleak
stronghold before long the fallen Emperor and Empress with their
children perished miserably of cold and hunger.
Theodoric, who was at this time settled with his people, not on the
shores of the AEgean, but in the region which we now call the Dobrudscha,
between the mouths of the Danube and the Black Sea, had zealously
espoused the cause of the banished Zeno, and lent an effectual hand in
the counter-revolution which restored him to the throne (478). For his
services in this crisis he was rewarded with the dignities of Patrician
and Master of the Soldiery, high honours for a barbarian of twenty-four;
and probably about this time he was also adopted as "_filius in arma_"
by the Emperor. What the precise nature of this adopted
"sonship-in-arms" may have been we are not able to say. It reminds us of
the barbarian customs which in the course of centuries ripened into the
mediaeval ceremony of knighthood, and the whole transaction certainly
sounds more Ostrogothic than Imperial. Zeno's own son and namesake (the
offspring of a first marriage before his union with Ariadne) was
apparently dead before this time; and possibly therefore the title of
son thus conferred upon Theodoric may have raised in his heart wild
hopes that he too might one day be saluted as Roman Emperor. Any such
hopes were probably doomed to inevitable disappointment. Any other
dignity in the State, the "Roman Republic", as it still called itself,
was practically within reach of a powerful barbarian, but the diadem, as
has been already said, could in this age of the world, only be worn by
one of pure Roman, that is, non-barbarian, blood.
At this time, and for the next three years, the position of our
Theodoric, both towards the Emperor and towards his own people, was
sorely embarrassed by the position and the claims of the other, the
squinting Theodoric (son of Triarius), whom we met with seventeen years
ago, and whose receipt of _stipendia_ from the court of Constantinople,
at the very time when their own were withheld, raised the wrath of
Walamir and Theudemir. This Theodoric, it will be remembered, was of
unkingly, perhaps of quite ignoble, birth, had risen to greatness by
clinging to the skirts of Aspar, and had, so far as the Emperor's favour
was concerned, fallen with his fall. Shortly before the death of Leo he
had appeared in arms against the Empire, taking one city and besieging
another, and had forced the Emperor to concede to him high rank in the
army (that of General of the Household Troops,[37]) a subsidy of;
L80,000 a year for himself and his people, and lastly a remarkable
stipulation, "that he should be absolute ruler[38] of the Goths, and
that the Emperor should not receive any of them who were minded to
revolt from him". This strange article of the treaty shows us, on the
one hand, how thoroughly fictitious and illegitimate was _this_
Theodoric's claim to kinship; since assuredly neither Alaric, nor
Ataulfus, nor Theudemir, nor any of the genuine kings of the Goths, ever
needed to bolster up their authority over their subjects by any such
figment of an Imperial concession; and on the other hand, as it
coincides in date with the time of Theudemir's and _his_ Theodoric's
entrance into the Empire, it shows us the distracting influences to
which the large number of Gothic settlers south of the Danube, settled
there before Theudemir's migration, were exposed by that event. There
can be little doubt that the Goths who were minded to revolt from the
son of Triarius and who were not to be received into favour by the
Emperor, were Ostrogoths, still dimly conscious of the old tie which
bound them to the glorious house of Amala, and more than half disposed
to forsake the service of their squinting upstart chief in order to
follow the banners of the young hero, son of Theudemir.
[Footnote 37: Magister Equitum et Peditum Praesentalis.]
[Footnote 38: (Greek: autocrator.)]
Then came the death of Leo (478), Zeno's accession and the insurrection
of Basiliscus, in which the son of Triarius took part against the
Isaurian Emperor. Soon after this insurrection was ended and Zeno was
restored to his precarious throne, there came an embassy from the
_foederati_ (as they called themselves) that is, from the unattached
Goths who followed the Triarian standard, begging Zeno to be reconciled
to their lord, and hinting that he was a truer friend to the Empire than
the petted and pampered son of Theudemir. After a consultation with "the
Senate and People of Rome", in other words, with the nobles of
Constantinople and the troops of the household, Zeno decided that to
take _both_ the Theodorics into his pay would be too heavy a charge on
the treasury; that there was no reason for breaking with the young Amal,
his ally, and therefore that the request of his rival must be refused.
Open war followed, consisting chiefly of devastating raids by the son of
Triarius into the valleys of Moesia and Thrace. A message was sent to
Theodoric the Amal, who was dwelling quietly with his people by the
Danube. "Why are you lingering in your home? Come forth and do great
deeds worthy of a Master of Roman Soldiery". "But if I take the field
against the son of Triarius", was the answer, "I fear that you will make
peace with him behind my back". The Emperor and Senate bound themselves
by solemn oaths that he should never be received back into favour, and
an elaborate plan of campaign was arranged, according to which the Amal
marching with his host from Marcianople, (_Shumla_) was to be met by one
general with twelve thousand troops, on the southern side of the
Balkans, and by another with thirty thousand in the valley of the Hebrus
(_Maritza_).
But the Roman Empire, in its feeble and flaccid old age, seemed to have
lost all capacity for making war. Theodoric the Amal performed his share
of the compact; but when with his weary army, encumbered with many women
and children, he emerged from the passes of the Balkans he found no
Imperial generals there to meet him, but, instead, Theodoric the
Squinter with a large army of Goths encamped on an inaccessible hill.
Neither chief gave the signal for combat; perhaps both were restrained
by a reluctance to urge the fratricidal strife; but there were daily
skirmishes between the light-armed horsemen at the foraging grounds and
places for watering. Every day, too, the son of Triarius rode round the
hostile camp, shouting forth reproaches against his rival, calling him
"a perjured boy, a madman, a traitor to his race, a fool who could not
see whither the Imperial plans were tending. The Romans would stand by
and look quietly on while Goth wore out Goth in deadly strife". Murmurs
from the Amal's troops showed that these words struck home. Next day the
son of Triarius climbed a hill overlooking the camp, and again raised
his voice in bitter defiance. "Scoundrel! why are you leading so many of
my kinsmen to destruction? why have you made so many Gothic wives
widows? What has become of that wealth and plenty which they had when
they first took service with you? Then they had two or three horses
apiece; now without horses and in the guise of slaves, they are
wandering on foot through Thrace. But they are free-born men surely,
aye, as free-born as you are, and they once measured out the gold coins
of Byzantium with a bushel". When the host heard these words, all, both
men and women, went to their leader Theodoric the Amal, and claimed from
him with tumultuous cries that he should come to an accommodation with
the son of Tnarius. The proposal must have been hateful to the Amal. To
throw away the laboriously earned favour of the Emperor, to denude
himself of the splendid dignity of Master of the Soldiery, to leave the
comfortable home-like fabric of Imperial civilisation and go out again
into the barbarian wilderness with this insolent namesake who had just
been denouncing him as a perjured boy: all this was gall and wormwood to
the spirit of Theodoric. But he knew the conditions under which he held
his sovereignty--"king", as a recent French monarch expressed it, "by
the grace of God and the will of the people", and he did not attempt to
strive against the decision of his tumultuary parliament. He met his
elderly competitor, each standing on the opposite bank of a disparting
stream, and after speech had, they agreed that they would wage no more
war on one another but would make common cause against Byzantium.
The now confederated Theodorics sent an embassy to Zeno, bearing their
common demands for territory, _stipendia_ and rations for their
followers, and, in the case of Theodoric the Amal, charged with bitter
complaints of the desertion which had exposed him to such dangers. The
Emperor replied with an accusation (which appears to have been wholly
unfounded) that Theodoric himself had meditated treachery, and that
this was the reason why the Roman generals had feared to join their
forces to his. Still the Emperor was willing to receive him again into
favour if he would relinquish his alliance with the son of Triarius, and
in order to lure him back the ambassadors were to offer him 1,000
pounds' weight of gold (L40,000), 10,000 of silver (L35,000), a yearly
revenue of 10,000 _aurei_ (L6,000), and the daughter of Olybrius, one of
the noblest-born damsels of Byzantium, for his wife. But the Amal king,
having stooped so low as to make an alliance with the son of Triarius,
was not going to stoop lower by breaking it. The ambassadors returned to
Constantinople with their purpose unaccomplished, and Zeno began
seriously to prepare for the apparently inevitable war with all the
Gothic _foederati_ in his land, commanded by both the Theodorics. He
summoned to the capital all the troops whom he could muster, and
delivered to them a spirited oration, in which he exhorted them to be of
good courage, declaring that he himself would go forth with them to war,
and would share all their hardships and dangers. For nearly a hundred
years, ever since the time of the great Theodosius, no Eastern Emperor
apparently had conducted a campaign in person; and the announcement that
this inactivity was to be ended and that a Roman Imperator was again,
like the Imperators of old time, to march with the legions and to
withstand the shock of battle, roused the soldiers to extraordinary
enthusiasm. The very men who, a little while before, had been bribing
the officers to procure exemption from service, now offered larger sums
of money in order to obtain an opportunity of distinguishing themselves
under the eyes of the Emperor. They pressed forward past the long wall
which at about sixty miles from Constantinople crossed the narrow
peninsula and defended the capital of the Empire; they caught some of
the forerunners of the Gothic host, the Uhlans, if we may call them so,
of Theodoric: everything foreboded an encounter, more serious and
perhaps more triumphant than any that had been seen since the days of
Theodosius. Then, as in a moment, all was changed. Zeno's old spirit of
sloth and cowardice returned. He would not undergo the fatigue of the
long marches through Thrace, he would not look upon the battle-field,
the very pictures of which he found so terrible; it was publicly
announced that the Emperor would not go forth to war. The soldiers,
enraged, began to gather in angry groups, rebuking one another for their
over-patience in submitting to be ruled by such a coward. "How? Are we
men, and have we swords in our hands, and shall we any longer bear with
such disgraceful effeminacy, by which the might of this great Empire is
sapped, so that every barbarian who chooses may carve out a slice from
it?"
These clamours were rapidly growing seditious, and in a few days an
anti-Emperor would probably have been proclaimed; but Zeno, more afraid
of his soldiers than even of the Goths, adroitly moved them into their
widely-scattered winter-quarters, leaving the invaded provinces to take
care of themselves for a little time, while he tried by his own natural
weapons of bribery and intrigue to detach the _other_ and older
Theodoric from the new confederacy.
On this path he met with unmerited success. The son of Triarius, who had
lately been uttering such noble sentiments about Gothic kinship, and the
folly of Gothic warriors playing into the hands of their hereditary
enemies, the crafty courtiers of Constantinople, soon came to terms with
the Emperor, and on receiving the command of two brigades of household
troops,(Scholse) his restoration to all the dignities which he had held
under Basiliscus, the military office which his rival had forfeited, and
rations and allowances for 13,000 of his followers, broke his alliance
with Theodoric the Amal, and entered the service of the Emperor of New
Rome.
Theodoric the Amal, who was now in his own despite (479) an outlaw from
the Roman State, burst in fierce wrath into Macedonia, into the region
where he and his people had been first quartered five years before.
Again he marched down the valley of the Vardar, he took Stobi, putting
its garrison to the sword, and threatened the great city of
Thessalonica. The citizens, fearing that Zeno would abandon them to the
barbarians, broke out into open sedition, threw down the statues of the
Emperor, took the keys of the city from the Prefect and entrusted them
to the safer keeping of their Bishop. Zeno sent ambassadors reproaching
the Amal for his ungrateful requital of the unexampled favours and
dignities which had been conferred upon him, and inviting him to return
to his old fidelity. Theodoric showed himself not unwilling to treat,
sent ambassadors to Constantinople, and ordered his troops to refrain
from murder and conflagration, and to take only the absolute necessaries
of life from the provincials. He then quitted the precincts of
Thessalonica and moved westwards to the city of Heraclea _(Monastir)_,
which lies at the foot of the great mountain range that separates
Macedonia from Epirus. While talking of peace he was already meditating
a new and brilliant stroke of strategy, but he was for some time
hindered from accomplishing it by the illness of his sister, who,
perhaps fatigued by the hardships of the march, had fallen sick in the
camp before Heraclea. This time of enforced delay was occupied by
negotiations with the Emperor. But the Emperor had really nothing to
offer worth the Ostrogoth's acceptance. A settlement on the Pantalian
plain, a bleak upland among the Balkans, about forty miles south of
Sardica _(Sofia)_, and a payment of two hundred pounds' weight of gold
(L8,000) as subsistence-money for the people till they should have had
time to till the land and reap their first harvest, this was all that
Zeno offered to the chief, who already in imagination saw the rich
cities of the Adriatic lying defenceless at his feet. For during this
time of inaction the Amal had opened communications with a Gothic
landowner, named Sigismund, who dwelt near Dyrrhachium _(Durazzo)_, and
was a man of influence in the province of Epirus; and Sigismund, though
nominally a loyal subject of the Emperor, was doing his best to sow
fear and discouragement in the hearts of the citizens of Dyrrhachium
and to prepare the way for the advent of his countrymen.
At length the Gothic princess died, and her brother, the Amal, having
vainly sought to put Heraclea to ransom (the citizens had retired to a
strong fortress which commanded it), burned the deserted city, a deed
more worthy of a barbarian than of one bred up in the Roman
Commonwealth. Then with all his nation-army he started off upon the
great Egnatian Way, which, threading the rough passes of Mount Scardus,
leads from Macedonia to Epirus, from the shores of the AEgean to the
shores of the Adriatic. His light horsemen went first to reconnoitre the
path; then followed Theodoric himself with the first division of his
army. Soas, his second in command, ordered the movements of the middle
host; last of all came the rear-guard, commanded by Theodoric's brother,
Theudimund, and protecting the march of the women, the cattle, and the
waggons. It was a striking proof both of their leader's audacity and of
his knowledge of the decay of martial spirit among the various garrisons
that lined the Egnatian Way, that he should have ventured with such a
train into such a perilous country, where at every turn were narrow
defiles which a few brave men might have held against an army.
The Amal and his host passed safely through the defiles of Scardus and
reached the fortress of Lychnidus overlooking a lake now known as Lake
Ochrida. Here Theodoric met with his first repulse. The fortress was
immensely strong by nature, was well stored with corn, and had
springing fountains of its own, and the garrison were therefore not to
be frightened into surrender. Accordingly, leaving the fortress untaken,
Theodoric with his two first divisions pushed rapidly across the second
and lower range, the Candavian Mountains, leaving Theudimund with the
waggons and the women to follow more slowly. In this arrangement there
was probably an error of judgment which Theodoric had occasion bitterly
to regret. For the moment, however, he was completely successful.
Descending into the plain he took the towns of Scampae (_Elbassan_) and
Dyrrhachium (_Durazzo_), both of which, probably owing to the
discouraging counsels of Sigismund, seem to have been abandoned by their
inhabitants.
Great was the consternation at Edessa (a town about thirty miles west of
Thessalonica and the headquarters of the Imperial troops) when the news
of this unexpected march of Theodoric across the mountains was brought
into the camp. Not only the general-in-chief, Sabinianus, was quartered
there, but also a certain Adamantius, an official of the highest rank,
who had been charged by Zeno with the conduct of the negotiations with
Theodoric, and whose whole soul seems to have been set on the success of
his mission. He contrived to communicate with Theodoric, and advanced
with Sabinianus through the mountains as far as Lychnidus in order to
conduct the discussion at closer quarters. Propositions passed backwards
and forwards as to the terms upon which a meeting could be arranged.
Theodoric sent a Gothic priest; Adamantius in reply offered to come in
person to Dyrrhachium if Soas and another Gothic noble were sent as
hostages for his safe return. Theodoric was willing to send the hostages
if Sabinianus would swear that they should return in safety. This,
however, for some reason or other, the general surlily and stubbornly
refused to do, and Adamantius saw the earnestly desired interview fading
away into impossibility. At length, with courageous self-devotion, he
succeeded in finding a by-path across the mountains, which brought him
to a fort, situated on a hill and strengthened by a deep ditch, in sight
of Dyrrhachium. From thence he sent messengers to Theodoric earnestly
soliciting a conference; and the Amal, leaving his army in the plain,
rode with a few horsemen to the banks of the stream which separated him
from Adamantius' stronghold. Adamantius, too, to guard against a
surprise, placed his little band of soldiers in a circle round the hill,
and then descended to the stream, and with none to listen to their
speech, commenced the long-desired colloquy. How Adamantius may have
opened his case we are not informed, but the Ostrogoth's reply is worth
quoting word for word: "It was my choice to live altogether out of
Thrace, far away towards Scythia, where I should disturb no one by my
presence, and yet should be ready to go forth thence to do the Emperor's
bidding. But you having called me forth, as if for war against the son
of Tnarius, first of all promised that the General of Thrace should
immediately join me with his forces (he never appeared); and then that
Claudius, the Steward of the Goth-money,[39] should meet me with the
pay of the mercenaries (him I never saw); and thirdly, you gave me
guides for my journey, but what sort of guides? Men who, leaving
untrodden all the easier roads into the enemy's country, led me by a
steep path and along the sharp edges of cliffs, where, had the enemy
attacked us, travelling as we were bound to do with horsemen and waggons
and all the lumber of our camp, it had been a marvel if I and all my
folk had not been utterly destroyed. Hence I was forced to make such
terms as I could with the foes, and in fact I owe them many thanks that,
when you had betrayed and they might have consumed me, they nevertheless
spared my life".
[Footnote 39: (Greek: Ton tou Gothicu tamian.) Probably the _Gothicum_
was a fund set apart for subsidising the Goths]
Adamantius went over the old story about the great benefits which the
Emperor had bestowed on Theodoric, the Patriciate, the Mastership, the
rich presents, and all the other evidences of his fatherly regard. He
attempted to answer the charges brought by Theodoric, but in this even
the Greek historian[40] who records the dialogue thinks that he failed.
With more show of reason he complained of the march across the mountains
and the dash into Epirus, while negotiations were proceeding with
Constantinople. He recommended him to make peace with the Empire while
it was in his power, and assuring him that he would never be allowed to
lord it over the great cities of Epirus nor to banish their citizens
from thence to make room for his people, again pressed him to accept the
Emperor's offer of "Dardania" (the Pantalian plain), "where there was
abundance of land, beside that which was already inhabited, a fair and
fertile territory lacking cultivators, which his people could till, so
providing themselves in abundance with all the necessaries of life".
[Footnote 40: Malchus of Philadelphia.]
Theodoric refused with an oath to take his toil-worn people who had
served him so faithfully, at that time of year (it was now perhaps
autumn) into Dardania. No! they must all remain in Epirus for the
winter; then if they could agree upon the rest of the terms he might be
willing in spring to follow a guide sent by the Emperor to lead them to
their new abode. But more than this, he was ready to deposit his baggage
and all his unwarlike folk in any city which the Emperor might appoint,
to give his mother and his sister as hostages for his entire fidelity,
and then to advance at once with ten thousand of his bravest warriors
into Thrace, as the Emperor's ally. With these men and the Imperial
armies now stationed in the Illyrian provinces, he would undertake to
sweep Thrace clear of all the Goths who followed the son of Triarius.
Only he stipulated that in that case he should be clothed with his old
dignity of Master of the Soldiery, which had been taken from him and
bestowed on his rival, and that he should be received into the
Commonwealth and allowed to live--as he evidently yearned to live--as a
Roman citizen.
Adamantius replied that he was not empowered to treat on such terms
while Theodoric remained in Epirus, but he would refer his proposal to
the Emperor, and with this understanding they parted one from the
other.
Meanwhile, important, and for the Goths disastrous, events had been
taking place in the Candavian mountains. Over these the rear-guard of
Theodoric's army, with the waggons and the baggage, had been slowly
making its way, in a security which was no doubt chiefly caused by the
facility of the previous marches, but to which the knowledge of the
negotiations going forward between King and Emperor may partly have
contributed. In any case, security was certainly insecure with such a
fort as Lychnidus untaken in their rear. The garrison of that fort had
been reinforced by many cohorts of the regular army who had flocked
thither at the general's signal, and with these Sabinianus prepared a
formidable ambuscade. He sent a considerable number of infantry round by
unfrequented paths over the mountains, and ordered them to take up a
commanding but concealed position, and to rush forth from thence at a
given signal. He himself started with his cavalry from Lychnidus at
nightfall, and rode rapidly along the Egnatian Way. At dawn the pursuing
horsemen attacked the Goths, who were just descending the last mountain
slopes into the plain. Theudimund, with his mother, was riding near the
head of the long line of march. Too anxious perhaps for her safety, and
fearing to meet the reproachful looks of Theodoric if aught of harm
happened to her, he hurried her across the last bridge, spanning a deep
defile, which intervened between the mountains and the plain, and then
broke down the bridge behind him to prevent pursuit. Pursuit was indeed
rendered impossible, and the mother of Theodoric was saved, but at what
a cost! The Goths turned back to fight, with the courage of despair, the
pursuing cavalry. At that moment the infantry in ambush, having received
the signal, began to attack them from the rocks above. The position was
a terrible one, and many brave men fell in the hopeless battle. Quarter,
however, was given by the Imperial soldiers, for we are told that more
than five thousand of the Goths were taken prisoners. The booty was
large; and all the waggons of the barbarians, two thousand in number,
were of course captured, but the soldiers, misliking the toil of
dragging them back over all those jagged passes to Lychnidus, burned
them there as they stood upon the Candavian mountains.
I have copied with some minuteness the account given us by the Greek
historian of this mountain march of Theodoric, because it brings before
us with more than usual vividness the conditions under which the
campaigns of the barbarians were conducted. It will have been noticed
that the Gothic army is not only an army but a nation, and that the
campaign is also a migration. The mother and the sister of Theodoric are
accompanying him. There is evidently a long train of non-combatants, old
men, women, and children, following the army in those two thousand
Gothic waggons. The character attributed by Horace to the
Campestres Scythae,
Quorum plaustra vagas rite trahunt domos
still survives.
"The waggon holds the Scythian's wandering home".
The Goth, a terrible enemy to those outside the pale of his kinship, is
a home-lover at heart, and even in war will not separate himself from
his wife and children. This makes his impact slow, his campaigns
unscientific. It prepares for him frequent defeats, such as that of the
Candavian mountains, which a celibate army would have avoided. But it
makes his conquests, when he does conquer, more enduring, while it
explains those perpetual demands for land, for a settlement within the
Empire, almost on any terms, with which, as was before shown, the
barbarian inroads so often close. We need not follow the tedious story
of the negotiations with Adamantius, which were interrupted by this
sudden success of the Imperial arms. In fact at this point our best
authority,[41] who has been unusually full and graphic for the events of
478 and 479, suddenly fails us, and we have scarcely anything but dry
and scanty annalistic notices for the next nine years of the life of
Theodoric. He seems not to have maintained his footing in Epirus, but to
have returned to the neighbourhood of the Danube, where he fought and
conquered the king of the Bulgarians, a fresh horde of barbarians who at
this time made their first appearance in "the Balkan peninsula" Whether
the much desired reconciliation with the Empire took place we know not.
It seems probable that this may have been the case, as in the year 481
we find his rival, the other Theodoric, in opposition, and planning an
invasion of Greece. But the career of the son of Triarius was about to
come to an untimely close. Marching westwards, he had reached a station
on the Egnatian Way, near the frontiers of Thrace and Macedonia, called
"The Stables of Diomed", and there pitched his camp. One morning he
would fain mount his horse for a gallop across the plain, but before he
was securely seated in the saddle the horse reared. The rider, afraid to
grasp the bridle firmly lest he should pull the creature over upon him,
clung tightly to his seat, but could not guide the horse, which, in its
dancing and prancing, came sidling past the door of the tent. There was
hanging, in barbarian fashion, a spear fastened by a thong. The horse
shied up against the spear, whose point gored his master's side. He was
not killed on the spot, but died soon after of the wound. After some
domestic dissensions and bloodshed, the leadership of his band passed to
his son Recitach, apparently a hot-tempered and tyrannical youth.
[Footnote 41: Malchus of Philadelphia, from whose history certain
"Extracts concerning Embassies" were made by order of the Emperor
Constantine Porphyrogemtus.]
Three years after his father's death (484), Recitach, now an enemy of
the Empire, was put to death by Theodoric the Amal, acting under the
orders of Zeno. The band of Triarian Goths, thirty thousand fighting men
in number, was joined to the army of Theodoric, an important addition to
his power, but also to his cares, to the ever-present difficulty of
finding food for his followers.
(481-487) Backwards and forwards between peace and war with the Empire,
Theodoric wavered during the six years which followed his rival's death.
The settlement of his people at this time seems to have been on the
southern shore of the Danube, in part of the countries now known as
Servia and Wallachia, with Novae _(Sistova)_ for his headquarters. One
year (482) he is making a raid into Macedonia and Thessaly and
plundering Larissa. The next (483) he is again clothed with his old
dignity of Master of the Soldiery and keeps his Goths rigidly within
their allotted limits. The next (484) he is actually raised to the
Consulate, an office which, though devoid of power, is still so radiant
with the glory of the illustrious men who have held it for near a
thousand years, from the days of Brutus and Collatinus, that Emperors
covet the possession of it and the mightiest barbarian chiefs in their
service long for no higher reward.
Two years after this (486) he is again in rebellion, ravaging Thrace;
the next year (487) he has broken through the Long Walls and penetrates
within fourteen miles of Constantinople. In all this wearisome period of
Theodoric's life his action seems to be merely destructive; there is
nothing constructive, no fruitful or fertilising thought to be found in
it. Had this been a fair sample of his life, there could be no reason
why he should not sink into the oblivion which covers so many forgotten
freebooters. But in 488 a change came over the spirit of his dream. A
plan was agreed upon between him and the Emperor (by which of them it
was first suggested we cannot now say) for the employment of all this
wasted and destructive force in another field, where its energies might
accomplish some result beneficent and enduring.
That new field was Italy, and in order to understand the conditions of
the problem which there awaited Theodoric, we must briefly recount the
chief events which had happened in that peninsula since Attila departed
from untaken Rome in compliance with the petition of Pope Leo.
[Illustration: GOLDEN SOLIDUS.
(LEO II ZENO)]
[Illustration:]
CHAPTER VI.
ITALY UNDER ODOVACAR.
Condition of Italy--End of the line of Theodosius--Ricimer the
Patrician--Struggles with the Vandals--Orestes the Patrician makes his
son Emperor, who is called Augustulus--The fall of the Western Empire
and elevation of Odovacar--Embassies to Constantinople.
[Illustration: I]
In former chapters I have very briefly sketched the
fortunes of the Italian peninsula during two great barbarian
invasions--that of Alaric (407-410) and that of Attila (452). The
monarch who ruled the Western Empire at the date of the last invasion
was Valentinian III., grandson of the great Theodosius. He dwelt
sometimes at Rome, sometimes at Ravenna, which latter city, protected by
the waves of the Adriatic and by the innumerable canals and pools
through which the waters of two rivers [42] flowed lazily to the sea,
was all but impregnable by the barbarians. A selfish and indolent
voluptuary, Valentinian III. made no valuable contribution to the
defence of the menaced Empire, some stones of which were being shaken
down every year by the tremendous blows of the Teutonic invaders. Any
wisdom that might be shown in the councils of the State was due to his
mother, Galla Placidia, who, till her death in 451, was the real ruler
of the Empire. Any strength and valour that was displayed in its defence
was due to the great minister and general, Aetius, a man who had
himself, probably, many drops of barbarian blood in his veins, though he
has been not unfitly styled "the last of the Romans". It was Aetius who,
as we have seen, in concert with the Visigothic king, fought the fight
of civilisation against Hunnish barbarism on the Catalaunian
battle-plain. It was to "Aetius, thrice Consul", that "the groans of the
Britons" were addressed when "the Barbarians drove them to the sea, and
the sea drove them back on the Barbarians".
[Footnote 42: The Ronco and the Montone.]
When Attila was dead, the weak and worthless Emperor seems to have
thought that he might safely dispense with the services of this too
powerful subject. Inviting Aetius to his palace, he debated with him a
scheme for the marriage of their children (the son of the general was to
wed the daughter of the Emperor), and when the debate grew warm, with
calculated passion he snatched a sword from one of his guardsmen, and
with it pierced the body of Aetius. The bloody work was finished by the
courtiers standing by, and the most eminent of the friends and
counsellors of the deceased statesman were murdered at the same time.
The foul assassination of this great defender of the Roman State was
requited next year by two barbarians of his train, men who no doubt
cherished for Aetius the same feelings of personal loyalty which bound
the members of a Teutonic "Comitatus" to their chief, and who deemed
life a dishonour while their leader's blood remained unavenged. On a day
in March, while Valentinian was watching intently the games in the
Campus Martius of Rome, these two barbarians rushed upon him and stabbed
him, slaying at the same time the eunuch, who had been his chief
confederate in the murder of Aetius.
With Valentinian III. the line of Theodosius, which had swayed the Roman
sceptre for eighty-six years, came to an end. None of the men who after
him bore the great title of Augustus in Rome (I am speaking, of course,
of the fifth century only) succeeded in founding a dynasty. Not only was
no one of them followed by a son: scarcely one of them was suffered to
end his own reign in peace. Of the nine Emperors who wore the purple in
Italy after the death of Valentinian, only two ended their reigns in the
course of nature, four were deposed, and three met their death by
violence. Only one reigned for more than five years; several could only
measure the duration of their royalty by months. Even the short period
(455-476) which these nine reigns occupy is not entirely filled by them,
for there were frequent interregna, one lasting for a year and eight
months. And the men were as feeble as their kingly life was short and
precarious. With the single exception of Majorian, (457-461), a brave
and strong man, and one who, if fair play had been given him, would have
assuredly done something to stay the ruin of the Empire, all of these
nine men (with whose names there is no need to burden the reader's
memory) are fitly named by a German historian "the Shadow Emperors".
During sixteen years of this time (456-472), supreme power in the Empire
was virtually wielded by a nobleman of barbarian origin, but naturalised
in the Roman State, the proud and stern "Patrician" Ricimer. This man,
descended from the chiefs of the Suevi,[43] grandson of a Visigothic
king, and brother-in-law of a king of the Burgundians, was doubtless
able to bring much barbaric influence to support the cause which, from
whatever motives, he had espoused,--the cause of the defence of that
which was left to Rome of her Empire in the West of Europe.
[Footnote: 43 widely spread German nation, the largest fragment of which
was at this time settled in the west of Spain and in Portugal.]
Many Teutonic tribes had by this time settled themselves in the Imperial
lands. Spain was quite lost to the Empire: some fragments of Gaul were
still bound to it by a most precarious tie; but the loss which
threatened the life of the State most nearly was the loss of Africa. For
this province, the capital of which was the restored and Romanised city
of Carthage, had been for generations the chief exporter of corn to feed
the pauperised population of Rome, and here now dwelt and ruled, and
from hence (428-432) sallied forth to his piratical raids against
Italy, the deadliest enemy of the Roman name, the king of the Vandals,
Gaiseric.[44] The Vandal conquest of Africa was, at the time which we
have now reached, a somewhat old story, nearly a generation having
elapsed since it occurred,[45] but the Vandal sack of Rome, which came
to pass immediately after the death of Valentinian III., and which
marked the beginning of the period of the "Shadow Emperors" was still
near and terrible to the memories of men. No Roman but remembered in
bitterness of soul how in June, 455, the long ships of the Vandals
appeared at the mouth of the Tiber, how Gaiseric and his men landed,
marched to the Eternal City, and entered it unopposed, how they remained
there for a fortnight, not perhaps slaying or ravishing, but with calm
insolence plundering the city of all that they cared to carry away,
stripping off what they supposed to be the golden roof of the Capitol,
removing the statues from their pedestals, transporting everything that
seemed beautiful or costly, and stowing away all their spoils in the
holds of those insatiable vessels of theirs which lay at anchor at
Ostia.
[Footnote 44: Commonly but incorrectly called Genseric. The form used
above, which is that found in nearly all contemporary historians, is now
almost universally employed by German scholars.]
[Footnote 45: The capture of Carthage, which completed the conquest, did
not take place till 439.]
The remembrance of this humiliating capture and the fear that it might
at any moment be repeated, probably with circumstances of greater
atrocity, were the dominant emotions in the hearts of the Roman Senate
and people during the twenty-one years which we are now rapidly
surveying. It was doubtless these feelings which induced them to submit
more patiently than they would otherwise have done to the scarcely
veiled autocracy of an imperfectly Romanised Teuton such as Ricimer. He
was a barbarian, it was true; probably he could not even speak Latin
grammatically; but he was mighty with the barbarian kings, mighty with
the _foederati_ the rough soldiers gathered from every German tribe on
the other side of the Alps, who now formed the bulk of the Imperial
army; let him be as arrogant as he would to the Senate, let him set up
and pull down one "Shadow Emperor" after another, if only he would keep
the streets of Rome from being again profaned by the tread of the
terrible Vandal.
(456-468) To a certain extent the confidence reposed in Ricimer was not
misplaced. He inflicted a severe defeat on the Vandals in a naval
engagement near the island of Corsica; he raised to the throne the young
and valiant Majorian, who repelled a Vandal invasion of Campania; he
planned, in conjunction with the Eastern Emperor, a great expedition
against Carthage, which failed through no fault of his, but by the bad
generalship of Basiliscus, whose brother-in-law, Leo, had appointed him
to the command. But the rule of a barbarian like Ricimer exercised on
the sacred soil of Italy, and the brutal arrogance with which he dashed
down one of his puppet-Emperors after another when they had served his
purpose, must have done much to break the spirit of the Roman nobles and
the Roman commonalty, and to prepare the way for the Teutonic revolution
which occurred soon after his death. Above all, we have reason to think
that, during the whole time of Ricimer's ascendancy, the barbarian
_foederati_ were becoming more absolutely dominant in the Roman army, and
with waxing numbers were growing more insolent in their demeanour, and
more intolerable In their demands.
The ranks of the _foederati_ were at this time recruited, not from one of
the great historic nationalities--Visigoth, Ostrogoth, Frank, or
Burgundian,--but chiefly from a number of petty tribes, known as the
Rugii, Scyri, Heruli, and Turcilingi, who have failed to make any
enduring mark in history. These tribes, which upon the break-up of
Attila's Empire had established themselves on the shore of the Middle
Danube, north and west of the lands occupied by the Ostrogoths, were
continually sending their young warriors over the passes of Noricum
(_Salzburg, Styria_, and _Carinthia_) to seek their fortune in Italy.
One of these recruits, on his southward journey, stepped into the cave
of a holy hermit named Severinus, and stooping his lofty stature in the
lowly cell, asked the saint's blessing. When the blessing was given, the
youth said: "Farewell". "Not farewell, but fare forward",[46] answered
Severinus. "Onward into Italy: skin-clothed now, but destined before
long to enrich many men with costly gifts". The name of this young
recruit was Odovacar.[47]
[Footnote 46: "Vale". "Vade".]
[Footnote 47: This is the form of the name used by contemporary
historians; Odoacer is a later and less authentic form.]
Odovacar probably entered Italy about 465. He attached himself to the
party of Ricimer, and before long became a conspicuous captain of
_foederati_ After the death of Ricimer (18th August, 472), there was a
series of rapid revolutions in the Roman State. Olybrius, the then
reigning nonentity, died in October of the same year.
(June, 474) After five months' interregnum, a yet more shadowy shadow,
Glycerius, succeeded him, and after fifteen months of rule was thrust
from the throne by Julius Nepos, who had married the niece of Verina,
the mischief-making Augusta of the East, and who was, therefore,
supported by all the moral influence of Constantinople.
Nepos, after fourteen months of Empire, in which he distinguished
himself only by the loss of some (Oct.,475) Gaulish provinces to the
Visigoths, was in his turn dethroned by the Master of the Soldiery,
Orestes, who had once held a subordinate situation in the court of
Attila. Nepos fled to Dalmatia, which was probably his native land, and
lived there for four years after his dethronement, still keeping up some
at least of the state which belonged to a Roman Emperor.
We know very little of the pretexts for these rapid revolutions, or the
circumstances attending them, but there cannot be much doubt that the
army was the chief agent in what, to borrow a phrase from modern
Spanish politics, were a series of _pronunciamentos_. For some reason
which is dim to us, Orestes, though a full-blooded Roman citizen, did
not set the diadem on his own head, but placed it on that of his son, a
handsome boy of some fourteen or fifteen years, named Romulus, and
nicknamed "the little Augustus". For himself, he took the dignity of
"Patrician", which had been so long worn by Ricimer, and was associated
in men's minds with the practical mastery of the Empire. But a ruler who
has been raised to the throne by military sedition soon finds that the
authors of his elevation are the most exacting of masters. The
_foederati,_ who knew themselves now absolute arbiters of the destiny of
the Empire, and who had the same craving for a settlement within its
borders which we have met with more than once among the followers of
Theodoric, presented themselves before the Patrician Orestes, and
demanded that one-third of the lands of Italy should be assigned to them
as a perpetual inheritance. This was more than Orestes dared to grant,
and, on his refusal, Odovacar said to the mercenaries: "Make me king and
I will obtain for you your desire".
(23d Aug., 476) The offer was accepted; Odovacar was lifted high on a
shield by the arms of stalwart barbarians, and saluted as king by their
unanimous acclamations.
When the _foederati_ were gathered out of the "Roman" army, there seems
to have been nothing left that was capable of making any real defence of
the Empire. The campaign, if such it may be called, between Odovacar
and Orestes was of the shortest and most perfunctory kind. Ticinum
(_Pavia_), in which Orestes had taken refuge, was taken, sacked, and
partly burnt by the barbarians. The Master of the Soldiery himself fled
to Placentia, but was there taken prisoner and beheaded, only five days
after the elevation of Odovacar. A week later his brother Paulus, who
had not men enough to hold even the strong city of Ravenna, was taken
prisoner, and slain in the great pine-forest outside that city. At
Ravenna the young puppet-Emperor, Romulus, was also taken prisoner. The
barbarian showed himself more merciful, perhaps also more contemptuous,
towards his boy-rival than was the custom of the Emperors of Rome and
Constantinople towards the sons of their competitors. Odovacar, who
pitied the tender years of Augustulus, and looked with admiration on his
beautiful countenance, spared his life and assigned to him for a
residence the palace and gardens of Lucullus, the conqueror of
Mithridates, who five and a half centuries before had prepared for
himself this beautiful home (the Lucullanum) in the very heart of the
lovely Bay of Naples. The building and the fortifying of a great
commercial city have utterly altered the whole aspect of the bay, but in
the long egg-shaped peninsula, on which stands to-day the Castel dell'
Ovo, we can still see the outlines of the famous Lucullanum, in which
the last Roman Emperor of Rome ended his inglorious days. His conqueror
generously allowed him a pension of L3,600 per annum, but for how long
this pension continued to be a charge on the revenues of the new
kingdom we are unable to say. There is one doubtful indication of his
having survived his abdication by about thirty years,[48] but clear
historical notices of his subsequent life and of the date of his death
are denied us; a striking proof of the absolute nullity of his
character.
[Footnote 48: I allude here to a letter in the Vanarum of Cassiodorus
(iii., 35), written between 504 and 525, and addressed to Romulus and
his mother. But we can by no means prove that this is Romulus
Augustulus.]
This then was the event which stands out in the history of Europe as the
"Fall of the Western Empire" The reader will perceive that it was no
great and terrible invasion of a conquering host like the Fall of the
Eastern Empire in 1453; no sudden overthrow of a national polity like
the Norman Conquest of 1066; not even a bloody overturning of the
existing order by demagogic force like the French Revolution of 1792. It
was but the continuance of a process which had been going forward more
or less manifestly for nearly a century,--the recognition of the fact
that the _foederati,_ the so-called barbarian mercenaries of Rome, were
really her masters. If we had to seek a parallel for the event of 476,
we should find it rather in the deposition of the last Mogul Emperor at
Delhi, and the public assumption by the British Queen of the "Raj" over
the greater part of India, than in any of the other events to which we
have alluded.
Reflecting on this fact, and seeing that the Roman Empire still lived on
in the East for nearly a thousand years, that the Eastern Caesar never
for many generations reliquished his claim to be considered the
legitimate ruler of the Old Rome, as well as of the New, and sometimes
asserted that claim in a very real and effective manner, and considering
too that Charles the Great, when he (in modern phrase) "restored the
Western Empire" in 800, never professed to be the successor of Romulus
Augustulus, but of Constantine VI., the then recently deposed Emperor of
the East; the latest school of historical investigators, with scarcely
an exception, minimise the importance of the event of 476, and some even
object to the expression "Fall of the Western Empire" as fitly
describing it. The protest is a sound one and was greatly needed.
Perhaps now the danger is in the other direction, and there is a risk of
our making too little of an event in which after all the sceptre did
manifestly depart from Rome. During the whole interval between
Odovacar's accession and Belisarius' occupation of Rome (476-536), no
Roman, however proud or patriotic, could blind himself to the fact that
a man of barbarian blood was the real, and in a certain sense the
supreme, ruler of his country. Ricimer might be looked upon as an
eminent servant of the Emperor who had the misfortune to be of barbarian
birth. Odovacar and Theodoric were, without all contradiction, kings; if
not "kings of Italy", at any rate "kings in Italy", sometimes actually
making war on the Caesar of Byzantium, and not caring, when they did so,
to set up the phantom of a rival Emperor in order to legitimise their
opposition. But in a matter so greatly debated as this it will be safer
not to use our own or any modern words, This is how Count Marcellinus,
an official of the Eastern Empire, writing his annals about fifty-eight
years after the deposition of Romulus, describes the event: "Odovacar
killed Orestes and condemned his son Augustulus to the punishment of
exile in the Lucullanum, a castle of Campania. The Hesperian (Western)
Empire of the Roman people, which Octavianus Augustus first of the
Augusti began to hold in the 709th year of the building of the city
(B.C. 44), perished with this Augustulus in the 522d year of his
predecessors (A.D. 476), the kings of the Goths thenceforward holding
both Rome and Italy".[49]
[Footnote 49: "Orestem Odoacer llico trucidavit, Augustulum filium
Orestis Odoacer in Lucullano Campania castello exilii poena damnavit.
Hesperium Romana gentis imperium, quod septingentesimo nono urbis
condita anno primus Augustorum Octavianus Augustus tenere coepit, cum hoc
Augustulo periit, anno decessorum regni Imperatorum DXXII. Gothorum
dehinc regibus Romam tenentibus". It will be seen that there is an error
of two years in the calculation.]
Of the details of Odovacar's rule in Italy we know very little. Of
course the _foederati_ had their will, at any rate in some measure, with
reference to the assignment of land in Italy, but no historian has told
us anything as to the social disorganisation which such a redistribution
of property must have produced. There are some indications that it was
not thoroughly carried into effect, at any rate in the South of Italy,
and that the settlements of the _foederati_ were chiefly in the valley of
the Po, and in the districts since known as the Romagna.
The old Imperial machinery of government was taken over by the new
ruler, and in all outward appearance things probably went on under King
Odovacar much as they had done under Count Ricimer. No great act of
cruelty or oppression stains the memory of Odovacar. He lost Provence to
the Visigoths, but, on the other hand, he by judicious diplomacy
recovered Sicily from the Vandals. Altogether it is probable that Italy
was, at any rate, not more miserable under the sway of this barbarian
king than she had been at any time since Alaric's invasion, in 408,
proclaimed her helplessness to the world.
One piece of solemn comedy is worth relating, namely, the embassies
despatched to Constantinople by the rival claimants to the dominion of
Italy. It was probably towards the end of 477, or early in 478, that
Zeno, then recently returned from exile after the usurpation of
Basiliscus, received two embassies from two deposed Emperors of the
West. First of all came the ambassadors of Augustulus, or rather of the
Roman Senate, sent nominally by the orders of Augustulus, really by
those of Odovacar. These men, great Roman nobles, represented "that they
did not need an Emperor of their own. One absolute ruler was sufficient
to guard both East and West; but they had, moreover, chosen Odovacar,
who was well able to protect their interests, being a man wise in
counsel and brave in war. They therefore prayed the Emperor to bestow on
him the dignity of Patrician, and to entrust to him the administration
of the affairs of Italy". At the same time (apparently) they brought the
ornaments of the Imperial dignity, the diadem, the purple robe, the
jewelled buskins, which had been worn by all the "Shadow Emperors" who
flitted across the stage, and requested that they might be laid up in
the Imperial palace at Constantinople.
Simultaneously there came ambassadors from Nepos, the Imperial refugee,
the nephew by marriage of Verina. From his Dalmatian exile he
congratulated his kinsman Zeno on his recent restoration to the throne,
and begged him to lend men and money to bring about the like happy
result for him by replacing him on the Western throne.
To these embassies Zeno returned ambiguous answers, which seemed to
leave the question as to the legitimacy of Odovacar's rule an open one.
The Senate were sharply rebuked for having acquiesced in the
dethronement of Nepos, and a previous Emperor who had been sent to them
from the East.[50] Odovacar was recommended to seek the coveted dignity
from Nepos, and to co-operate for his return. At the same time, the
moderation of Odovacar's rule, and his desire to conform himself to the
maxims of Roman civilisation, received the Emperor's praise. The nature
of the reply to Nepos is not recorded, but it was no doubt made plain to
him that sympathy and good wishes were all that he would receive from
his Eastern colleague. The letters addressed to Odovacar bore the
superscription "To the _Patrician_ Odovacar", and that was all that the
barbarian really cared for. With such a title as this, every act, even
the most high-handed, on the part of the barbarian king was rendered
legitimate. Nepos and Augustulus were equally excluded as useless
encumbrances to the state, and the kings _de jure_ and _de facto_ became
practically one man, and that man Odovacar.
[Footnote 50: Anthemius.]
[Illustration: HALF-SILIQUA OF SILVER. (ODOVACAR.)]
[Illustration:]
CHAPTER VII.
THE CONQUEST OF ITALY.
Odovacar invades Dalmatia--Conducts a successful campaign against the
Rugians--Theodoric accepts from Zeno the commission to overthrow
Odovacar--He invades Italy, overthrowing the Gepidse, who attempt to bar
his passage--Battles of the Isonzo and Verona--Odovacar takes refuge in
Ravenna--The treachery of Tufa--Gundobad, king of the Burgundians, comes
to Italy to oppose Theodoric, while Alaric II, king of the Visigoths,
comes as his ally--The battle of the Adda, and further defeat of
Odovacar--Surrender of Ravenna--Assassination of Odovacar.
[Illustration:]
The friendly relations between Odovacar and the Eastern Emperor which
had been established by the embassy last described were gradually
altered into estrangement. In the year 480, Nepos, the dethroned Emperor
of Rome, was stabbed by two treacherous courtiers in his palace near
Salona. Odovacar led an army into Dalmatia, and avenged the murder, but
also apparently annexed the province of Dalmatia to his dominion, thus
coming into nearer neighbourhood with Constantinople (487-488) This may
have been one cause of alienation, but a more powerful one was the
negotiation which was commenced in the year 484 between Odovacar and
Illus, the last of the many insurgent generals who disturbed the reign
of Zeno. At first Odovacar held himself aloof from the proposed
confederacy, but afterwards (486) he was disposed, or Zeno believed that
he was disposed, to accept the alliance of the insurgent general. In
order to find him sufficient occupation nearer home, the Emperor fanned
into a flame the smouldering embers of discord between Odovacar and
Feletheus, king of the Rugians, the most powerful ruler of those
Danubian lands from which the Italian king himself had migrated into
Italy. The Rugian war was short, and Odovacar's success was decisive. In
487 he vanquished the Rugian army and carried Feletheus and his wife
prisoners to Ravenna. In 488 an attempt to raise again the standard of
the Rugian monarchy, which was made by Frederic, the son of Feletheus,
was crushed, and Frederic, an exile and a fugitive, betook himself to
the camp of Theodoric, who was then dwelling at Novae(_Sistova?_), on the
Danube.
When the attempt to weaken Odovacar by means of his fellow-barbarians in
"Rugiland" failed, Zeno feigned outward acquiescence, offering
congratulations on the victory and receiving presents out of the Rugian
spoils, but in his heart he felt that there must now be war to the death
between him and this too powerful ruler of Italy. The news came to him
at a time when Theodoric was in one of his most turbulent and
destructive moods, when he had penetrated within fourteen miles of
Constantinople and had fired the towns and villages of Thrace, perhaps
even within sight of the capital. It was a natural thought and not
altogether an unstatesmanlike expedient to play off one disturber of his
peace against the other, to commission Theodoric to dethrone the
"tyrant" Odovacar, and thus at least earn repose for the provincials of
Thrace, perhaps secure an ally at Ravenna. Theodoric, we may be sure,
with those instincts of civilisation and love for the Empire which had
been in his heart from boyhood, though often repressed and disobeyed,
needed little exhortation to an enterprise which he may himself have
suggested to the Emperor.
Thus then it came to pass that a formal interview was arranged between
Emperor and King (perhaps at Constantinople, though it seems doubtful
whether Theodoric could have safely trusted himself within its walls),
and at this interview the terms of the joint enterprise were arranged,
an enterprise to which Theodoric was to contribute all the effective
strength and Zeno the glamour of Imperial legitimacy.
When the high contracting parties met, Theodoric lamented the hapless
condition of Italy and Rome: Italy once subject to the predecessors of
Zeno; Rome, once the mistress of the world, now harassed and distressed
by the usurped authority of a king of Rugians and Turcilingians. If the
Emperor would send Theodoric thither with his people, he would be at
once relieved from the heavy charges of their _stipendia_ which he was
now bound to furnish, while Theodoric would hold the land as of the free
gift of the Emperor, and would reign there as king, only till Zeno
himself should arrive to claim the supremacy[51].
[Footnote 51: The account of this important interview is combined from
two sources: Jordanes, the Gothic historian, who naturally magnifies
Theodoric's share in the inception of the enterprise; and a chronicler
known as "Anonymus Valesii", who evidently writes in the interest of
Zeno. It is from the latter only that we have any hint of an intended
visit of Zeno to Italy, a visit which certainly never took place.
Procopius, who also writes from the Byzantine point of view, attributes
the conception of the design to Zeno.]
In the autumn of the year 488, Theodoric with all his host set forth
from Sistova on the Danube on his march to Italy. His road was the same
taken by Alaric and by most of the barbarian invaders; along the Danube
as far as Belgrade, then between the rivers Drave and Save or along the
banks of one of them till he reached the Julian Alps (not far from the
modern city of Laibach), then down upon Aquileia and the Venetian plain.
As in the Macedonian campaign, so now, he was accompanied by all the
members of his nation, old men and children, mothers and maidens, and
doubtless by a long train of waggons. We have no accurate information
whatever as to the number of his army, but various indications, both in
earlier and later history, seem to justify us in assuming that the
soldiers must have numbered fully 40,000; and if this was the case, the
whole nation cannot have been less than 200,000. The difficulty of
finding food for so great a multitude in the often desolated plains of
Pannonia and Noricum must have been enormous, and was no doubt the
reason of the slowness of Theodoric's progress. Very probably he divided
his army into several portions, moving on parallel lines; foragers would
scour the country far and wide, stores of provisions would be
accumulated in the great Gothic waggons, which would be laboriously
driven over the rough mountain passes. Then all the divisions of the
army which had scattered in search of food would have to concentrate
again when they came into the neighbourhood of an enemy, whether
Odovacar or one of the barbarian kings who sought to bar their progress.
All these operations consumed much time, and hence it was that though
the Goths started on their pilgrimage in 488 (probably in the autumn of
that year) they did not descend into the plains of Italy even at its
extreme north-eastern corner, till July, 489.
There was one fact which probably facilitated the progress of Theodoric,
and prevented his expedition with such a multitude from being condemned
as absolute foolhardiness. His road lay, for the most part, through
regions with which he was already well acquainted, through a land which
might almost be called his native land, and both the resources and the
difficulties of which were well known to him. The first considerable
city that he came to, Singidunum (the modern Belgrade), was the scene of
his own first boyish battle. The Gepidae, who were his chief antagonists
on the road, had swarmed over into that very province of Pannonia where
his father's palace once stood; and though they showed themselves
bitter foes, they were doubtless surrounded by foes of their own who
would be friends to the Ostrogoths. Probably, too, Frederic, the Rugian
refugee, brought with him many followers who knew the road and could
count on the assistance of some barbarian allies, eager to overturn the
throne of Odovacar. Thus it will be seen that though the perils of the
Ostrogothic march were tremendous, the danger which in those mapless
days was so often fatal to an invading army--ignorance of the
country--was not among them.
We are vaguely told of countless battles fought by the Ostrogoths with
Sclavonic and other tribes that lay across their line of march, but the
only battle of which we have any details (and those only such as we can
extract from the cloudy rhetoric of a popular preacher[52]) is one which
was fought with the Gepidse, soon after the Goths had emerged from the
territory of the friendly Empire, near the great mere or river which
went by the name of Hiulca Palus, in what is now the crown-land of
Sclavonia. When the great and over-wearied multitude approached the
outskirts of the Gepid territory, their leader sent an embassy to
Traustila, king of the Gepidae, entreating that his host might have an
unmolested passage, and offering to pay for the provisions which they
would require. To this embassy Traustila returned a harsh and insulting
answer: "He would yield no passage through his dominions to the
Ostrogoths; if they would go by that road they must first fight with
the unconquered Gepidae" Traustila then took up a strong position near
the Hiulca Palus, whose broad waters, girdled by fen and treacherous
morass, made the onward march of the invaders a task of almost desperate
danger. But the Ostrogoths could not now retreat; famine and pestilence
lay behind them on their road; they must go forward, and with a
reluctant heart Theodoric gave the signal for the battle.
[Footnote 52: Ennodius, Bishop of Pavia, whose Panegyric on Theodoric,
spoken about 506, is our chief authority for this part of the history.]
It seemed at first as if that battle would be lost, and as if the name
and fame of the Ostrogothic people would be swallowed up in the morasses
of the reedy Hiulca. Already the van of the army, floundering in the
soft mud, and with only their wicker shields to oppose to the deadly
shower of the Gepid arrows, were like to fall back in confusion. Then
Theodoric, having called for a cup of wine, and drunk to the fortunes of
his people, in a few spirited words called to his soldiers to follow his
standard--the standard of a king who would carve out the way to victory.
Perchance he may have discerned some part of the plain where the road
went over solid ground, and if that were beset by foes, at any rate the
Gepid was less terrible than the morass. So it was that he charged
triumphantly through the hostile ranks, and, being followed by his eager
warriors, achieved a signal victory. The Gepidae were soon wandering over
the plain, a broken and dispirited force. Multitudes of them were slain
before the descent of night saved the remaining fugitives, and so large
a number of the Gepid store-waggons fell into the hands of the
Ostrogoths that throughout the host one voice of rejoicing arose that
Traustila had been willing to fight. So had a little Gothic blood bought
food more than they could ever have afforded money to purchase.
Thus, through foes and famine, hardships of the winter and hardships of
the summer, the nation-army held on its way, and at length (as has been
already said) in the month of August (489) the last of the waggons
descended from the highlands, which are an outpost of the Julian Alps,
and the Ostrogoths were encamped on the plains of Italy. Odovacar, who
apparently had allowed them to accomplish the passage of the Alps
unmolested, stood ready to meet them on the banks of the Isonzo, the
river which flows near the ruins of the great city of Aquileia. He had a
large army, the kernel of which would doubtless be those mercenaries who
had raised him on the shield thirteen years before, and among whom he
had divided one-third part of the soil of Italy. But many other
barbarians had flocked to his standard, so that he had, as it were, a
little court of kings, chieftains serving under him as supreme leader.
He himself, however, was now in the fifty-sixth year of his age, and his
genius for war, if he ever had any, seems to have failed him. He fought
(as far as we can discern his conduct from the fragmentary notices of
the annalists and panegyrists) with a sort of sullen savageness, like a
wild beast at bay, but without skill either of strategy or tactics. The
invaders, encumbered with the waggons and the non-combatants, had
greatly the disadvantage of position. Odovacar's camp had been long
prepared, was carefully fortified, and protected by the deep and rapid
Isonzo. But Theodoric's soldiers succeeded in crossing the river,
stormed the camp, defended as it was by a strong earthen rampart, and
sent its defenders flying in wild rout over the plains of Venetia.
Odovacar fell back on the line of the Adige, and the beautiful
north-eastern corner of Italy, the region which includes among its
cities Udine, Venice, Vicenza, Padua, now accepted without dispute the
rule of Theodoric, and perhaps welcomed him as a deliverer from the
stern sway of Odovacar.[53] From this time forward it is allowable to
conjecture that the most pressing of Theodoric's anxieties, that which
arose from the difficulty of feeding and housing the women and children
of his people, if not wholly removed was greatly lightened. Odovacar
took up a strong position near Verona, separated from that city by the
river Adige. Theodoric, though not well provided with warlike
appliances,[54] rightly judged that it was of supreme importance to his
cause to follow up with rapidity the blow struck on the banks of the
Isonzo, and accordingly, towards the end of September, he, with his
army, stood before the _fossatum_ or entrenched camp at Verona. In order
to force his soldiers to fight bravely, Odovacar had, in defiance of the
ordinary rules of war, placed his camp where retreat was almost
hopelessly barred by the swift stream of the Adige, and he addressed his
army with stout words full of simulated confidence in victory. On the
morning of the 30th of September, when the two armies were about to join
in what must evidently be a most bloody encounter, the mother and sister
of Theodoric, Erelieva and Amalfrida, sought his presence and asked him
with some anxiety what were the chances of the battle. With words,
reminding us of the Homeric saying that "the best omen is to fight
bravely for one's country", Theodoric reassured their doubting hearts.
On that day, he told his mother, it was for him to show that she had
given birth to a hero on the day when the Ostrogoths did battle with the
Huns. Dressed in his most splendid robes, those robes which their hands
had adorned with bright embroidery, he would be conspicuous both to
friend and foe, and would give a noble spoil to his conqueror if any man
could succeed in slaying him. With these words he leapt on his horse,
rushed to the van, cheered on his wavering troops, and began a series of
charges, which at length, but not till thousands of his own men as well
as of the enemy were slain, carried the _fossatum_ of Odovacar.
[Footnote 53: I cannot put this as more than a conjecture. We have
singularly little information, even from the panegyrical Ennodius, as to
the feelings of the Italian provincials during this crisis of their
fate.]
[Footnote 54: Expers bellicis rebus (Continuatio Prosperi: Codex
Havniensis)]
The battle once gained, of course the dispositions which Odovacar had
made to ensure the resistance of his soldiers, necessitated their ruin,
and the swirling waters of the Adige probably destroyed as many as the
Ostrogothic sword. Odovacar himself, again a fugitive, sped across the
plain south-eastward to Ravenna, compelled like so many Roman Emperors
before him to shelter himself from the invader behind its untraversable
network of rivers and canals. It would seem from the scanty notices
which remain to us that in this battle of Verona, the bloodiest and
most hardly fought of all the battles of the war, the original army of
_foederati_, the men who had crowned Odovacar king, and divided the third
part of Italy between them, was, if not annihilated, utterly broken and
dispirited, and Theodoric, who now marched westward with his people, and
was welcomed with blessing and acclamations by the Bishop and citizens
of Milan, received also the transferred allegiance of the larger part of
the army of his rival.
It seemed as if a campaign of a few weeks had secured the conquest of
Italy, but the war was in fact prolonged for three years and a half from
this time by domestic treachery, foreign invasion, and the almost
absolute impregnability of Ravenna.
I. At the head of the soldiers of Odovacar who had apparently with
enthusiasm accepted the leadership of his younger and more brilliant
rival, was a certain Tufa, Master of the Soldiery among the _foederati_
Either he had extraordinary powers of deception, or Theodoric, short of
generals, accepted his professions of loyalty with most unwise facility;
for so it was that the Ostrogothic king entrusted to Tufa's generalship
the army which assuredly he ought to have led himself to the siege of
Ravenna. When Tufa arrived at Faventia, about eighteen miles from
Ravenna, his old master came forth to meet him; the instinct of loyalty
to Odovacar revived (if indeed he had not all along been playing a part
in his alleged desertion), and Tufa carried over, apparently, the larger
part of the army under his command to the service of Theodoric's rival.
Worst of all, he surrendered to his late master the chief members of
his staff the so-called _comites (henchmen)_ of Theodoric some of whom
had probably helped him in his early adventure against Singidunum, and
had shared his hardships in many a weary march through Thrace and
Macedonia. These men were all basely murdered by Odovacar, a deed which
Theodoric inwardly determined should never be forgiven (492).
Such an event as the defection of Tufa, carrying with him a considerable
portion of his troops, was a great blow to the Ostrogothic cause. Some
time later another and similar event took place. Frederic the Rugian,
whose father had been dethroned, and who had been himself driven into
exile by the armies of Odovacar, for some unexplained and most
mysterious reason, quitted the service of Theodoric and entered that of
his own deadliest enemy. The sympathy of scoundrels seems to have drawn
him into a special intimacy with Tufa, with whom he probably wandered up
and down through Lombardy (as we now call it) and Venetia, robbing and
slaying in the name of Odovacar, but not caring to share his hardships
in blockaded and famine-stricken Ravenna. Fortunately, the Nemesis which
so often waits on the friendship of bad men was not wanting in this
case. The two traitors quarrelled about the division of the spoil and a
battle took place between them, in the valley of the Adige above Verona,
in which Tufa was slain. Frederic, with his Rugian countrymen, occupied
the strong city of Ticinum _(Pavia)_, where they spent two dreadful
years, "Their minds", says an eye-witness,[55] in after-time the Bishop
of that city, "were full of cruel energy which prompted them to daily
crimes. In truth, they thought that each day was wasted which they had
not made memorable by some sort of outrage". In 494, with the general
pacification of Italy, they disappear from view: and we may conjecture,
though we are not told, that Pavia was taken, and that Frederic received
his deserts at the hands of Theodoric.
II. In the year 490 Gundobad, king of the Burgundians, crossed the Alps
and descended into Italy to mingle in the fray as an antagonist of
Theodoric. In the same year, probably at the same time, Alaric II., king
of the Visigoths, entered Italy as his ally. A great battle was fought
on the river Adda, ten miles east of Milan, in which Odovacar, who had
emerged from the shelter of Ravenna, was again completely defeated. He
fled once more to Ravenna, which he never again quitted.
[Footnote 55: Ennodius (writing the life of Bishop Epiphanius).]
While these operations were proceeding, Theodoric's own family and the
non-combatants of the Ostrogothic nation were in safe shelter, though in
somewhat narrow quarters, in the strong city of Pavia, whose Bishop,
Epiphanius, was the greatest saint of his age, and one for whom
Theodoric felt an especial veneration. No doubt they must have left that
city before the evil-minded Rugians entered it (492), but we hear
nothing of the circumstances of their flight or removal.
As for the Burgundian king, he does not seem to have been guided by any
high considerations of policy in his invasion of Italy, and having been
induced to conclude a treaty with Theodoric, he returned to his own
royal city of Lyons with goodly spoil and a long train of hapless
captives torn from the fields of Liguria.
III. These disturbing elements being cleared away, we may now turn our
attention to the true key of the position and the central event of the
war, the siege of Odovacar in Ravenna. After Tufa's second change of
sides, and during the Burgundian invasion of Italy, there was no
possibility of keeping up an Ostrogothic blockade of the city of the
marshes. Odovacar emerged thence, won back the lower valley of the Po,
and marching on Milan, inflicted heavy punishment on the city, for the
welcome given to Theodoric. In the battle of the Adda, 11 August, 490,
however, as has been already mentioned, he sustained a severe defeat, in
which he lost one of his most faithful friends and ablest counsellors, a
Roman noble named Pierius. After his flight to Ravenna, which
immediately followed the battle of the Adda, there seems to have been a
general movement throughout Italy, headed by the Catholic clergy, for
the purpose of throwing off his yoke, and if we do not misread the
obscure language of the Panegyrist, this movement was accompanied by a
wide-spread popular conspiracy, somewhat like the Sicilian Vespers of a
later day, to which the _foederati_, the still surviving adherents of
Odovacar, scat
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