was summoned home, and a great man, whom his presence in Italy had kept
in check, availed himself of his absence. Totila seemed indeed worthy
to succeed to the empire of his countryman Theodoric. He again peopled
the utterly exhausted Rome; he restored its buildings, and lived among
the new-comers himself, encouraging their efforts to give it once more
the appearance of the capital of the world. But these efforts were
in vain. There was no possibility of reviving the old fiction of the
identity of the freshly-imported inhabitants and the countrymen of
Scipio and Cæsar. Only one link was possible between the old state of
things and the new. It was strange that it was left for the Christian
Bishop to bridge over the chasm that separated the Rome of the
Consulship and the Empire from the capital of the Goths. Yet so it was.
While the short duration of the reigns of the barbaric kings prevented
the most sanguine from looking forward to the stability of any power
for the future, the immunity already granted to the clerical order, and
the sanctuary afforded, in the midst of the wildest excesses of siege
and storm, by their shrines and churches, had affixed a character of
inviolability and permanence to the influence of the ecclesiastical
chief. At Constantinople, the presence of the sovereign, who affected a
grandeur to which the pretensions to divinity of the Roman emperors had
been modesty and simplicity, kept the dignity of the Bishop in a very
secondary place. But at Rome there was no one left to dispute his rank.
His office claimed a duration of upwards of four hundred years; and
though at first his predecessors had been fugitives and martyrs, and
even now his power had no foundation except in the willing obedience
of the members of his flock, the necessity of his position had forced
him to extend his claims beyond the mere requirements of his spiritual
rule. During the ephemeral occupations of the city by Vandals and Huns
and Ostrogoths, and all the tribes who successively took possession of
the great capital, he had been recognised as the representative of the
most influential portion of the inhabitants. As it naturally followed
that the higher the rank of a ruler or intercessor was, the more likely
his success would be, the Christians of the orthodox persuasion had
the wisdom to raise their Bishop as high as they could. He had stood
between the devoted city and the Huns; he had promised obedience or
threatened resistance to the Goths, according to the conduct pursued
with regard to his flock by the conquerors. He had also lent to
Belisarius all the weight of his authority in restoring the power of
the emperors, and from this time the Bishop of Rome became a great
civil as well as ecclesiastical officer. All parties in turn united in
trying to win him over to their cause--the Arian kings, by kindness
and forbearance to his adherents; and the orthodox, by increasing the
rights and privileges of his see. And already the policy of the Roman
Pontiffs began to take the path it has never deserted since. They
looked out in all quarters for assistance in their schemes of ambition
and conquest. Emissaries were despatched into many nations to convert
them, not from heathenism to Christianity, but from independence to an
acknowledgment of their subjection to Rome. It was seen already that
a great spiritual empire might be founded upon the ruins of the old
Roman world, and spread itself over the perplexed and unstable politics
of the barbaric tribes. No means, accordingly, were left untried to
extend the conquests of the spiritual Cæsar. When Clovis the Frank was
converted by the entreaties of his wife from Arianism to the creed
of the Roman Church, the orthodox bishops of France considered it a
victory over their enemies, though these enemies were their countrymen
and neighbours. And from henceforth we find the different confessions
of faith to have more influence in the setting up or overthrowing of
kingdoms than the strength of armies or the skill of generals. Narses,
who was appointed the successor of Belisarius, was a believer in the
decrees of the Council of Nice. His orthodoxy won him the support of
all the orthodox Huns and Heruleans and Lombards, who formed an army
of infuriated missionaries rather than of soldiers, and gained to his
cause the majority of the Ostrogoths whom it was his task to fight.
Totila in vain tried to bear up against this invasion. The heretical
Ostrogoths, expelled from the towns by their orthodox fellow-citizens,
and ill supported by the inhabitants of the lands they traversed,
were defeated in several battles; and at last, when the resisting
forces were reduced to the paltry number of seven thousand men, their
spirits broken by defeat, and a continuance in Italy made useless by
the hostile feelings of the population, they applied to Narses for
some means of saving their lives. He furnished them with vessels,
which carried them from the lands which, sixty years before, had
been assigned them by the great Theodoric, and they found an obscure
termination to so strange and checkered a career, by being lost and
mingled in the crowded populations of Constantinople. This was in
553. The Ostrogoths disappear from history. The Visigoths have still
a settlement at the southwest of France and in the rich regions of
Spain, but they are isolated by their position, and are divided into
different branches. The Franks are a great and seemingly well-cemented
race between the Rhine and the sea. The Burgundians have a form of
government and code of laws which keep them distinct and powerful.
There are nations rising into independence in Germany. In England,
Christianity has formed a bond which practically gives firmness and
unity to the kingdoms of the Heptarchy; and it might be expected
that, having seen so many tribes of strange and varying aspect emerge
from the unknown regions of the East, we should have little to do but
watch the gradual enlightenment of those various races, and see them
assuming, by slow degrees, their present respective places; but the
undiscovered extremities of the earth were again to pour forth a swarm
of invaders, who plunged Italy back into its old state of barbarism and
oppression, and established a new people in the midst of its already
confused and intermixed populations.
Somewhere up between the Aller and the Oder there had been settled,
from some unknown period, a people of wild and uncultivated habits,
who had occasionally appeared in small detachments in the various
gatherings of barbarians who had forced their way into the South.
Following the irresistible impulse which seems to impel all the
settlers in the North, they traversed the regions already occupied
by the Heruleans and the Gepides, and paused, as all previous
invasions had done, on the outer boundary of the Danube. These were
the Longobards or Lombards, so called from the spears, _bardi_, with
which they were armed; and not long they required to wait till a
favourable opportunity occurred for them to cross the stream. In the
hurried levies of Narses some of them had offered their services, and
had been present at the victory over Totila the Goth. They returned,
in all probability, to their companions, and soon the hearts of
the whole tribe were set upon the conquest of the beautiful region
their countrymen had seen. If they hesitated to undertake so long an
expedition, two incidents occurred which made it indispensable. Flying
in wild fury and dismay from the face of a pursuing enemy, the Avars,
themselves a ferocious Asiatic horde which had terrified the Eastern
Empire, came and joined themselves to the Lombards. With united forces,
all their tents, and wives and children, their horses and cattle, this
dreadful alliance began their progress to Italy. The other incident
was, that in revenge for the injustice of his master, and dreading his
further malice, Narses himself invited their assistance. Alboin, the
Lombard king, was chief of the expedition. He had been refused the hand
of Rosamund, the daughter of Cunimond, chief of the Gepides. He poured
the combined armies of Lombards and Avars upon the unfortunate tribe,
slew the king with his own hand, and, according to the inhuman fashion
of his race, formed his drinking-cup of his enemy's skull. He married
Rosamund, and pursued his victorious career. He crossed the Julian
Alps, made himself master of Milan and the dependent territories, and
was lifted on the shield as King of Italy. At a festival in honour of
his successes, he forced his favourite wine-goblet into the hands of
his wife. She recognised the fearful vessel, and shuddered while she
put her lips to the brim. But hatred took possession of her heart. She
promised her hand and throne to Kilmich, one of her attendants, if he
would take vengeance on the tyrant who had offered her so intolerable a
wrong. The attendant was won by the bride, and slew Alboin. But justice
pursued the murderers. They were discovered, and fled to Ravenna, where
the Exarch held his court. Saved thus from human retribution, Rosamund
brought her fate upon herself. Captivated with the prospect of marrying
the Exarch, she presented a poisoned cup to Kilmich, now become her
husband, as he came from the bath. The effect was immediate, and the
agonies he felt told him too surely the author of his death. [A.D. 575.]
He just lived long enough to stab the wretched woman with his dagger,
and this frightful domestic tragedy was brought to a close.
Alboin had divided his dominion into many little states and dukedoms.
A kind of anarchy succeeded the strong government of the remorseless
and clear-sighted king, and enemies began to arise in different
directions. The Franks from the south of France began to cross the
Alps. The Greek settlements began to menace the Lombards from the
South. Internal disunion was quelled by the public danger, and
Antharis, the son of Cleph, was nominated king. To strengthen himself
against the orthodox Franks, he professed himself a Christian and
joined the Arian communion. With the aid of his co-religionists
he repelled the invaders, and had time, in the intervals of their
assaults, to extend his conquests to the south of the peninsula. There
he overthrew the settlements which owned the Empire of the East;
and coming to the extreme end of Italy, the savage ruler pushed his
war-horse into the water as deep as it would go, and, standing up in
his stirrups, threw forward his javelin with all his strength, saying,
"That is the boundary of the Lombard power." Unhappily for the unity
of that distracted land, the warrior's boast was unfounded, and it
has continued ever since a prey to discord and division. [A.D. 591.]
Another kingdom, however, was added to the roll of European states;
and this was the last settlement permanently made on the old Roman
territory.
The Lombards were a less civilized horde than any of their
predecessors. The Ostrogoths had rapidly assimilated themselves to
the people who surrounded them, but the Lombards looked with haughty
disdain on the population they had subdued. By portioning the country
among the chiefs of the expedition, they commenced the first experiment
on a great scale of what afterwards expanded into the feudal system.
There were among them, as among the other northern settlers, an
elective king and an hereditary nobility, owing suit and service to
their chief, and exacting the same from their dependants; and already
we see the working of this similarity of constitution in the diffusion
throughout the whole of Europe of the monarchical and aristocratic
principle, which is still the characteristic of most of our modern
states. From this century some authors date the origin of what are
called the "Middle Ages," forming the great and obscure gulf between
ancient and modern times. Others, indeed, wish to fix the commencement
of the Middle Ages at a much earlier date--even so far back as the
reign of Constantine. They found this inclination on the fact that to
him we are indebted for the settlement of barbarians within the empire,
and the institution of a titled nobility dependent on the crown. But
many things were needed besides these to constitute the state of
manners and polity which we recognise as those of the Middle Ages,
and above them all the establishment of the monarchical principle in
ecclesiastical government, and the recognition of a sovereign priest.
This was now close at hand, and its approach was heralded by many
appearances.
How, indeed, could the Church deprive itself of the organization
which it saw so powerful and so successful in civil affairs? A
machinery was all ready to produce an exact copy of the forms of
temporal administration. There were bishops to be analogous to the
great feudataries of the crown; priests and rectors to represent the
smaller freeholders dependent on the greater barons; but where was the
monarch by whom the whole system was to be combined and all the links
of the great chain held together by a point of central union? The
want of this had been so felt, that we might naturally have expected
a claim to universal superiority to have long ere this been made by
a Pope of Rome, the ancient seat of the temporal power. But with his
residence perpetually a prey to fresh inroads, a heretical king merely
granting him toleration and protection, the pretension would have been
too absurd during the troubles of Italy, and it was not advanced for
several years. The necessity of the case, however, was such, that a
voice was heard from another quarter calling for universal obedience,
and this was uttered by the Patriarch of Constantinople. Rome, we must
remember, had by this time lost a great portion of her ancient fame.
It was reserved for this wonderful city to rise again into all her
former grandeur, by the restoration of learning and the knowledge of
what she had been. At this period all that was known of her by the
ignorant barbarians was, that she was a fresh-repaired and half-peopled
town, which had been sacked and ruined five times within a century,
that her inhabitants were collected from all parts of the world, and
that she was liable to a repetition of her former misfortunes. They
knew nothing of the great men who had raised her to such pre-eminence.
She had sunk even from being the capital of Italy, and could therefore
make no intelligible claim to be considered the capital of the world.
Constantinople, on the other hand, which, by our system of education,
we are taught to look upon as a very modern creation compared with
the Rome of the old heroic ages of the kings and consuls, was at that
period a magnificent metropolis, which had been the seat of government
for three hundred years. The majesty of the Roman name had transferred
itself to that new locality, and nothing was more natural than that the
Patriarch of the city of Constantine, which had been imperial from its
origin, and had never been defiled by the presence of a Pagan temple,
should claim for himself and his see a pre-eminence both in power and
holiness. Accordingly, a demand was made in 588 for the recognition
throughout the Christian world of the universal headship of the
bishopric of Constantinople. But at that time there was a bishop of
Rome, whom his successors have gratefully dignified with the epithet
of Great, who stood up in defence, not of his own see only, but of all
the bishoprics in Europe. Gregory published, in answer to the audacious
claim of the Eastern patriarch, a vigorous protest, in which these
remarkable words occur:--"This I declare with confidence, that whoso
designates himself Universal Priest, or, in the pride of his heart,
consents to be so named--he is the forerunner of Antichrist." It was
therefore to Rome, on the broad ground of the Christian equality of all
the chief pastors of the Church, that we owe this solemn declaration
against the pretensions of the ambitious John of Constantinople.
But Constantinople itself was about to fade from the minds of men.
Dissatisfied with the opposition to its supremacy, the Eastern Church
became separated in interest and discipline and doctrine from its
Western branch. The intercourse between the two was hostile, and in
a short time nearly ceased. The empire also was so deeply engaged
in defending its boundaries against the Persians and other enemies
in Asia, that it took small heed of the proceedings of its late
dependencies, the newly-founded kingdoms in Europe. It is probable
that the refined and ostentatious court of Justinian, divided as it
was into fanatical parties about some of the deepest and some of the
most unimportant mysteries of the faith, and contending with equal
bitterness about the charioteers of the amphitheatre according as
their colours were green or blue, looked with profound contempt on
the struggles after better government and greater enlightenment of
the rabble of Franks, and Lombards, and Burgundians, who had settled
themselves in the distant lands of the West. The interior regulations
of Justinian formed a strange contrast with the grandeur and success of
his foreign policy. By his lieutenants Belisarius and Narses, he had
reconquered the lost inheritance of his predecessors, and held in full
sovereignty for a while the fertile shores of Africa, rescued from the
debasing hold of the Vandals; he had cleared Italy of Ostrogoths, Spain
even had yielded an unwilling obedience, and his name was reverenced in
the great confederacy of the Germanic peoples who held the lands from
the Atlantic eastward to Hungary, and from Marseilles to the mouth of
the Elbe. But his home was the scene of every weakness and wickedness
that can disgrace the name of man. Kept in slavish submission to his
wife, he did not see, what all the rest of the world saw, that she
was the basest of her sex, and a disgrace to the place he gave her.
Beginning as a dancer at the theatre, she passed through every grade of
infamy and vice, till the name of Theodora became a synonym for every
thing vile and shameless. Yet this man, successful in war and politic
in action, though contemptible in private life, had the genius of a
legislator, and left a memorial of his abilities which extended its
influence through all the nations which succeeded to any portion of the
Roman dominion, and has shaped and modified the jurisprudence of all
succeeding times. He was not so much a maker of new laws, as a restorer
and simplifier of the old; and as the efforts of Justinian in this
direction were one of the great features by which the sixth century is
distinguished, it will be useful to devote a page or two to explain in
what his work consisted.
The Roman laws had become so numerous and so contradictory that the
administration of justice was impossible, even where the judges
were upright and intelligent. The mere word of an emperor had been
considered a decree, and legally binding for all future time. No
lapse of years seems to have brought a law once promulgated into
desuetude. The people, therefore, groaned under the uncertainty of
the statutes, which was further increased by the innumerable glosses
or interpretations put upon them by the lawyers. All the decisions
which had ever been given by the fifty-four emperors, from Adrian to
Justinian, were in full force. All the commentaries made upon them by
advocates and judges, and all the sentences delivered in accordance
with them, were contained in thousands of volumes; and the result
was, when Justinian came to the throne in 526, that there was no
point of law on which any man could be sure. He employed the greatest
jurisconsults of that time, Trebonian and others, to bring some order
into the chaos; and such was the diligence of the commissioners,
that in fourteen months they produced the Justinian Code in twelve
books, containing a condensation of all previous constitutions.
[A.D. 527.] In the course of seven years, two hundred laws and fifty
judgments were added by the emperor himself, and a new edition of the
Code was published in 534. [A.D. 533.] Under the name of Institutes
appeared a new manual for the legal students in the great schools of
Constantinople, Berytus, and Rome, where the principles of Roman law
are succinctly laid down. The third of his great works was one for the
completion of which he gave Trebonian and his assessors ten years.
It is called the Digest or Pandects of Justinian, because in it were
digested, or put in order in a general collection, the best decisions
of the courts, and the opinions and treatises of the ablest lawyers.
All previous codes were ransacked, and two thousand volumes of legal
argument condensed; and in three years the indefatigable law-reformers
published their work, wherein three million leading judgments were
reduced to a hundred and fifty thousand. Future confusion was guarded
against by a commandment of the emperor abolishing all previous laws
and making it penal to add note or comment to the collection now
completed. The sentences delivered by the emperor, after the appearance
of the Pandects, were published under the name of the Novellæ; and
with this great clearing-out of the Augean stable of ancient law, the
salutary labours of Trebonian came to a close. In those laws are to be
seen both the virtues and the vices of their origin. They sprang from
the wise liberality of a despot, and handle the rights of subjects,
in their relation to each other, with the equanimity and justice of a
power immeasurably raised above them all. But the unlimited supremacy
of the ruler is maintained as the sole foundation for the laws
themselves. So we see in these collections, and in the spirit which
they have spread over all the codes which have taken them for their
model, a combination of humanity and probity in the civil law, with a
tendency to exalt to a ridiculous excess the authority of the governing
power.
This has been a century of wonderful revolutions. We have seen the
kingdom of the Ostrogoths take the lead in Europe under the wise
government of Theodoric the Great. We have seen it overthrown by
an army of very small size, consisting of the very forces they had
so recently triumphed over in every battle; and finally, after the
victories over them of Belisarius and Narses, we have seen the
last small remnant of their name removed from Italy altogether and
eradicated from history for all future time. But, strange as this
reassertion of the Greek supremacy was, the rapidity of its overthrow
was stranger still. A new people came upon the stage, and established
the Lombard power. The empire contracted itself within its former
narrow bounds, and kept up the phantom of its superiority merely by
the residence of an Exarch, or provincial governor, at Ravenna. The
fiction of its power was further maintained by the Emperor's official
recognition of certain rulers, and his ratification of the election of
the Roman bishops. But in all essentials the influence had departed
from Constantinople, and the Western monarchies were separated from the
East.
In the Northwest, the confederacy of the Franks, which had consolidated
into one immense and powerful kingdom under Clovis, became separated,
weakened, and converted into open enemies under his degenerate
successors.
But as the century drew to a close, a circumstance occurred, far away
from the scene of all these proceedings, which had a greater influence
on human affairs than the reconquest of Italy or the establishment
of France. This was the marriage of a young man in a town of Arabia
with the widow of his former master. In 564 this young man was born in
Mecca, where his family had long held the high office of custodiers
and guardians of the famous Caaba, which was popularly believed to be
the stone that covered the grave of Abraham. But when he was still a
child his father died, and he was left to the care of his uncle. The
simplicity of the Arab character is shown in the way in which the young
noble was brought up. Abu Taleb initiated him in the science of war
and the mysteries of commerce. He managed his horse and sword like an
accomplished cavalier, and followed the caravan as a merchant through
the desert. Gifted with a high poetical temperament, and soaring above
the grovelling superstitions of the people surrounding him, he used
to retire to meditate on the great questions of man's relation to his
Maker, which the inquiring mind can never avoid. Meditation led to
excitement. He saw visions and dreamed dreams. He saw great things
before him, if he could become the leader and lawgiver of his race. But
he was poor and unknown. His mistress Cadijah saw the aspirations of
her noble servant, and offered him her hand. He was now at leisure to
mature the schemes of national regeneration and religious improvement
which had occupied him so long, and devoted himself more than ever to
study and contemplation. This was Mohammed, the Prophet of Islam, who
retired in 594 to perfect his scheme, and whose empire, before many
years elapsed, extended from India to Spain, and menaced Christianity
and Europe at the same time from the Pyrenees and the Danube.
SEVENTH CENTURY.
Kings of the Franks.
A.D.
THIERRY II. and THEODOBERT II.--(_cont._)
614. CLOTAIRE III. (sole king.)
628. DAGOBERT and CHARIBERT.
638. SIGEBERT and CLOVIS II.
654. CHILDERIC II.
679. THIERRY IV.
692. CLOVIS III. (PEPIN, Mayor.)
695. CHILDEBERT III. (do.)
Emperors of the East.
A.D.
MAURICE--(_cont._)
602. PHOCAS.
611. HERACLIUS.
641. CONSTANTINE, (and others.)
642. CONSTANS.
668. CONSTANTIUS V.
685. JUSTINIAN II.
695. LEONTIUS.
697. TIBERIUS.
Authors.
NENNIUS, (620,) BEDE, (674-735,) ALDHELM, ADAMNANUS.
THE SEVENTH CENTURY.
POWER OF ROME SUPPORTED BY THE MONKS--CONQUESTS OF THE MOHAMMEDANS.