PERIODS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY
PERIOD I., 476-918
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Periods of European History
General Editor, ARTHUR HASSALL, M.A.,
STUDENT OF CHRIST CHURCH, OXFORD.
Crown 8vo. With Maps and Plans.
The object of this series is to present in separate Volumes a
comprehensive and trustworthy account of the general development of
European History, and to deal fully and carefully with the more
prominent events in each century.
It is believed that no such attempt to place the History of Europe
before the English Public has yet been made, and it is hoped that the
Series will form a valuable continuous History of Mediæval and Modern
Europe.
Period I.—The Dark Ages. A.D. 476-918. By C. W. C. OMAN, M.A., Fellow of
All Souls College, Oxford. 7s. 6d. [Already published.
Period II.—The Empire and the Papacy. A.D. 918-1273. By T. F. TOUT,
M.A., Professor of History at the Owens College, Victoria
University, Manchester. 7s. 6d. [Already published.
Period III.—The Close of the Middle Ages. A.D. 1272-1494. By R. LODGE,
M.A., Professor of History at the University of Glasgow. [In
preparation.
Period IV.—Europe in the 16th Century. A.D. 1494-1598. By A. H. JOHNSON,
M.A., Historical Lecturer to Merton, Trinity, and University
Colleges, Oxford. 7s. 6d. [Already published.
Period V.—The Ascendancy of France. A.D. 1598-1715. By H. O. WAKEMAN,
M.A., Fellow of All Souls College, and Tutor of Keble College,
Oxford. 6s. [Already published.
Period VI.—The Balance of Power. A.D. 1715-1789. By A. HASSALL, M.A.,
Student of Christ Church, Oxford. 6s. [Already published.
Period VII.—Revolutionary Europe. A.D. 1789-1815. By H. MORSE STEPHENS,
M.A., Professor of History at Cornell University, Ithaca, U.S.A.
6s. [Already published.
Period VIII.—Modern Europe. A.D. 1815-1878. By G. W. PROTHERO, Litt.D.,
Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh. [In
preparation.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE DARK AGES
476-918
BY
CHARLES OMAN, M.A., F.S.A.
FELLOW OF ALL SOULS COLLEGE
AND LECTURER AT NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD
AUTHOR OF ‘A HISTORY OF GREECE,’
‘THE ART OF WAR IN THE MIDDLE AGES,’ ETC.
PERIOD I
RIVINGTONS
KING STREET, COVENT GARDEN
LONDON
1898
Third Edition
------------------------------------------------------------------------
All rights reserved
------------------------------------------------------------------------
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
In spite of the very modest scale on which this book has been written, I
trust that it may be of some use to students of European History. Though
there are several excellent monographs in existence dealing with various
sections of the period 476-918, there is no continuous general sketch in
English which covers the whole of it. Gibbon’s immortal work is
popularly supposed to do so, but those who have read it most carefully
are best aware that it does not. I am not acquainted with any modern
English book where the inquirer can find an account of the Lombard
kings, or of the Mohammedan invasions of Italy and Sicily in the ninth
century, or of several other not unimportant chapters in the early
history of Europe. I am in hopes, therefore, that my attempt to cover
the whole field between 476 and 918 may not be entirely useless to the
reading public.
I must acknowledge my indebtedness to two living authors, whose works
have been of the greatest possible help to me in dealing with two great
sections of this period, Doctor Gustav Richter, whose admirable
collection of original authorities in his _Annalen des Fränkischen
Reichs_ makes such an excellent introduction to the study of Merovingian
and Carolingian times, and Professor Bury of Dublin, whose _History of
the Later Roman Empire_ has done so much for the knowledge of East-Roman
affairs between 476 and 800. Nor must I omit to express my indebtedness
to the kindly and diligent hands which spent so many summer hours in the
laborious task of compiling my index.
A word ought, perhaps, to be added on the vexed question of the spelling
of proper names. I have always chosen the most modern form in speaking
of places, but in speaking of individuals I have employed that used by
contemporary authorities, save in the case of a few very well known
names, such as Charles, Henry, Gregory, Lewis, where archaism would
savour of pedantry.
OXFORD, _November 1893._
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
The author has to acknowledge much kind help in the revision of this
second edition given him by the Rev. Dr. Bright, Regius Professor of
Ecclesiastical History; by Mr. C. H. Turner, Fellow of Magdalen College;
by the Rev. F. E. Brightman, of University College; and by the unwearied
compiler of the index. They have materially improved the accuracy of the
book by their suggestions.
_October 30, 1894._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. ODOACER AND THEODORIC, 476-493, 1
II. THEODORIC KING OF ITALY, 493-526, 19
III. THE EMPERORS AT CONSTANTINOPLE, 476-527, 33
IV. CHLODOVECH AND THE FRANKS IN GAUL, 55
481-511,
V. JUSTINIAN AND HIS WARS, 528-540, 65
VI. JUSTINIAN—(_continued_), 540-565, 89
VII. THE EARLIER FRANKISH KINGS AND THEIR 111
ORGANISATION OF GAUL, 511-561,
VIII. THE VISIGOTHS IN SPAIN, 531-603, 128
IX. THE SUCCESSORS OF JUSTINIAN, 565-610, 145
X. DECLINE AND DECAY OF THE MEROVINGIANS, 158
561-656,
XI. THE LOMBARDS IN ITALY AND THE RISE OF 181
THE PAPACY, 568-653,
XII. HERACLIUS AND MOHAMMED, 610-641, 204
XIII. THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE VISIGOTHS, 221
A.D. 603-711,
XIV. THE CONTEST OF THE EASTERN EMPIRE AND 235
THE CALIPHATE, 641-717,
XV. THE HISTORY OF THE GREAT MAYORS OF THE 256
PALACE, 656-720,
XVI. THE LOMBARDS AND THE PAPACY, 653-743, 272
XVII. CHARLES MARTEL AND HIS WARS, 720-41, 289
XVIII. THE ICONOCLAST EMPERORS—STATE OF THE 300
EASTERN EMPIRE IN THE EIGHTH CENTURY,
717-802,
XIX. PIPPIN THE SHORT—WARS OF THE FRANKS AND 322
LOMBARDS, 741-768,
XX. CHARLES THE GREAT—EARLY YEARS 335
768-785—CONQUEST OF LOMBARDY AND
SAXONY,
XXI. THE LATER WARS AND CONQUESTS OF CHARLES 357
THE GREAT, 785-814,
XXII. CHARLES THE GREAT AND THE EMPIRE, 369
XXIII. LEWIS THE PIOUS, 814-840, 383
XXIV. DISRUPTION OF THE FRANKISH EMPIRE—THE 405
COMING OF THE VIKINGS, 840-855,
XXV. THE DARKEST HOUR, 855-887. FROM THE 424
DEATH OF LOTHAIR I. TO THE DEPOSITION
OF CHARLES THE FAT,
XXVI. ITALY AND SICILY IN THE NINTH CENTURY, 446
827-924,
XXVII. GERMANY, 888-918, 468
XXVIII. THE EASTERN EMPIRE IN THE NINTH CENTURY, 478
802-912,
XXIX. THE END OF THE NINTH CENTURY IN WESTERN 496
EUROPE. CONCLUSION,
INDEX 519
--------------
MAPS
NO. PAGE
1. The Perso-Roman Frontier under 91
Justinian,
2. The Frankish Kingdoms in 511, 112
3. The Frankish Kingdoms in 575, 160
4. Italy in 590, 189
5. The Asiatic Themes, 243
6. Saxony in the Ninth Century, 350
7. The Partition-Treaty of Verdun, 853, 410
8. Western Europe in 890, 444
--------------
GENEALOGICAL TABLES
1. The Vandal Kings, 12
2. The Eastern Emperors, 457-518, 39
3. The House of the Merovings, 166
4. The Lombard Kings, 183
5. The House of Heraclius, 236
6. The Mayors of the Palace of the House of 260
St. Arnulf,
7. The Descendants of Charles the Great, 413
--------------
APPENDIX.
Names and Dates of the Emperors at 515-517
Constantinople, the Ostrogothic and
Visigothic Kings, the Popes, and the
Caliphs,
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER I
ODOACER AND THEODORIC
476-493
Importance of the year 476—The Emperor Zeno recognises Odoacer as
Patrician in Italy—Odoacer’s position—Divisions of Europe in 476—The
Vandals in Africa and King Gaiseric—Rule of Odoacer in Italy—His war
with Theodoric, and fall.
In the summer of 477 A.D. a band of ambassadors, who claimed to speak
the will of the decayed body which still called itself the Roman senate,
appeared before the judgment-seat of the emperor Zeno, the ruler of
Constantinople and the Eastern Empire. They came to announce to him that
the army of the West had slain the patrician Orestes, and deposed from
his throne the son of Orestes, the boy-emperor Romulus. But they did not
then proceed to inform Zeno that another Caesar had been duly elected to
replace their late sovereign. Embassies with such news had been common
of late years, but this particular deputation, unlike any other which
had yet visited the Bosphorus, came to announce to the Eastern emperor
that his own mighty name sufficed for the protection of both East and
West. They laid at his feet the diadem and purple robe of Romulus, and
professed to transfer their homage and loyalty to his august person.
Then, as if by way of supplement and addendum, they informed Zeno that
they had chosen Flavius Odoacer for their governor, and trusted that
their august master would deign to ratify the choice, and confer on
Odoacer the title of Patrician.
It has often been repeated of late years that this date, 476 A.D., does
not form a very notable landmark in the history of the world, that its
sole event was the transfer of the nominal supremacy of the Western
World from a powerless Caesar who lived at Ravenna to a powerless Caesar
who lived at Constantinople. We are reminded that the patrician Odoacer
and the deputies of the Roman Senate assured the Eastern Emperor not
that they had cast off allegiance to the imperial name, but that Italy
no longer needed a separate Augustus, and that a single ruler might once
more rule East and West, as in the days of Constantine and Theodosius.
[Sidenote: Odoacer Patrician in Italy.] And if the representatives of
the western realm then proceeded to recommend Zeno to appoint as his
vice-regent among them ‘Odoacer, a mighty man of war, and a person well
skilled in political matters, whom they had selected to defend their
interests,’ they were, in truth, making no new or startling proposition;
for similar embassies had often arrived at Constantinople to announce,
not the choice of a mere patrician, but the election of an independent
emperor.
In a purely formal way all this is true enough, and we must concede that
the permanent establishment of a Teutonic ruler in Italy was only
another instance of what had already occurred in Spain and Africa. As
yet nobody in either of the three countries had asserted that the Roman
Empire had died out and been replaced for all purposes by a Teutonic
kingship. Documents were still dated and coins still struck with the
name of a Roman Emperor upon them alike in Spain, Africa, and Italy.
After 476 the subjects of the Visigoth Euric, no less than those of the
Scyrrian Odoacer, proceeded to grave a rude portrait of Zeno on their
moneys, just as they had done a few years earlier with a rude portrait
of Valentinian III. What mattered it to them that the one dwelt east of
the Adriatic and the other west?
But if the historians of the last century were too neglectful of the
constitutional and theoretical aspect of affairs, when they bluntly
asserted that the Roman Empire ceased in the West in 476, there is a
danger that our own generation may become too much imbued with the
formal aspect of things, and too little conscious of the real change
which took place in that obscure year. The disappearance of the Roman
Empire of the West was, in truth, a long process, which began as early
as 411 when Britain—first of all the Occidental ‘dioceses’—was abandoned
to the barbarian, and did not, perhaps, end till Francis II. of Austria
laid down the title of Emperor in the year 1806. Yet if we must choose a
point at which, rather than at any other, we are to put the breach
between the old and the new, if we must select any year as the
dividing-line between ancient history and the Middle Ages, it is
impossible to choose a better date than 476.
Down to the day on which Flavius Odoacer deposed Augustulus there was
always at Rome or Ravenna a prince who represented in clear heritage the
imperial succession that descended from Octavian and Trajan and
Constantine. His crown might be fragile, his life in constant danger;
his word might be less powerful in Italy than that of some barbarian
Ricimer or Gundobad who stood behind the throne. Nevertheless, he was
brought into real contact with his subjects, and was a visible, tangible
personage whose will and character still made some difference in the
governance of the state. The weakest Glycerius or Olybrius never sank
into being a mere puppet, like an eighth century king of the Franks, or
a seventeenth century Mikado. Moreover, there was till the last a
possibility—even, perchance, a probability—that there would arise some
strong emperor who would free himself from the power of his German prime
minister. Majorian nearly succeeded in doing so; and the stories of the
falls of the Goths, Gainas and Aspar, in the East show that such an
attempt was not a hopeless undertaking.
But when Odoacer seized the throne from the boy Augustulus, and became
with the consent, if not the goodwill, of the Constantinopolitan Caesar,
the sole representative in the West of the imperial system, a very grave
change took place in the status of the empire. [Sidenote: Practical
meaning of Odoacer’s position.] Flavius Odoacer was something far more
than a patrician ruling as the representative of an absentee emperor. He
was not only the successor of Ricimer, but the predecessor of Theodoric
and Alboin. For, beside being a Roman official, he was a German king,
raised on the shield and hailed as ‘Thiudans’ by the whole Teutonic
horde who now represented the old legions of the West. If he never took
the title of ‘king of Italy,’ it was because territorial appellations of
the kind were not yet known. Euric and Gaiseric, his contemporaries,
called themselves Kings of the Visigoths and Vandals, not of Spain and
Africa. And so Odoacer being king of a land and an army, but not of a
nation, may have been somewhat at a loss how to set forth his royal
appellation. He would not have deigned to call himself ‘king of the
Italians;’ to call himself king of the Scyrri or Turcilingi, or any
other of the tribes who furnished part of his host, would have been to
assume an inadequate name. Puzzled contemporary chroniclers sometimes
called him king of the Goths, though he himself never used such a title.
Still he was a king, and a king with a settled territory and an
organised host; not a migratory invader of Italy, as Alaric had been,
but a permanent ruler of the land. In this way he was undoubtedly the
forerunner of the Ostrogoths and Lombards who took his place, and,
though the title would have sounded strange in his own ears, we may
fairly style him king of Italy, as we so style Theodoric, or Berengar,
or Victor Emmanuel. For it was the will of Odoacer that was obeyed in
the land, and not the will of his titular superior at Constantinople. It
was Odoacer who appointed taxes and chose officials, and interfered in
the election of bishops of Rome, and declared war on the Rugians or the
Vandals. In the few documents of his time that have survived, the name
of Zeno is seldom mentioned, and in signing grants he styles himself
Odovacar Rex, and not Odovacar Patricius, as strict Roman usage should
have prescribed. Similarly, an Italian official acknowledges his _regia
largitas_, not his _patricia magnitudo_. It is, then, in every way
correct, as well as convenient, to style him the first German king of
Italy, and to treat his reign as the commencement of a new era. If we
hesitate to do this, we are logically bound to refuse to recognise the
Visigothic or Frankish kings in Spain and Gaul as independent sovereigns
till the middle of the sixth century, and to protract the Roman Empire
of the West till Leovigild and Theudebert formally disclaimed the
imperial supremacy (540-70).
In the year 476 the greater parts of the lands which had formerly
composed the Roman Empire of the West had taken new forms in the shape
of six large Teutonic kingdoms. Italy and Noricum formed the kingdom of
Odoacer; North Africa the dominions of the Vandal Gaiseric. The
Visigothic realm of Euric extended from the Loire to the Straits of
Gibraltar. King Gundobad the Burgundian occupied the valleys of the
Rhone and Saône, as far as their extreme headwaters. The Princes of the
Franks reigned on the Meuse, Moselle, and lower Rhine. Last and smallest
of the six Teutonic States was the kingdom of the Suevi in what would
now be called north Portugal and Galicia. Interspersed among these
German kingdoms were three or four remnants of the old Roman Empire,
which had not yet been submerged by the rising flood of Teutonism,
though they were destined ere long to disappear beneath its surface.
[Sidenote: State of Western Europe in 476.] The province of Britain had
become a group of small and unhappy Celtic kingdoms, on whose borders
the Angle and Saxon had not yet made any appreciable encroachment.
Armorica, the modern Brittany, was also a rough confederacy of Celtic
states. The Seine valley and the middle Loire formed a Romano-Gallic
kingdom under Syagrius, the last governor who had acknowledged the
supremacy of the empire beyond the Alps. The Cantabrians and Basques in
their hills above the Bay of Biscay had preserved their independence
against the Visigoths, just as their ancestors, five centuries before,
had held out against the Roman conquerors of Spain. Lastly, there was
still a fragment of territory on the Adriatic which claimed to represent
the legitimate Empire of the West. The emperor Julius Nepos, when driven
from Rome and Ravenna, had fled to Dalmatia, where he contrived to keep
together a small kingdom around his capital of Salona. Of these five
scattered remnants of territory which had not yet fallen into the hands
of the Germans, there were two, the kingdoms of Syagrius and Nepos,
which were doomed to a speedy fall; for the other three a longer and
more chequered career was reserved.
Around the solid block of land, which had once formed the Western
Empire, were lying a ring of German tribes, who had worked forward from
the North and East into the deserted dwellings of the races who had
already passed on within the Roman border. The Frisians lay about the
mouths of the Waal and Lech, north of the land lately won by the Franks.
The Alamanni, a confederacy of Suevian tribes, had possession of the
valleys of the Main and Neckar, the Black Forest, and the banks of the
upper Danube. East of them again lay the Thuringians and Rugians, in the
lands which we should now call northern Bavaria and Bohemia. Beyond them
came the Lombards in Moravia and northern Hungary, and the Herules and
Gepidae on the middle Danube and the Theiss. All these tribes, like
their brethren who had gone before them, were showing a general tendency
to press West and South, and take their share in the plunder of the
dismembered Empire.
The history of the Teutonic kingdoms of the later fifth and earlier
sixth century falls into two distinct halves. The tale of the doings of
Frank, Visigoth, Burgundian, and Suevian in the West forms one. Very
slightly connected with it do we find the other, the story of the doings
of Odoacer in Italy, and of the Vandal kings in Africa, whose
connections and interests are far more with the Eastern Empire than with
the Transalpine kingdoms. It is with these two states that we shall
first have to deal, leaving the discussion of the affairs of the Teutons
of Gaul and Spain for another chapter.
Gaiseric, or Genseric as the Romans sometimes called him, first of the
Vandal kings of Africa, was still reigning at Carthage in the year when
Odoacer became ruler of Italy. For forty-eight years did this first of
the Teutonic sea-kings bear sway in the land which he had won, and hold
the naval supremacy in the central Mediterranean. The creation of the
Vandal kingdom had been one of the most extraordinary feats of the time
of the great migrations, and must be attributed entirely to the personal
energy of their long-lived king. His tribe was one of the least numerous
of the many wandering hordes which had trespassed within the bounds of
the empire, no more than 80,000 souls, men, women, and children all
counted, when they first invaded Africa. [Sidenote: The Vandals in
Africa, 439-77.] That such a small army should have overrun a province a
thousand miles long, and should have become the terror of the whole
seaboard of the Western Empire was the triumph of Gaiseric’s ability. He
was not one of the stalwart, hard-fighting, brainless chiefs who were
generally to be found at the head of a German horde, but a man of very
moderate stature, limping all his life through from a kick that he got
from a horse in early youth. His mental powers alone made him
formidable, for he was not only a general of note, but a wily
politician, faithless not with the light and heady fickleness of a
savage, but with the deliberate and malicious treachery of a
professional intriguer. He was one of those not uncommon instances of a
Teuton, who, when brought into contact with the empire, picked up all
the vices of its decaying civilisation without losing those of his
original barbarism. It is not without some reason that the doings of
Gaiseric have left their mark on the history of language in the shape of
the modern word ‘Vandalism.’ The sufferings of Italy and Africa at his
hands were felt more deeply than the woes they had endured at the hands
of other invaders, because of the treachery and malice which inspired
them. Compared with Gaiseric, Alaric the Goth seemed a model of knightly
courtesy, and Attila the Hun a straightforward, if a brutal, enemy. The
Vandal king’s special foibles were the conclusion of treaties and
armistices which he did not intend to keep, and a large piratical
disregard for the need of any pretext or justification for his raids,
save indeed the single plea that the city or district that he attacked
was at that particular moment not in a good position to defend itself.
From his contact with the empire, Gaiseric had picked up the
characteristics of the two most odious types of the day—the
tax-collector and the persecuting ecclesiastical bigot. There was more
systematic financial oppression in Africa than in any of the other new
Germanic kingdoms, and far more spiteful persecution of religious
enemies.
The system on which the Vandal organised his realm was not the
comparatively merciful ‘thirding of the land’ that Odoacer and Theodoric
introduced into Italy. He confiscated all the large estates of the great
African landowners, and turned them into royal domains, worked by his
bailiffs. Of the smaller estates, tilled by the provincials who owned
them, he made two parts; those in the province of Africa proper and the
best of those beyond it, were appropriated and made into military fiefs
for his Teutonic followers. [Sidenote: Vandal Oppression.] These _sortes
Vandalorum_, as they were called, were hereditary and free from all
manner of taxation. The royal revenue was raised entirely from those of
the poorer and more remote provincial proprietors, who had not been
expropriated, and from them Gaiseric, by pitiless taxation, drew a very
large revenue.
But it was for his persecution, far more than his fiscal oppression,
that Gaiseric was hated. The Vandals, like most of the other Teutons,
had embraced Arianism when they were converted, and Gaiseric—evil-liver
as he was—had set his mind on forcing his subjects to conform to the
religion of their masters. He confiscated all the Catholic churches in
Africa, and either handed them over to the Arians or destroyed them. He
forbade the consecration of new Catholic bishops, and banished or
imprisoned all whom he found already existing in his dominions.
Occasionally he put to death, and frequently he imprisoned or sold as
slaves, prominent supporters of the orthodox faith. If martyrdoms were
few, ‘_Dragonnades_’ were many, and, by their systematic cruelty, the
Vandal king and people have gained for themselves an ill name for ever
in the pages of history.
Their hateful oppression of the provincials made the Vandals’ power in
Africa very precarious. They were far too few for the mighty land they
had conquered, even when Gaiseric had attracted adventurers of all sorts
to his banner, and had even enlisted the savage Moors of Atlas to serve
on his fleet. The fanatical Africans, the race who had produced the
turbulent Donatist sectaries and the wild Circumcelliones, were not
likely to submit with meekness to their new masters. They only waited
for a deliverer in order to rise against the Vandals, and twice, during
the reign of Gaiseric, it seemed as if the deliverer were at hand. On
each occasion, the Vandal snatched a success by his cunning and
promptitude, when all the probabilities of success were against him.
[Sidenote: Gaiseric in danger.] In 460, the Emperor Majorian had
collected a fleet of overwhelming strength at Carthagena, and was
already gathering the army that was to be conveyed in it. But warned and
helped by traitors, Gaiseric came down on the ships before they were
manned or equipped, and carried off or burnt them all. In 468, a still
greater danger had threatened the Vandal; the Emperors of East and West,
Leo and Anthemius, had joined their forces to crush the nest of pirates
at Carthage. They actually sent to Africa an army that is said to have
amounted to nearly 100,000 men, and overran the whole country from
Tripoli to the gates of Carthage. In the hour of danger Gaiseric’s
courage and treachery were both conspicuous. After deluding the imbecile
Roman general Basiliscus, by asking and gaining a five days’ truce for
settling terms of submission, he sent fire-ships by night against the
hostile fleet, and, while the Roman troops were endeavouring to save
their vessels, attacked their unguarded camp. After suffering a defeat,
the coward Basiliscus drew off his armament, and the Vandal, saved as by
a miracle, could breathe again.
The last ten years of Gaiseric’s reign were filled with countless pirate
raids on Italy and Sicily, unopposed by the five puppet-emperors who
ruled at Rome and Ravenna in those evil days. Gaiseric survived the fall
of Romulus Augustulus just long enough to enable him to make a treaty
with Odoacer. By this agreement the Vandal, always more greedy for money
than for land, gave up his not inconsiderable conquests in Sicily in
return for an annual payment from the newly-enthroned king of Italy.
Gaiseric died in 477, and with him the greatness of the Vandals, though
their kingdom was to endure fifty years more. He left behind him a fine
fleet and a full treasury, and a palace resplendent with the spoils
taken at the great sack of Rome in 455. But the dominion of his handful
of Vandal followers in Africa was still as precarious as ever; their one
security had been the cunning and courage of their aged king, and when
he was gone there was no defence left to prevent the Vandal dominion
from falling, the moment that it should be attacked. Dreading rebellion
among the provincials, Gaiseric had dismantled the walls and gates of
every African town save Carthage. One battle lost would place the whole
country-side in the hands of an assailant, and at no very distant day
the assailant was to come, to avenge the sufferings of three unhappy
generations of the oppressed subjects of the Vandals.
[Sidenote: Hunneric, 477-84.] Gaiseric was succeeded by his son,
Hunneric, a man already advanced in years, who was, like his father, an
Arian and a bitter persecutor. He was married to Eudocia, the daughter
of the emperor Valentinian III., a prisoner of the sack of Rome in 455.
But his wife did not much influence him; he drew from her no tincture of
Roman civilisation, nor did her persistent orthodoxy wean him from his
Arianism. After living with him for sixteen unhappy years and bearing
him two sons, she at last contrived to escape secretly from Carthage,
fled to Jerusalem, and died there enjoying once more the Catholic
communion of which she had been so long deprived.
Hunneric was a tyrant of the worst type. His dealings with his family
are a sufficient proof of his character. Gaiseric, to avoid the danger
of a minority—a contingency which would have been fatal to his
precarious monarchy—had prescribed that each Vandal king should be
succeeded, not by his next-of-kin, but by his eldest relative. Such
successions were very usual among the Teutonic tribes, though they had
never before been formally made into a rule. Now Hunneric had a grown-up
son, Hildecat, whom he destined for his successor; but the prince was,
of course, younger than the king’s own brothers. Instead of cancelling
his father’s law, Hunneric set to work to exterminate his brothers, and
slew them with all their children, save two youths, the sons of his next
brother, Genzo, who saved themselves by timely flight.
During the seven years of his reign (477-484) Hunneric waged no wars;
his fleet could no longer prey on the dying carcase of the Western
Empire. The two formidable kingdoms of the Visigoth Euric and the
Scyrrian Odoacer could not be ravaged like the realm of a Maximus or a
Glycerius. They were left alone, while the energies of Hunneric were
devoted to persecution of the Catholics in his own realm. The orthodox
declared that he from first to last caused the death of 40,000 persons,
a hyperbolical exaggeration which half causes us to doubt the reality of
what was in truth a very cruel and severe persecution. Hunneric
delighted more in mutilation of hands and eyes and tongues than in death
given by the sword and the rope, but there is no doubt that, in a
considerable number of cases, he punished Catholics with the extreme
penalty.
While Hunneric was thus employed it is not strange to hear that he was
vexed by rebellions. The Moors of Mount Atlas rose against him, and, by
no means to the grief of the Latin-speaking provincials, encroached on
the Southern border of the Vandal kingdom, and pushed their incursions
as far as the Mons Aurasius in Numidia. While preparing to attack them
the king died, smitten, if the Catholic chroniclers are to be believed,
by the same horrid disease which made an end of Herod Agrippa. His
eldest and only grown-up son, Hildecat, had died before him, and the
Vandals at once placed on the throne Gunthamund, the eldest of his two
surviving nephews, a prince who showed great forbearance, when the
circumstances are considered, in imprisoning instead of murdering
Hunneric’s two younger children.
THE VANDAL KINGS, 427-530.
[The names of kings in Capital letters.]
GAISERIC,
King, 427; reigned at
Carthage, 439-477.
|
+---------+-----------------+
| | |
Eudocia, = HUNNERIC, Genzo. Theodoric.
daughter | 477-484. |
of Valentinian| |
III. | |
| +------------+----------+
| | | |
HILDERIC, GUNTHAMUND, THRASAMUND, Gelaris.
523-530. 484-496. 496-523. |
|
+---------+--------+
| | |
GEILAMIR, Ammatas. Tzazo.
530-534.
While we turn from the Vandal kingdom in Africa to the dominions of
Odoacer in Italy, we are struck at once by the contrast between the
methods of government employed in the two countries. [Sidenote: Internal
Government of Odoacer in Italy.] While Gaiseric and Hunneric ruled as
mere barbarians, and cast away all the ancient Roman machinery of
administration, king Odoacer kept up the whole system as he found it. He
appointed prætorian præfects, and _magistri militum_, and counts of the
sacred largesses, just as the Emperors before him had done. The senate
still sat at Rome and passed otiose decrees, the consuls still gave
their names to the year. But his great scheme of expropriation, by which
one-third of the land of each of the richer proprietors of Italy was
confiscated for the benefit of his mercenary troops, must have caused
much trouble and heart-burning. It is curious that we find so little
complaint made about it in the historians of the time. Probably
Odoacer’s wisdom in letting the smaller proprietors alone has preserved
his name from the abuse which still clings to the reputations of many of
the Teutonic conquerors of the empire.
On the whole the provincials of Italy must have felt comparatively
little change, when they began to be governed by a barbarian king,
instead of by a barbarian patrician, such as Ricimer or Gundobad had
been. Odoacer appears to have been one of those wise men who can let
well alone. Though an Arian himself, he refrained from all religious
persecution; and, if he firmly asserted his right to confirm the
election of bishops of Rome, we do not find that he ever forced his own
nominees on the clergy and people. Indeed, he was noted as a repressor
of the alienation of church lands and of simony.
Odoacer’s foreign policy seems to have been limited in its scope to the
design of keeping together the old ‘Diocese of Italy,’ that is, the
peninsula with its mainland appendages of Noricum and north Illyria. He
ceded to the Visigoth Euric the coastland of Provence, which he had
found still in Roman hands, and made no attempt to establish relations
with the Romano-Gallic governor Syagrius, who held Mid-Gaul, pressed in
between Visigoth and Frank. On the other hand, he pursued a firm policy
on his north-east frontier. When Julius Nepos was murdered by rebels in
480, Odoacer at once invaded and subdued the Dalmatian kingdom, which
the ex-emperor had till the last contrived to retain. Further north, in
Noricum, the Rugians had for many years been molesting the Roman
provincials and pushing across the Danube. Odoacer sent against them his
brother Hunwulf, who drove them back over the river, and took prisoner
Feva their king. But, when freed for a moment from their Rugian
oppressors, the Roman provincials took the opportunity, not of repairing
their ruined cities, but of migrating _en masse_ to Italy. [Sidenote:
Evacuation of Noricum 487.] Protected by the army of Hunwulf, the whole
population of Noricum, bearing all their goods and chattels, their
treasures, and even the exhumed bodies of their saints, poured southward
over the Alps, and obtained from Odoacer a settlement on the waste lands
of Italy, which the Vandals had ruined. Only in the Rhaetian valleys did
some remnants of the Latin-speaking population linger behind. Hence it
comes that south Bavaria and archducal Austria are not at this day
speaking Roumansh, like the Engadine, but the German tongue of the
Rugians and Herules who passed into the deserted province of Noricum,
when it was abandoned a few years later by the armies of Odoacer.
For thirteen years, 476-489, the Scyrrian king bore rule over Italy,
Noricum, and Dalmatia with very considerable success. As the years
rolled on without any disaster, with the army in good temper, and the
Italians fairly content at being at last freed from Vandal and Gothic
raids, Odoacer must have begun to believe that he had established a
kingdom as well founded as those of his Burgundian or Visigothic
neighbours. But there was one fatal weakness in his position: he
depended not on the loyalty of a single compact tribe, but on the
fidelity of a purely mercenary army, made up of the remnants of a dozen
broken Teutonic clans, which looked upon him as a general and a
paymaster, and not as a legitimate hereditary prince, descended from the
gods and heroes. The regiments of _Foederati_, who had proclaimed him
king, were in no sense a nation; it would have taken many generations to
weld them into one, and the fabric of the new kingdom was to be tried by
the roughest of shocks before it was even half a generation old.
In 489 there came against Odoacer from the Danube and the Illyrian Alps,
Theodoric, son of Theodemir, the king of the Ostrogoths, with all the
people of his race behind him—a vast host with their wives and children,
their slaves and their cattle, blocking all the mountain-passes of the
north-east with the twenty thousand ox-waggons that bore their worldly
goods.
Theodoric, the king of that half of the Gothic race which had lingered
behind in the Balkan peninsula, when Alaric led the other half westward,
was just at the end of a long series of rebellions and ravages by which
he had reduced Thrace and Moesia to a condition even more miserable than
that in which they had been left by the hordes of Attila.[1] Having
failed, like all his forerunners, to take Constantinople, and having
concluded his fourth peace with the emperor Zeno, he found himself left
with a half-starved army in a land which had been harried quite bare. He
had tried his best to reduce the Eastern empire to the condition to
which Ricimer had brought the Western, but the impregnable walls of
Byzantium had foiled him. Young, capable, and ambitious, he was yearning
for new and more profitable fields to conquer; while, at the same time,
the emperor of the East was casting about for all possible means to get
the Goths as far away from his gates as could be managed. Both Zeno and
Theodoric had their reasons for wishing ill to Odoacer: the emperor
believed him to have fostered or favoured a late rebellion in Asia which
had shaken his throne;[2] the Ostrogothic king was being stirred up by
Rugian exiles who had fled before the conquering arm of the king of
Italy.
Footnote 1:
See pp. 40-43.
Footnote 2:
See p. 44.
Neither party then needed much persuasion when a scheme was broached for
an invasion of Odoacer’s realm by the Ostrogoths. Zeno, taking the
formal ground that, by the admission of Odoacer and the Italians, he was
emperor as well of West as of East, proceeded to decree the deposition
of the patrician who now ruled at Rome, and his supersession by a new
patrician, the king of the Ostrogoths. Theodoric, in return for his
investiture with his new title, and the grant of the dominion of Italy,
made a loosely-worded promise to hold his future conquests as the
emperor’s representative. How far such homage would extend neither party
much cared; the emperor only wanted to get rid of the king of the Goths;
the king of the Goths knew that once master of Italy he could pay the
emperor just as much or as little deference as he might choose.
In the autumn of 488 Theodoric called together the whole Ostrogothic
people to a camp on the middle Danube, and bade them prepare for instant
migration. The inclement season of the year that he chose for this march
seems to have been dictated by fear of famine, for the war had so
ravaged Moesia that the Goths had not provisions enough to last till
next spring. So, in the October of 488, the Ostrogoths, a great
multitude of 200,000 or 300,000 souls, followed the Roman road along the
Danube, crossed at Singidunum and set out to march across Pannonia. But
they soon met with opposition; Traustila, king of the Gepidae, who now
occupied both banks of the mid-Danube, came out against them with his
host to prevent them from passing through his land. Theodoric defeated
him, but found such difficulty in pressing on through the hostile
country that he had to winter on the Save, supporting all his host on
the plunder of the farms of the Gepidae. [Sidenote: Theodoric invades
Italy, 489.] In the spring of 489 he moved on, and pressing through the
passes of the Julian Alps, without meeting any opposition from the
troops of the king of Italy, came out at last to the spot where the
gorge of Schönpass leads down into the plain of Venetia. Here, on the
banks of the Isonzo, Odoacer was waiting for him with all his host of
_Foederati_, and there was a mighty battle. The result was not doubtful;
the Ostrogoths, a single people, fighting for their wives and families,
who lay behind them in the crowded pass, led by their hereditary king,
the heaven-born Amal, and knowing that defeat meant destruction, were
too desperately fierce to be stopped by the mixed multitude of
mercenaries that followed Odoacer. The king of Italy was routed, his
camp stormed, his army scattered. It was only beneath the walls of
Verona that he could rally it for a second stand. Just a month after the
battle of the Isonzo, Theodoric appeared again in front of his enemy,
and again won a prompt victory. Here perished most of the old regiments
of _Foederati_ that had been wont to defend Italy, for Odoacer had
fought with the rapid Adige behind him, and the greater part of his army
was rolled back into the fierce stream.
Abandoning north Italy Odoacer now fell back on the marsh-girt fortress
of Ravenna, which had baffled so many invaders of the peninsula.
Theodoric meanwhile pressed forward and occupied Milan and all the
valley of the Po; his triumph was apparently made complete by the
surrender of Tufa, the _magister militum_ of Odoacer’s host, who
submitted to the Ostrogoth with the wreck of the Italian army. (Autumn,
489.)
But the war was destined to endure for three years more: Ravenna was
impregnable and Theodoric was thrice diverted from its siege by
disturbances from outside. First Tufa, with the remnant of the
_Foederati_, broke faith and rejoined his old master Odoacer. Then, in
the next year, Gundobad, king of the Burgundians, came over the Alps and
had to be turned back. Last Frederic, king of the Rugians, the first of
the many Frederics of German history, took arms in favour of Odoacer,
though Theodoric had sheltered him three years before, when he had fled
from the armies of the king of Italy. [Sidenote: Siege of Ravenna.
491-93.] It was not till July 491 that Odoacer was for the last time
driven back within the shelter of the marshes of Ravenna. For twenty
months more he maintained himself within its impregnable walls, till
sheer famine drove him to ask for peace in February 493.
Theodoric proffered his vanquished enemy far better terms than he could
have expected—that he should retain his kingly title and a share in the
rule of Italy. But, when Odoacer had laid down his arms and came to his
conqueror’s camp, he was treacherously slain at a banquet, only ten days
after Ravenna fell. This was almost the only base and mean crime in
Theodoric’s long and otherwise glorious career: his whole conduct at the
time of the surrender seems to prove that he deliberately lured his
rival to visit him, with the fixed intention of putting him to death.
(March, 493.)
So died Odoacer in the sixtieth year of his age; seventeen years after
he had slain Orestes, he met the same fate that he had inflicted on his
predecessor.
------------------------------------------------------------------------