Produced by V-M Osterman, Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE
No. 13
Editors:
HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A. PROF. GILBERT MURRAY, Litt.D., LL.D.,
F.B.A. PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A. PROF. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A.
MEDIEVAL EUROPE
BY H. W. C. DAVIS, M.A.
FELLOW AND TUTOR OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD AUTHOR OF "CHARLEMAGNE,"
"ENGLAND UNDER THE NORMANS AND ANGEVINS" ETC.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
I THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
II THE BARBARIAN KINGDOMS
III THE EMPIRE AND THE NEW MONARCHIES (800-1000 A.D.)
IV FEUDALISM
V THE PAPACY BEFORE GREGORY VII
VI THE HILDEBRANDINE CHURCH
VII THE MEDIEVAL STATE
VIII THE EXPANSION OF EUROPE--THE CRUSADES
IX THE FREE TOWNS
NOTE ON BOOKS
MAP OF THE BARBARIAN KINGDOMS AND FRANKISH EMPIRE
MAP OF FRANCE
MAP OF HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE
MAP OF THE CRUSADES
MAP OF THE ALPS AND NORTH ITALY
MEDIEVAL EUROPE
INTRODUCTION
All divisions of history into periods are artificial in proportion as
they are precise. In history there is, strictly speaking, no end and no
beginning. Each event is the product of an infinite series of causes,
the starting-point of an infinite series of effects. Language and
thought, government and manners, transform themselves by imperceptible
degrees; with the result that every age is an age of transition, not
fully intelligible unless regarded as the child of a past and the parent
of a future. Even so the species of the animal and vegetable kingdoms
shade off one into another until, if we only observe the marginal cases,
we are inclined to doubt whether the species is more than a figment of
the mind. Yet the biologist is prepared to defend the idea of species;
and in like manner the historian holds that the distinction between one
phase of culture and another is real enough to justify, and, indeed, to
demand, the use of distinguishing names. In the development of single
communities and groups of communities there occurs now and again a
moment of equilibrium, when institutions are stable and adapted to the
needs of those who live under them; when the minds of men are filled
with ideas which they find completely satisfying; when the statesman,
the artist, and the poet feel that they are best fulfilling their
several missions if they express in deed and work and language the
aspirations common to the whole society. Then for a while man appears to
be the master of his fate; and then the prevailing temper is one of
reasoned optimism, of noble exaltation, of content allied with hope. The
spectator feels that he is face to face with the maturity of a social
system and a creed. These moments are rare indeed; but it is for the
sake of understanding them that we read history. All the rest of human
fortunes is in the nature of an introduction or an epilogue. Now by a
period of history we mean the tract of years in which this balance of
harmonious activities, this reconciliation of the real with the ideal,
is in course of preparing, is actually subsisting, and is vanishing
away.
Such a period were the Middle Ages--the centuries that separate the
ancient from the modern world. They were something more than centuries
of transition, though the genius of a Gibbon has represented them as a
long night of ignorance and force, only redeemed from utter squalor by
some lingering rays of ancient culture. It is true that they began with
an involuntary secession from the power which represented, in the fifth
century, the wisdom of Greece and the majesty of Rome; and that they
ended with a jubilant return to the Promised Land of ancient art and
literature. But the interval had been no mere sojourning in Egypt. The
scholars of the Renaissance destroyed as much as they created. They
overthrew one civilisation to clear the ground for another. It was
imperative that the old canons of thought and conduct should be
reconsidered. The time comes in the history of all half-truths when they
form the great obstacles to the pursuit of truth. But this should not
prevent us from recognising the value of the half-truth as a guide to
those who first discover it; nor should we fall into the error, common
to all reformers, of supposing that they comprehend the whole when they
assert the importance of the neglected half. Erasmus had reason on his
side; but so, too, had Aquinas. Luther was in his rough way a prophet;
but St. Bernard also had a message for humanity.
Medieval culture was imperfect, was restricted to a narrow circle of
superior minds, offered no satisfaction to some of the higher faculties
and instincts. Measure it, however, by the memories and the achievements
that it has bequeathed to the modern world, and it will be found not
unworthy to rank with those of earlier and later Golden Ages. It
flourished in the midst of rude surroundings, fierce passions, and
material ambitions. The volcanic fires of primitive human nature
smouldered near the surface of medieval life; the events chronicled in
medieval history are too often those of sordid and relentless strife, of
religious persecutions, of crimes and conquests mendaciously excused by
the affectation of a moral aim. The truth is that every civilisation has
a seamy side, which it is easy to expose and to denounce. We should not,
however, judge an age by its crimes and scandals. We do not think of the
Athenians solely or chiefly as the people who turned against Pericles,
who tried to enslave Sicily, who executed Socrates. We appraise them
rather by their most heroic exploits and their most enduring work. We
must apply the same test to the medieval nations; we must judge of them
by their philosophy and law, by their poetry and architecture, by the
examples that they afford of statesmanship and saintship. In these
fields we shall not find that we are dealing with the spasmodic and
irreflective heroisms which illuminate a barbarous age. The highest
medieval achievements are the fruit of deep reflection, of persevering
and concentrated effort, of a self forgetting self in the service of
humanity and God. In other words, they spring from the soil, and have
ripened in the atmosphere, of a civilised society.
I
THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
Medieval history begins with the dissolution of the Western Empire, with
the abandonment of the Latin world to German conquerors. Of the
provinces affected by the catastrophe the youngest was Britain; and even
Britain had then been Roman soil for more than three hundred years. For
Italy, Spain, and Gaul, the change of masters meant the atrophy of
institutions which, at first reluctantly accepted, had come by lapse of
time to be accepted as part of the natural order. Large tracts of Europe
lay outside the evacuated provinces; for the Romans never entered
Ireland or Scandinavia or Russia, and had failed to subjugate Scotland
and the greater part of modern Germany. But the Romanised provinces long
remained the dominant force in European history; the hearth-fire of
medieval culture was kindled on the ruins of the Empire. How far the
victorious Teuton borrowed from the conquered provincial is a question
still debated; the degree and the nature of Rome's influence on the new
rulers varied in every province, indeed in different parts of the same
province. The fact of the debt remains, suggesting a doubt whether in
this case it was indeed the fittest who survived. The flaws in a social
order which has collapsed under the stress of adverse fortunes are
painfully apparent. It is natural to speak of the final overthrow as the
judgment of heaven or the verdict of events. But it has still to be
proved that war is an unfailing test of worth; we have banished the
judicial combat from our law courts, and we should be rash in assuming
that a process obviously absurd when applied to the disputes of
individuals ought to determine the judgments of history on nationalities
or empires.
The immediate and obvious causes which ruined the Western Empire were
military and political--the shortcomings of a professional army and
professional administrators. If asked whether these shortcomings were
symptomatic of evils more generally diffused through other ranks and
classes of society, we must go deeper in the analysis of facts. No _a
priori_ answer would be satisfactory.
The beginning and the end of the disaster were successful raids on
Italy. Alaric and his Visigoths (401-410 A.D.) shattered the prestige
and destroyed the efficiency of the government which ruled in the name
of the feeble Honorius. The Ostrogoths under Theodoric destroyed the
last simulacrum of an imperial power rooted in Italy (489-493 A.D.).
After Theodoric had vanquished Odoacer, it was clear that the western
provinces would not again acknowledge an Emperor acclaimed at Ravenna;
although the chance remained that they might be reconquered and
reorganised from Constantinople. This chance disappeared when the
Lombards crossed the Alps (568 A.D.) and descended on the Po valley.
From first to last Italy was the key to the West. And these successive
shocks to imperial power in Italy were all due to one cause. All three
of the invading hordes came from the Danube. The Roman bank of the great
river was inadequately garrisoned, and a mistaken policy had colonised
the Danubian provinces with Teutonic peoples, none the less dangerous
for being the nominal allies (_foederati_) of the Empire. The
Visigothic raids, which were in fact decisive, succeeded because the
military defences of the Western Empire were already strained to
breaking-point; and because the Roman armies were not only outnumbered,
but also paralysed by the jealousies of rival statesmen, and divided by
the mutinies of generals aspiring to the purple. The initial disasters
were irreparable, because the whole machine of Roman officialdom came to
a standstill when the guiding hand of Ravenna failed. Hitherto dependent
on Italy, the other provinces were now like limbs amputated from the
trunk. Here and there a local leader raised the standard of resistance
to the barbarians. But a large proportion of the provincials made peace
on the best terms they could obtain. Such are the essential facts.
Evidently the original error of the Romans was the undue extension of
their power. This was recognised by no less a statesman than Augustus,
the founder of the Empire; but even in his time it was too late to sound
a retreat; he could only register a protest against further annexations.
Embracing the whole of the Mediterranean littoral and a large part of
the territories to the south, east, and north, the Empire was encumbered
with three land frontiers of enormous length. Two of these, the European
and the Asiatic, were perpetual sources of anxiety, and called for
separate military establishments. That neither might be neglected in the
interest of the other it was reasonable to put the imperial power in
commission between two colleagues. Diocletian (284-305 A.D.) was the
first to adopt this plan; from his time projects of partition were in
the air and would have been more regularly carried out, had not
experience shown that partitions led naturally to civil wars between
rival Emperors. In 395, on the death of the great Theodosius, the
hazardous expedient was given a last trial. His youthful sons, Arcadius
and Honorius, were allowed to divide the Empire; but the line of
partition was drawn with more regard to racial jealousies than military
considerations. It extended from the middle Danube (near Belgrade) to a
point near Durazzo on the Adriatic coast, and thence to the Gulf of
Sidra. East of this line lay the sphere of Greek civilisation, the
provinces which looked to Alexandria and Antioch and Constantinople as
their natural capitals. West of it the prevailing language was Latin,
and the higher classes of society modelled themselves upon the Italian
aristocracy.
Founded upon a principle which appeals to our modern respect for
nationality, this partition only gave a legal form to a schism which had
been long in preparation. But in one respect it was disastrous. The
defence of the Danube frontier was divided between the two governments;
and that of the East, rating the impoverished Balkan peninsula as of
secondary importance, and envisaging the problem from a wholly selfish
point of view, left unguarded the great highways leading from the Danube
into Italy. Stilicho, the great general who administered the West in the
name of Honorius, ventured to meet this danger by intervening in the
peninsula, and even in the political intrigues of Constantinople. He
only succeeded in winning a precarious alliance with the Visigoths and
the permanent ill-will of the Eastern Empire. He was left to deal
single-handed with the first invaders of Italy; and the estrangement of
the two imperial courts persisted after his untimely fall. The Western
Empire, betrayed by the one possible ally, collapsed under the strain
of simultaneous attacks along the whole line of the European frontier.
It has been alleged that the Roman armies were neither so robust nor so
well disciplined in the fifth century as they had been in an earlier
age. However this may be, they could still give a good account of
themselves when matched on equal terms with the most warlike of the
barbarians. It was in patriotism and in numbers, rather than in
professional efficiency, that they failed when put to the supreme test.
The armies were now largely recruited with barbarians, who numbered more
than half the fighting strength and were esteemed the flower of the
Roman soldiery. Many of these hirelings showed an open contempt for
their employers, and sympathised with the enemies whom they were paid to
fight. Furthermore, each army, whatever its constituent elements, tended
to be a hereditary caste, with a strong corporate spirit, respecting no
authority but that of the general. The soldiers had no civic interests;
but they had standing grievances against the Empire. Any political
crisis suggested to them the idea of a mutiny led by the general,
sometimes to obtain arrears of pay and donatives, sometimes to put their
nominee upon the throne. The evil was an old one, dating from the latter
days of the Republic, when Marius, in the interests of efficiency, had
made military service a profession. But it was aggravated under the
successors of Diocletian, as the barbarian element in the armies
increased and the Roman element diminished. Its worst effects appeared
in the years 406-407. The German inroads upon Italy and Gaul were then
followed by the proclamation of military usurpers in Britain and on the
Rhine; the Roman West was divided by civil war at the very moment when
union was supremely important. Hence the strange spectacle of the
Visigoths, still laden with the spoils of Rome, entering Gaul by
invitation of the Empire to fight against imperial armies.
The problem of numbers had been earlier recognised, but not more
adequately met. Diocletian is said to have quadrupled the armies, and in
the fourth century they were far larger than they had been under Julius
and Augustus; Constantine had revised the scheme of frontier-defence to
secure the greatest possible economy of men. Still, under Honorius, we
find that one vital point could only be defended by withdrawing troops
from another. The difficulty of increasing the numbers was twofold.
First, the army was mercenary, and taxation was already strained to the
point of diminishing returns. Secondly, it was difficult to raise
recruits among the provincials. The old principle of universal service
had been abandoned by Valentinian I (364-375); and although compulsory
levies were still made from certain classes, the Government had thought
fit to prohibit the enlistment of those who contributed most to
taxation. Every citizen was legally liable for the defence of local
strongholds; but the use of arms was so unfamiliar, the idea of military
service as a national duty was so far forgotten, that Stilicho, when the
barbarians were actually in Italy, preferred the desperate measure of
enlisting slaves to the obvious resource of a general call to arms.
We find ourselves here confronted with a social malady which was more
than an economic weakness. The Empire was, no doubt, a complex and
expensive form of government superimposed upon a society which stood at
a rudimentary stage of economic development. Barbarous methods of
taxation and corrupt practices among the ruling classes had aggravated
the burden to such a degree that the municipalities of the provinces
were bankrupt, and the middle-class capitalist was taxed out of
existence. For this and other reasons the population of the older
provinces was stationary or declining. But there was still much wealth
in the Empire; and the great landowners of the provinces could raise
considerable armies among their dependants when they saw fit to do so.
The real evil was a moral evil, the decay of civic virtue.
We do not mean that the ethics of private life had deteriorated from the
standard of the past. This is incredible when we remember that
Christianity was now the all but universal religion of the Empire; for
Christianity, at its worst and weakest, laid more stress upon ethical
duties, in the narrower sense, than any of the older religions. The
provincial was a more moral being than the Goth or the Vandal. It is a
mere superstition that every victorious race is chaste and frugal, just
and law-abiding; or that ill success in the struggle for existence is a
symptom of the contrary vices. In many respects the Greeks who submitted
to Philip and Alexander were morally superior to the victors of Salamis
and Plataea. Private and political morality may spring from the same
root; but the one has often flourished where the other has been stunted.
Perhaps this is only natural. Human nature seldom develops equally in
all directions. Men who are intensely concerned with the right ordering
of their relations to neighbours, friends and family, may well forget
the larger community in which their private circle is contained. The
Roman provincial had exceptional excuses for remaining indifferent to a
state which claimed his loyalty, not in the name of nationality or
religion, but in that of reason and the common good. Loyalty for him
could only be an intellectual conviction. But, unless he could enter the
privileged ranks of the army or the higher civil service, he had no
opportunities of studying, still less of helping to decide, the
questions of policy and administration with which his welfare was
closely though indirectly linked. Political ideas only came before the
private citizen under the garb of literature. The most admired authors
only taught him to regret republican polities long out of date. The
antiquarian enthusiasms which he acquired by his studies were in no way
corrected by the experience of daily life. If a townsman, he was legally
prohibited from changing his residence and even from travelling about
the Empire, for fear that he might evade the tax-collector. If a rural
landowner, he lived in a community which was economically
self-sufficient, and consequently provincial to the last degree. The
types of character which developed under such conditions were not
wanting in amiable or admirable traits. The well-to-do provincial was
often a scholar, a connoisseur in art and literature, a polished
letter-writer and conversationalist, a shrewd observer of his little
world, an exemplary husband and father, courteous to inferiors,
warm-hearted to his friends. Sometimes he found in religion or
philosophy an antidote to the pettiness of daily life, and was roused
into rebellion against the materialism of his equals, the greed and the
injustice of his rulers. But he despaired of bridging the gulf between
the Empire, as he saw it, and the ideal commonwealth--City of God or
Republic of the Universe--which his teachers held up to him as the goal
of human aspirations. Rather he was inclined, like the just man of
Plato, to seek the nearest shelter, to veil his head, and to wait
patiently till the storm of violence and wrong should pass away.
It is hard to condemn such conduct when we remember the appalling
contrast between the weakness of the individual and the strength of a
social order coextensive with civilisation itself. But in this spirit of
reasonable submission to a state of things which appeared fundamentally
unreasonable, in this conviction that the bad could not be bettered by
reforms of detail, there was more danger to society than in the crass
indifference of the selfish and the unreflecting. When the natural
leaders of society avow that they despair of the future, fatalism
spreads like a contagious blight among the rank and file, until even
discontent is numbed into silence. Nor does the evil end here. The
idealists pay for their contempt of the real, not merely with their
fortunes and their lives, but, worse still, with their intellectual
patrimony. Just as a government deteriorates when it is no longer tested
by continual reference to principles of justice, so a Utopia, however
magnificent, fades from the mind of the believer when he ceases to
revise it by comparison with facts, when it is no longer a reply to the
problems suggested by workaday experience. Life and theory being once
divorced, the theorist becomes a vendor of commonplaces, and the plain
man is fortified in his conviction that he must take life as he finds
it.
This analysis helps us to understand why the Western Empire, on the eve
of dissolution, had already assumed the appearance of a semi-barbarian
state. In those districts which had been lately settled with Teutonic
colonists the phenomenon may be explained as resulting from
over-sanguine attempts to civilise an intractable stock. But even in the
heart of the oldest provinces the conditions were little better. Law and
custom had conspired to sap the ideas and principles that we regard as
essentially Roman. The civil was now subjected to the military power.
The authority of the state was impaired by the growth of private
jurisdictions and defied by the quasi-feudal retinues of the great. For
civic equality had been substituted an irrational system of
class-privileges and class-burdens. Law was ceasing to be the orderly
development of general principles, and was becoming an accumulation of
ill-considered, inconsistent edicts. So far had decay advanced through
the negligence of those most vitally concerned that, if Europe was ever
to learn again the highest lessons which Rome had existed to teach, the
first step must be to sweep away the hybrid government which still
claimed allegiance in the name of Rome. The provincials of the fifth
century possessed the writings in which those lessons were recorded, but
possessed them only as symbols of an unintelligible past. A long
training in new schools of thought, under new forms of government, was
necessary before the European mind could again be brought into touch
with the old Roman spirit.
The great service that the barbarians rendered was a service of
destruction. In doing so they prepared the way for a return to the past.
Their first efforts in reconstruction were also valuable, since the
difficulty of the work and the clumsiness of the product revived the
respect of men for the superior skill of Rome. In the end the barbarians
succeeded in that branch of constructive statesmanship where Rome had
failed most signally. The new states which they founded were smaller and
feebler than the Western Empire, but furnished new opportunities for the
development of individuality, and made it possible to endow citizenship
with active functions and moral responsibilities. That these states
laboured under manifold defects was obvious to those who made them and
lived under them. The ideal of the world-wide Empire, maintaining
universal peace and the brotherhood of men, continued to haunt the
imagination of the Middle Ages as a lost possibility. But in this case,
as so often, what passed for a memory was in truth an aspiration; and
Europe was advancing towards a higher form of unity than that which had
been destroyed.
II
THE BARBARIAN KINGDOMS
The barbarian states which arose on the ruins of the Western Empire were
founded, under widely different circumstances of time and place, by
tribes and federations of tribes drawn from every part of Germany. We
expect to find, and we do find, infinite varieties of detail in their
laws, their social distinctions, their methods of government. But from a
broader point of view they may be grouped in two classes, not according
to affinities of race, but according to their relations with the social
order which they had invaded.
[Illustration: The Barbarian Kingdoms and Frankish Empire]
One group of kingdoms was founded under cover of a legal fiction; the
Visigoths, the Ostrogoths, and the Burgundians claimed to be the allies
of the Empire. At one time or another they obtained the recognition of
Constantinople for their settlements. Their kings accepted or usurped
the titles of imperial administrators, stamped their coins with the
effigies of the reigning Emperor, dated their proclamations by the names
of the consuls for the year, and in many other ways flaunted their
nominal subjection as the legal basis of their actual sovereignty. This
fiction did not prevent them from governing their new dominions in true
Teutonic fashion, through royal bailiffs, who administered the state
demesnes, and military officers (dukes, counts, etc.) who ruled with
autocratic sway over administrative districts. Nor did the most lenient
of them hesitate to provide for their armies by wholesale confiscations;
the ordinary rule was to take from the great proprietor one-third or
two-thirds of his estate for the benefit of the Teutonic immigrant.
Further, we have ample evidence that the provincials found existence
considerably more precarious under the new order. The rich were exposed
to the malice of the false informer and the venal judge; the cultivators
of the soil were often oppressed and often reduced from partial freedom
to absolute slavery. Yet in some respects the invaders of this type were
tolerant and adaptable. They left to the provincials the civil law of
Rome, and even codified it to guard against unauthorised innovations;
the _Lex Romana Burgundionum_ and the Visigothic _Breviarium Alarici_
are still extant as memorials of this policy. They realised the
necessity of compelling barbarians and provincials alike to respect
the elementary rights of person and property; Theodoric the Ostrogoth
and Gundobad the Burgundian were the authors of new criminal codes, in
the one case mainly, in the other partially, derived from Roman
jurisprudence. Such rulers were not content with professing an impartial
regard for both classes of their subjects; they frequently raised the
better-class provincials to posts of responsibility and confidence. By a
singular fatality the chief races of this group had embraced the Arian
heresy, which was repudiated and detested by their subjects. Yet their
great statesmen uniformly extended toleration to the rival creed, and
even patronised the orthodox bishops, by whom they were secretly
regarded as worse than the lowest of the heathen. This generosity was
little more than common prudence. Numerically the conquerors were much
inferior to the provincials; economically they had everything to lose by
needless ill-treatment of those whom they exploited. But the best of
them had studied the organisation of the Empire at close quarters,
sometimes as captains in the imperial service, sometimes as neighbours
of flourishing provinces in the years preceding the grand catastrophe;
and knowledge rarely failed to produce in them some respect or even
enthusiasm for the _Respublica Romana_. "When I was young," said
King Athaulf the Visigoth, "I desired to obliterate the Roman name and
to bring under the sway of the Goths all that once belonged to the
Romans. But I learned better by experience. The Goths were licentious
barbarians who would obey no laws; and to deprive the commonwealth of
laws would have been a crime. So for my part I chose the glory of
restoring the Roman name to its old estate." To such men the ideal of
the future was a federation of states owing a nominal allegiance to the
official head of the Empire, but cherishing an effective loyalty to all
that was best in Roman law and culture.
The second group comprises the kingdoms which were founded in outlying
provinces or comparatively late in time. The invaders of England, the
Franks in Northern Gaul, the Alemanni and the Bavarians on the Upper
Rhine and the Danube, the Lombards in Italy, the Vandals in Africa,
never came completely under the spell of the past. The Vandals might
have done so, but for their fanatical devotion to Arianism; for the
province of Africa, in which they settled, was one of those which Roman
statesmanship had most completely civilised. The Franks might have
imitated the Visigoths and the Burgundians, if fortune had laid the
cradle of their power in the valley of the Loire or the Rhone instead of
the forests and marshes of the Netherlands. The Lombards and the Saxons
showed no innate aversion to the ways and works of Rome; but they
entered upon provinces which had already been impoverished and
depopulated by the scourge of war. Such races proceeded rapidly with the
construction of a new social and political order, because the past was a
sealed book to them. Roman law vanished from England so completely as to
leave it doubtful whether the Saxons ever came to terms with the
provincials; it was tolerated but not encouraged by the Franks; it was
in great measure set aside by the Lombards; it seems to have been
unknown to the Alemanni and Bavarians. We shall see in the sequel the
importance of these facts. The future of Europe lay not with the Goths
or with the Burgundians, but with more ignorant or less impressionable
races who, rather by good fortune than by choice, escaped the vices in
missing the lessons of Roman civilisation. The Franks and the Saxons, as
we find them described by Gregory of Tours and the Venerable Bede, were
far from resembling the noble savage imagined by Tacitus and other
idealists. But they were trained for future empire in the hard school of
a northern climate.
All that concerns us in the history of these kingdoms can be briefly
stated.
(1) Teutonic England hardly enters into European history before the year
800. In the fifth and sixth centuries a multitude of small colonies had
been founded on the soil of Roman Britain by the three tribes of the
Angles, Saxons and Jutes, who migrated thither from Jutland and
Schleswig-Holstein. A few considerable kingdoms had emerged from this
chaos by the time when the English received from Rome their first
Christian teacher, St. Augustine: Kent, Sussex, and Wessex in the south;
Mercia and East Anglia in the Midlands; Northumbria between the Humber
and the Forth. The efforts of every ruler were devoted to the
establishment of his personal ascendancy over the whole group. Such a
supremacy was obtained by AEthelbert of Kent, the first royal convert to
Christianity; by Edwin of Northumbria and his two immediate successors
in the seventh century; by Offa of Mercia (757-796); and by Egbert of
Wessex (802-839), whose power foreshadowed the later triumphs of the
house of Alfred.
(2) Southern Gaul was divided in the fifth century between the Visigoths
and the Burgundians. The former of these peoples entered the imperial
service in 410, after the death of Alaric I, who had led them into
Italy. His successors, Athaulf and Wallia, undertook to pacify Gaul and
to recover Spain for the rulers of Ravenna; the second of these
sovereigns was rewarded with a settlement, for himself and his
followers, between the Loire and the Garonne (419). In the terrible
battle of Troyes, against Attila the Hun (451), they did good service to
the Roman cause; but both before and after that event they were chiefly
occupied in extending their boundaries by force or fraud. At the close
of the fifth century their power in Gaul extended from the Loire to the
Pyrenees, from the Atlantic to the Rhone valley, and along the
Mediterranean seaboard farther east to the Alps. In Spain--which had
been, since 409, the prey of the Vandals, Alans and Suevi--they found a
more legitimate field for their ambitions. Between 466 and 484 they
annexed every part of the peninsula except the north-west corner, which
remained the last stronghold of their defeated competitors. The
Burgundians, from less auspicious beginnings, had built up a smaller but
yet a powerful kingdom. Transplanted by a victorious Roman general to
Savoy (443) from the lands between the Necker and the Main, they had
descended into the Rhone basin at the invitation of the provincials, to
protect that fertile land alike against Teutonic marauders and Roman
tax-collectors. By the year 500 they ruled from the Durance in the south
to the headwaters of the Doubs and the Saone in the north, from the Alps
and the Jura to the sources of the Loire.
(3) Italy was less fortunate than Gaul; in the fifth century she was
ravaged more persistently, since Rome and Ravenna were the most tempting
prizes that the West could offer to conquerors seeking a settlement or
to mere marauders; and for yet another two centuries her soil was in
dispute between the Eastern Empire and the Teutons. The strategic
importance of the peninsula, the magic of the name of Rome, the more
recent tradition that Ravenna was the natural headquarters of imperial
bureaucracy in the West, were three cogent reasons why the statesmen of
Constantinople should insist that Italy must be recovered whatever
outlying provinces of the West were abandoned. For sixty years after the
deposition of Romulus Augustulus (476) Italy was entirely ruled by
barbarians; then for more than two hundred years there was an Imperial
Italy or a Papal Italy continually at feud with an Ostrogothic or a
Lombard Italy. It would have been better for the Italians if either the
Ostrogoths or the Lombards had triumphed decisively and at an early
date.
The Ostrogoths entered Italy from the north-east in 489, under the lead
of Theodoric, the first and last statesman of their race. They came from
the Middle Danube, where they had settled, with the leave of the Empire,
after the death of Attila and the dissolution of his army. They were now
in search of a more kindly habitation, and brought with them their
wives, their children, and their household stuff on waggons. Their way
was barred by Odoacer the Patrician--general of the Italian army and
King of Italy in all but name. It cost them four years of hard fighting
to overthrow this self-constituted representative of the Empire. After
that they had no overt opposition to fear. To the Italians there was
little difference between Odoacer and Theodoric. The change of rulers
did not affect their material interests, since Theodoric merely
appropriated that proportion of the cultivated land (one-third) which
Odoacer had claimed for his followers. Nor was submission inconsistent
with the loyalty demanded by the Eastern Empire; since for the moment it
suited imperial policy to accept the Visigothic King as the successor of
Odoacer. Theodoric reigned over Italy for thirty-three years (493-526).
A tolerant and enlightened ruler, he spared no effort to give his rule a
legal character, and to protect the Italians against oppression. Two
eminent Romans, Liberius and Cassiodorus, acted successively as his
confidential advisers and interpreted his policy to their countrymen. No
attempt was made to fuse the Ostrogoths with the Italians. The invaders
remained, an army quartered on the soil, subject for most purposes to
their own law. But the law of the Italians was similarly respected;
Theodoric applied the Roman law of crime impartially to both races; and
he rigourously interdicted the prosecution of private wars and feuds.
Unfortunately his subordinates were less scrupulous than himself. The
Ostrogothic soldiery maintained the national character for lawlessness;
the royal officers and judges were corrupt; men of means were harassed
by blackmailers and false informers; the poor and helpless were
frequently enslaved by force or fraud. The Italians could not forgive
the Arian tenets of their new rulers, even though the orthodox were
tolerated and protected. Naturally the clergy and the remnants of the
Roman aristocracy sighed for an imperial restoration. And Theodoric,
rightly or wrongly, came to suspect them all of treason. In his later
years he meted out a terrible and barbarous justice to the supposed
authors of conspiracy--notably to the Senator Boethius, who was beaten
to death with clubs after a long period of rigourous imprisonment.
Boethius has vindicated his own fair name, and blackened for ever that
of Theodoric, by his immortal treatise, the _Consolation of Philosophy_,
composed in hourly expectation of death. A Christian it would seem, but
certainly nurtured on the precepts of Plato and the Stoics, Boethius
turned in his extremity to these teachers for reassurance on the doubts
which must always afflict the just man enmeshed in undeserved
misfortune. Himself a philosopher only in his sublime optimism and his
resolve to treat the inevitable as immaterial, Boethius rivets the
attention by his absolute honesty. His book, revered in the Middle Ages
as all but inspired, will be read with interest and sympathy so long as
honest men are vexed by human oppression and the dispensations of a
seemingly capricious destiny. But the footprints of the Ostrogoths are
effaced from the soil of Italy; the name of Theodoric is scantily
commemorated by some mosaics and a rifled mausoleum at Ravenna. Here at
least Time has done justice in the end; from all that age of violent
deeds and half-sincere ideals nothing has passed into the spiritual
heritage of mankind but the communings of one undaunted sufferer with
his soul and God.
Theodoric died in 526, bequeathing his crown to his only daughter's son.
Eight years afterwards the boy king, worn out by premature excess, was
laid in the grave; his mother was murdered to clear the path of an
ambitious kinsman; and, while the succession was still in doubt, the
Emperor Justinian launched upon Italy the still invincible armies of the
Empire, led by Belisarius, the greatest general of the time and already
famous as the deliverer of Africa from the Vandals (536). The intrigues
of his court rivals, rather than the resources of the divided
Ostrogoths, robbed Belisarius of a decisive victory, and prolonged the
struggle for years after he had been superseded. But in 553 the last
embers of resistance were quenched in blood. Italy, devastated and
depopulated, was reorganised as an imperial province with an elaborate
hierarchy of civil and military officials. The change was welcome to the
orthodox clergy, the more so because Justinian gave large powers in
local administration to their bishops. Of outward pomp there was enough
to gild corruption and inefficiency with a deceptive splendour; but in
fact the restored Empire was little more civilised, in the true sense of
the word, than the barbarian states of the past and future. Upon the
Italians the Emperor conferred the boon of his famous _Corpus Juris_, a
compendium of that legal wisdom which constitutes the best title of Rome
to the world's gratitude. For the future it was momentous that Italy
learned, at this early date, to regard the _Corpus_ as the perfection of
legal wisdom. Through the Italian schools of later times (Ravenna,
Bologna, etc.) the _Corpus_ has influenced the law of every European
state and has dictated the principles of scientific jurisprudence. But
in the sixth century good laws availed nothing for want of good
government.
In 568, only fifteen years after the restoration, the Lombards descended
upon Italy from the Middle Danube, following the track of Theodoric and
inspirited by the fame of his success. A few years made them masters of
the North Italian plain still known as Lombardy. Within three-quarters
of a century they had demonstrated the hollowness of the Byzantine
power. The power of their kings, whose capital was Pavia, extended on
the one side into Liguria and Tuscany, on the other into Emilia and
Friuli; far away in the south, behind the line of fortresses which
linked Rome with Ravenna, the semi-independent dukes of Spoleto and
Benevento were masters of the land on both sides of the Apennines,
excepting Naples and the toe of the Bruttian peninsula. Apart from these
districts there remained in the imperial allegiance only the fisher-folk
of the Venetian lagoons and the lands which afterwards were to be known
as the Papal States. What the Byzantines achieved by the maintenance of
this precarious foothold was nothing less than the political disruption
of Italy. The Lombard duchies of the south were kept separate from the
parent state; with the result that their ruins were built long
afterwards into the fabric of a South Italian monarchy which was
irreconcilably hostile to the political heirs of the Lombard kings. In
many respects the Lombards showed capacity for governing a subject
population. They adopted the Latin language; they forsook Arianism for
Catholicism; they accommodated themselves to city life; they were
liberal patrons of Italian art and industry. Although they introduced a
strictly Teutonic form of administration, their rule compared not
unfavourably with the makeshift methods of Byzantine statesmanship. In
Imperial Italy we see the strange spectacle of a military despotism
tempered by the usurped privileges and jurisdictions of the great
proprietors, or by the ill-defined temporal pretensions of the bishops.
In Lombard Italy matters were at least no worse. The Lombards were
aliens; but so were the Greeks. The Greeks treated the Italians as
inferiors. But the Lombards intermarried freely with their subjects, and
the Lombard legislators (Rotharis, Luitprand) recognised no invidious
privileges of race.
(4) Northern Gaul remains to be considered. It was here that the
Frankish monarchy developed; and we deal last with the Franks because
they were destined to harvest the chief fruits of barbarian conquest and
colonisation. By the close of the eighth century Africa, Spain, and
Britain were the only western provinces of the Empire in which they had
failed to establish themselves as the sole or the dominant power; and
moreover they had penetrated by that time farther into Central Europe
than any Roman statesman, since Tiberius, had extended his schemes of
conquest. The expansion of the Franks was a slow process, interrupted by
periods of stagnation or relapse; and we can only trace it in the barest
outline.
Known from an early date to the Romans as vagrant marauders, the Franks
had been heavily chastised by most of the soldier emperors from Probus
to Julian. Some of them were forcibly settled as serf-colonists on the
left bank of the Rhine; others (the _Salian_ Franks) appropriated
to themselves a large part of Batavia, the marsh country at the mouths
of the Scheldt and Rhine; a third group (the _Ripuarians_) occupied
the lands between the Rhine and the Meuse, in the neighbourhood of Koln
and Bonn. The Salians and Ripuarians counted as allies (_foederati_) of
the Empire, at least from the time of Aetius; under whom, like the
Visigoths, they fought against the Huns at Troyes (451). Their
aggressions were checked on the West by the Roman governors of the
country lying between the Somme and the Loire; and their power
was impaired by the partition of the Salian people among a swarm of
petty kings. But in 481, with the accession of Clovis to the throne of
Tournai, there began a period of consolidation and advance. In 486
Clovis overthrew the Roman governor Syagrius and usurped his power. In
496 he annexed the purely Teutonic principality which the Alemanni had
recently established in the country now known as Suabia. This victory
was the occasion of his conversion to Christianity. The legend goes
that, in the crisis of the final battle, Clovis appealed to the God of
his pious wife: "I have called on my gods and they have forsaken me. To
Thee I turn, in Thee will I believe, if Thou wilt deliver me." He kept
his word, and was baptised by St. Remi, the Bishop of Rheims, thus
becoming a member of the orthodox communion, and the hope of all the
Gallic clergy, who had hitherto submitted with an ill grace to the
heretical rulers of the Visigoths and the Burgundians. A crafty and
ambitious savage, the King of Tournai quickly realised the advantage of
alliance with the native Church. In the year 500 he turned upon the
Burgundians in the hope of making them his tributaries. He failed in his
object, for the Burgundian King made a timely feint of conversion to
orthodoxy and otherwise conciliated the Gallo-Roman population. But over
Alaric II the Visigoth, who had been so impolitic as to persecute
orthodox bishops, the Franks secured an easy and dramatic triumph. "It
irks me," said Clovis to his army, "that these Arians should rule in
Gaul." The Aquitanians welcomed him as a Crusader; Alaric, after a
single defeat, took refuge in his Spanish dominions, where he was left
to rule in peace. At one stroke the power of the Franks had advanced
from the Loire to the Pyrenees (507). The latter days of Clovis were
prosperously occupied in exterminating rival Frankish dynasties and the
more dangerous of his own kindred. He died, after a reign of thirty
years, in the odour of sanctity: "God increased his kingdom every day,
because he walked with an upright heart and did what was pleasing in the
eyes of God." He was buried in the Gallo-Roman part of his dominions, at
Paris, which he had chosen as his capital. The province of Syagrius,
later known as Neustria or Western Francia, was the natural centre of
the Frankish state, nor was Clovis indifferent to the traditions and the
luxury of an older civilisation. In Aquitaine he posed as the
representative of the Empire, and he rode through the streets of Tours
in the purple robe of a consul, which he had received from the Emperor
Anastasius. The hope at Constantinople was that he would treat Theodoric
the Ostrogoth as he had already treated Alaric; this was the first of
many occasions on which the network of imperial diplomacy was woven
round a Frankish king. Church and Empire conspired to inflame the
ambitions and enlarge the schemes of Merovingian and Carolingian
conquerors.