In the history of nations there is one fact which again and again with
startling uniformity repeats itself. The rough, strong races from the
north menace, and at last rudely dominate more highly civilized
but less hardy races at the South, to the ultimate benefit of both,
although with much present discomfort to the conquered race!
In Greece it was first the rude Hellenes who overran the Pelasgians.
And again, long after that, there was another descent of fierce
northern barbarians,--the Dorians from Epirus,--who, when they took
possession of the Peloponnesus and became the _Spartans_, infused that
vigorous strain without which the history of Greece might have been a
very tame affair. In the British Isles it was the Picts and Scots, who
would have done the same thing with England, perhaps, if the Angles
and Saxons had not come to the rescue, while Spain had her own Picts
and Scots in the mountain tribes of the Pyrenees. But in the fifth
century there was the most stupendous illustration of this tendency,
when all of Southern Europe was at last inundated by that northern
deluge, and the effete Roman Empire was effaced.
The process had been a gradual one; had commenced, in fact, two
centuries before the overthrow of the Roman Republic. But not
until the fourth century, after the wicked old empire had espoused
Christianity, did it become obvious that its foundations were
undermined by this flood of barbarians. In 410 A.D., when the
West-Goths, under Alaric, entered and sacked Rome, her power was
broken. The roots no longer nourished the distant extremities in
Britain and Gaul, and it was only a question of time when these, too,
should succumb to the inflowing tide.
The Ostro-Goths--or East-Goths--in Northern Italy, and the
Visigoths--or West-Goths--in Gaul, were setting up kingdoms of their
own, under a Roman protectorate. The long period of peace in Spain was
broken. The Pyrenees, with their warlike tribes, defended her for a
time; but the Suevi and the Vandals--the latter a companion tribe of
the Goths--had found an easier entrance by the sea on the east. They
flowed down toward the south, and from thence across to the northern
coast of Africa, which they colonized, leaving a memorial in Spain,
in the lovely province of Andalusia, which was named after
them--_Vandalusia_. But before the sacking of Rome a wave of the
Gothic invasion had overflowed the Pyrenees, and Northern Spain had
become a part of the Gothic kingdom in Gaul, with the city of Toulouse
as its head.
A century of contact with Roman civilization had wrought great changes
in this conquering race. They were untamed in strength, but realized
the value of the civilities of life, and of intellectual superiority;
and even strove to acquire some of the arts and accomplishments of the
race they were invading. They were not yet acknowledged entire masters
of Gaul and northern Spain. On condition of military service they had
undisputed possession of their territory, with their own king,
laws, and customs, but were nominally subjects of the Roman Emperor,
Honorius.
Their attitude toward the Romans at this period cannot better be told
than in the words of Ataulf himself (or Ataulfus, or Adolphus), whose
interesting story will be briefly related. He says:
"It was my first wish to destroy the Roman name and erect in its place
a Gothic Empire, taking to myself the place and the powers of Caesar
Augustus. But when experience taught me that the untamable barbarism
of the Goths would not suffer them to live under the sway of law, and
that the abolition of the institutions on which the state rested would
involve the ruin of the state itself, I chose instead the glory
of renewing and maintaining by Gothic strength the fame of Rome;
preferring to go down to posterity as the restorer of that Roman power
which it was beyond my power to replace."
These are not the words of a barbarian; although by the corrupt and
courtly nobles in Rome he was considered one; but no doubt he towered
far above the barbarous host whom he helped to lead into Rome in the
year 410 A.D.
Ataulf was the brother-in-law of Alaric, and succeeded that great
leader in authority after his death (410 A.D.).
At the time of the sacking of Rome this Gothic prince fell in love
with Placidia, the sister of the Emperor Honorius; and after the
fashion of his people, carried her away as his captive; not an
unwilling one, we suspect, for we learn of her great devotion to her
brave, strong wooer, with blond hair and blue eyes. Ataulf took his
fair prize to the city of Narbonne in southern France, and made
her his Queen. But when Constantius, a disappointed Roman lover of
Placidia's, instigated Honorius to send an army against him and his
Goths, he withdrew into Spain, and established his court with its rude
splendor in the ancient city of Barcelona.
He seems to have had not an easy task between the desire to please his
haughty Roman bride and, at the same time, to repel the charge of his
people that he was becoming effeminate and Romanized; and, finally, so
jealous did they become of her influence that Ataulf was assassinated
in the presence of his wife, all his children butchered, and the proud
Placidia compelled to walk barefoot through the streets of Barcelona.
Constantius, the faithful Roman lover, came with an army and carried
back to Rome the royal widow, who married him and became the mother of
Valentinian III., who succeeded his uncle Honorius as Emperor of Rome
in 425 A.D., under the regency of Placidia during his infancy.
This romance, lying at the very root of a Gothic dynasty in Spain,
marks the earliest beginnings of a line of Visigoth kings. Ataulf's
successor removed his court to Toulouse in France, and Spain for many
years remained only an outlying province of the Gothic kingdom; her
turbulent northern tribes refusing to accept or to mingle with the
strange intruders. When driven by the Romans from their mountain
fastnesses the Basques, many of them, were at that time dispersed
through southern and central France; which accounts for the presence
of that race in France, before alluded to.
In the second half of the fifth century Attila, "the Scourge of God,"
swept down upon Europe with his Huns,--mysterious, terrible, as a fire
out of heaven, and more like an army of demons than men,--destroying
city after city, and driving the people before them, until they came
to Orleans. There they met the combined Roman and Gothic armies.
Theodoric, the Visigoth king, was killed on the battlefield. But to
him, and to the Roman general AEtius, belongs the glory of the defeat
of the Huns (451 A.D.).
It was Evaric, the son of this Theodoric, who finally completed the
conquest of the Spanish Peninsula, and with him really commences the
line of Visigoth kings in Spain, and the conversion of that country
into a Gothic empire,[A] entirely independent of Rome.
The German _Franks_, under Clovis, established their kingdom in
Gaul 481 A.D. The _Angles_ and _Saxons_ in 446 A.D. did the same in
Britain. The _Ostrogoths_ had their own kingdom in northern Italy and
southern Gaul (Burgundy). So, with the _Visigoths_ ruling in Spain,
the "northern deluge" had in the fifth century practically submerged
the whole of Europe, and above its dark waters showed only the somber
wreck of a Roman empire.
From this fusing of Roman and Teutonic races there were to arise two
types of civilization, utterly different in kind, the _Anglo-Saxon_
and the _Latin_. In one the prevailing element, after the fusing was
complete, was to be the Teutonic; in the other, the Roman. Herein lies
the difference between these two great divisions of the human family,
and this is the germinal fact in the war raging to-day between Spain
and the United States. It is a difference created not by the mastery
of arms, but by the more efficient mastery of ideas.
When the Angles and Saxons conquered Britain, after a Roman occupation
of over three hundred years, they swept it clean of Roman laws,
literature, and civilization. Untamed pagan barbarians though they
were, they had fine instincts and simple ideals of society and
government, and they cast out the corrupt old empire, root and branch.
The Visigoths in Spain, more enlightened than they, already
Christianized, and, perhaps, even superior in intelligence, were
content in the words of Ataulf--"to renew and maintain by Gothic
strength the fame of Rome." So they built upon the ruins of decaying
institutions of a corrupt civilization, a kingdom which flourished
with the enormous vitality drawn from the conquering race, which race
was in turn conquered by Roman ideals.
So, in the conflict now existing between Spain and the United States,
we see the Spaniard, the child of the Romans; valorous, picturesque,
cruel, versed in strategic arts, and with a savor of archaic
wickedness which belongs to a corrupt old age. In the American we see
the child of the simple Angles and Saxons, no less brave, but just,
and with an enthusiasm and confiding integrity which seems to endow
him with an imperishable youth.
[Footnote A: The famous Gothic code established by him still linger in
much of Spanish jurisprudence.]