year (A. D. 452) he invaded Italy and laid siege to Aquileia,
an important city which stood in his path. It resisted for
three months and was then utterly destroyed. The few
inhabitants who escaped, with fugitives from neighboring
ports, found a refuge in some islands of the Adriatic coast,
and formed there a sheltered settlement which grew into the
great city and republican state of Venice. Aetius made
strenuous exertions to gather forces for another battle with
the Huns; but the resources of the Empire had sunk very low.
While he labored to collect troops, the effect of a pacific
embassy was despairingly tried, and it went forth to the camp
of Attila, led by the venerable bishop of Rome--the first
powerful Pope--Leo I., called the Great. The impression which
Leo made on the Hunnish king, by his venerable presence, and
by the persuasiveness of his words, appears to have been
extraordinary. At all events, Attila consented to postpone his
designs on Rome; though he demanded and received promise of an
annual tribute. The next winter he died, and Rome was troubled
by him no more.
Rome Sacked by the Vandals.
But another enemy came, who rivalled Attila in ruthlessness,
and who gave a name to barbarity which it has kept to this
day. The Vandal king, Genseric, who now swept the
Mediterranean with a piratical fleet, made his appearance in
the Tiber (A. D. 455) and found the Roman capital powerless to
resist his attack. The venerable Pope Leo again interceded for
the city, and obtained a promise that captives should not be
tortured nor buildings burned,--which was the utmost stretch
of mercy that the Vandal could afford. Once more, then, was
Rome given up, for fourteen days and nights, to pillage and
the horrors of barbaric debauch. "Whatever had survived the
former sack,--whatever the luxury of the Roman Patriciate,
during the intervening forty-five years, had accumulated in
reparation of their loss,--the treasures of the imperial
palace, the gold and silver vessels employed in the churches,
the statues of pagan divinities and men of Roman renown, the
gilded roof of the temple of Capitolian Jove, the plate and
ornaments of private individuals, were leisurely conveyed to
the Vandal fleet and shipped off to Africa" (Sheppard).
The Vandal invasion had been preceded, in the same year, by a
palace revolution which brought the dynasty of Theodosius to
an end. Placidia was dead, and her unworthy son, Valentinian
III., provoked assassination by dishonoring the wife of a
wealthy senator, Maximus, who mounted to his place. Maximus
was slain by a mob at Rome, just before the Vandals entered
the city. The Empire was now without a head, and the throne
without an heir. In former times, the Senate or the army would
have filled the vacant imperial seat; now, it was a barbarian
monarch, Theodoric, the Visigothic king, who made choice of a
successor to the Cæsars. He named a Gallic noble, Avitus by
name, who had won his esteem, and the nomination was confirmed
by Marcian, Emperor of the East.
Ricimer and Majorian.
But the influence of Theodoric in Roman affairs was soon
rivalled by that of Count Ricimer, another Goth, or Sueve, who
held high command in the imperial army, and who resented the
elevation of Avitus. The latter was deposed, after reigning a
single year; and Majorian, a soldier of really noble and
heroic character, was promoted to the throne. He was too great
and too sincere a man to be Ricimer's tool, and the same hand
which raised him threw him down, after he had reigned four
years (A. D. 457-461). He was in the midst of a powerful
undertaking against the Vandals when he perished. Majorian was
the last Emperor in the Western line who deserves to be named.
The last Emperors in the West.
Ricimer ruled Italy, with the rigor of a despot, under the
modest title of Patrician, until 472. His death was soon
followed by the rise of another general of the barbarian
troops, Orestes, to like autocracy, and he, in turn, gave way
to a third, Odoacer, who slew him and took his place. The
creatures, half a dozen in number, who put on and put off the
purple robe, at the command of these adventurers, who played
with the majesty of Rome, need no further mention.
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The last of them was Romulus Augustulus, son of Orestes, who
escaped his father's fate by formally resigning the throne. He
was the last Roman Emperor in the West, until Charlemagne
revived the title, three centuries and a quarter later. "The
succession of the Western Emperors came to an end, and the way
in which it came to an end marks the way in which the names
and titles of Rome were kept on, while all power was passing
into the hands of the barbarians. The Roman Senate voted that
one Emperor was enough, and that the Eastern Emperor, Zeno,
should reign over the whole Empire. But at the same time Zeno
was made to entrust the government of Italy, with the title of
Patrician, to Odoacer. ... Thus the Roman Empire went on at
Constantinople, or New Rome, while Italy and the Old Rome
itself passed into the power of the Barbarians. Still the
Roman laws and names went on, and we may be sure that any man
in Italy would have been much surprised if he had been told
that the Roman Empire had come to an end" (Freeman).
Odoacer.
The government of Odoacer, who ruled with the authority of a
king, though pretending to kingship only in his own nation,
was firm and strong. Italy was better protected from its
lawless neighbors than it had been for nearly a century
before. But nothing could arrest the decay of its
population--the blight that had fallen upon its prosperity.
Nor could that turbulent age afford any term of peace that
would be long enough for even the beginning of the cure of
such maladies and such wounds as had brought Italy low. For
fourteen years Odoacer ruled; and then he was overthrown by a
new kingdom-seeking barbarian, who came, like Alaric, out of
the Gothic swarm.
Theodoric the Ostrogoth.
The Ostrogoths had now escaped, since Attila died, from the
yoke of the Huns, and were prepared, under an able and
ambitious young king, Theodoric, who had been reared as a
hostage at Constantinople, to imitate the career of their
cousins, the Visigoths. Having troubled the Eastern Court
until it stood in fear of him, Theodoric asked for a
commission to overthrow Odoacer, in Italy, and received it
from the Emperor's hand. Thus empowered by one still
recognized as lawful lord on both sides of the Adriatic,
Theodoric crossed the Julian Alps (A. D. 489) with the
families of his nation and their household goods. Three
battles made him master of the peninsula and decided the fate
of his rival. Odoacer held out in Ravenna for two years and a
half, and surrendered on a promise of equal sovereignty with
the Ostrogothic king. But Theodoric did not scruple to kill
him with his own sword, at the first opportunity which came.
In that act, the native savagery in him broke loose; but
through most of his life he kept his passions decently tamed,
and acted the barbarian less frequently than the civilized
statesman and king. He gave Italy peace, security, and
substantial justice for thirty years. With little war, he
extended his sovereignty over Illyrium, Pannonia, Noricum,
Rhætia and Provence, in south-eastern Gaul. If the extensive
kingdom which he formed--with more enlightenment than any
other among those who divided the heritage of Rome--could have
endured, the parts of Europe which it covered might have fared
better in after times than they did. "Italy might have been
spared six hundred years of gloom and degradation." But
powerful influences were against it from the first, and they
were influences which proceeded mischievously from the
Christian Church. Had the Goths been pagans, the Church might
have turned a kindly face to them, and wooed them to
conversion as she wooed the Franks. But they were Christians,
of a heretic stamp, and the orthodox Christianity of Rome held
them in deadly loathing. While still beyond the Danube, they had
received the faith from an Arian apostle, at the time of the
great conflict of Athanasius against Arius, and were stubborn
in the rejection of Trinitarian dogma. Hence the Church in the
West was never reconciled to the monarchy of Theodoric in
Italy, nor to that of the Visigoths at Toulouse; and its
hostility was the ultimate cause of the failure of both.
The Empire in the East.
To understand the events which immediately caused the fall of
the Ostrogothic power, we must turn back for a moment to the
Empire in the East. Marcian, whom Pulcheria, the wise daughter
of Arcadius, made Emperor by marrying him, died in 457, and
Aspar, the barbarian who commanded the mercenaries, selected
his successor. He chose his own steward, one Leo, who proved
to have more independence than his patron expected, and who
succeeded in destroying the latter. After Leo I. came (474)
his infant grandson; Leo II., whose father, an Isaurian
chieftain, took his place when he died, within the year. The
Isaurian assumed a Greek name, Zeno, and occupied the
throne--with one interval of flight and exile for twenty
months--during seven years. When he died, his widow gave her
hand in marriage to an excellent officer of the palace,
Anastasius by name, and he was sovereign of the Empire for
twenty-seven years.
The reign of Justinian.
After Anastasius, came Justin I., born a peasant in Dacia
(modern Roumania), but advanced as a soldier to the command of
the imperial guards, and thence to the throne. He had already
adopted and educated his nephew, Justinian, and before dying,
in 527, he invested him with sovereignty as a colleague. The
reign of Justinian was the most remarkable in the whole
history of the Empire in the East. Without breadth of
understanding, or notable talents of any kind: without
courage; without the least nobility of character; without even
the virtue of fidelity to his ministers and friends,--this
remarkable monarch contrived to be splendidly served by an
extraordinary generation of great soldiers, great jurists,
great statesmen, who gave a brilliance to his reign that was
never rivalled while the Byzantine seat of Empire stood. It
owes, in modern esteem, its greatest fame to the noble
collection of Roman laws which was made, in the Pandects and
the Code, under the direction of the wise and learned
Tribonian. Transiently it was glorified by conquests that bore
a likeness to the march of the resistless legions of ancient
Rome; and the laurelled names of Belisarius and Narses claimed
a place on the columns of victory with the names of Cæsar and
Pompeius.
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But the splendors of the reign were much more than offset by
miseries and calamities of the darkest kind. "The reign of
Justinian, from its length, its glory and its disasters, may
be compared to the reign of Louis XIV., which exceeded it in
length, and equalled it in glory and disaster. ... He extended
the limits of his empire; but he was unable to defend the
territory he had received from his predecessors. Everyone of
the thirty-eight years of his reign was marked by an invasion
of the barbarians; and it has been said that, reckoning those
who fell by the sword, who perished from want, or were led
into captivity, each invasion cost 200,000 subjects to the
empire. Calamities which human prudence is unable to resist
seemed to combine against the Romans, as if to compel them to
expiate their ancient glory. ... So that the very period which
gave birth to so many monuments of greatness, may be looked
back upon with horror, as that of the widest desolation and
the most terrific mortality" (Sismondi). The first and longest
of the wars of Justinian was the Persian war, which he inherited
from his predecessors, and which scarcely ceased while the
Persian monarchy endured. It was in these Asiatic campaigns
that Belisarius began his career. But his first great
achievement was the overthrow and extinction of the Vandal
power in Africa, and the restoration of Roman authority (the
empire of the new Rome) in the old Carthaginian province (A.
D. 533-534). He accomplished this with a force of but 10,000
foot and 5,000 horse, and was hastily recalled by his jealous
lord on the instant of his success.
Conquests of Belisarius in Italy.
But the ambition of Justinian was whetted by this marvellous
conquest, and he promptly projected an expedition against the
kingdom of the Eastern Goths. The death of Theodoric had
occurred in 526. His successor was a child of ten years, his
grandson, whose mother exercised the regency. Amalsuentha, the
queen-regent, was a woman of highly cultivated mind, and she
offended her subjects by too marked a Romanization of her
ideas. Her son died in his eighteenth year, and she associated
with herself on the throne the next heir to it, a worthless
nephew of Theodoric, who was able, in a few weeks, to strip
all her power from her and consign her to a distant prison,
where she was soon put to death (A. D. 535). She had
previously opened negotiations with Justinian for the
restoration of his supremacy in Italy, and the ambitious
Emperor assumed with eagerness a right to avenge her
deposition and death. The fate of Amalsuentha was his excuse,
the discontent of Roman orthodoxy with the rule of the heretic
Goths was his encouragement, to send an army into Italy with
Belisarius at its head. First taking possession of Sicily,
Belisarius landed in Italy in 536, took Naples and advanced on
Rome. An able soldier, Vitiges, had been raised to the Gothic
throne, and he evacuated Rome in December; but he returned the
following March and laid siege to the ancient capital, which
Belisarius had occupied with a moderate force. It was defended
against him for an entire year, and the strength of the Gothic
nation was consumed on the outer side of the walls, while the
inhabitants within were wasted by famine and disease. The
Goths invoked the aid of the Franks in Gaul, and those fierce
warriors, crossing the Alps (A. D. 538), assailed both Goths
and Greeks, with indiscriminate hostility, destroyed Milan and
Genoa, and mostly perished of hunger themselves before they
retreated from the wasted Cisalpine country.
Released from Rome, Belisarius advanced in his turn against
Ravenna, and took the Gothic capital, making Vitiges a
prisoner (A. D. 539). His reward for these successes was a
recall from command. The jealous Emperor could not afford his
generals too much glory at a single winning. As a consequence
of his folly, the Goths, under a new king, Totila, were
allowed to recover so much ground in the next four years that,
when, in 544, Belisarius was sent back, almost without an
army, the work of conquest had to be done anew. Rome was still
being held against Totila, who besieged it, and the great
general went by sea to its relief. He forced the passage of
the Tiber, but failed through the misconduct of the commander
in the city to accomplish an entry, and once more the great
capital was entered and yielded to angry Goths (A. D. 546).
They spared the lives of the few people they found, and the
chastity of the women; but they plundered without restraint.
Rome a Solitude for Forty Days.
Totila commanded the total destruction of the city; but his
ruthless hand was stayed by the remonstrances of Belisarius.
After demolishing a third of the walls, he withdrew towards
the South, dragging the few inhabitants with him, and, during
forty days, Rome is said to have been an unpeopled solitude.
The scene which this offers to the imagination comes near to
being the most impressive in history. At the end of that
period it was entered by Belisarius, who hastily repaired the
walls, collected his forces, and was prepared to defend
himself when Totila came back by rapid marches from Apulia.
The Goths made three assaults and were bloodily repulsed.
End of the Ostrogothic Kingdom.
But again Belisarius was recalled by a mean and jealous court,
and again the Gothic cause was reanimated and restored. Rome
was taken again from its feeble garrison (A. D. 549), and this
time it was treated with respect. Most of Italy and Sicily,
with Corsica and Sardinia, were subdued by Totila's arms, and
that king, now successful, appealed to Justinian for peace. It
was refused, and in 552 a vigorous prosecution of the war
resumed, under a new commander--the remarkable eunuch Narses,
who proved himself to be one of the great masters of war.
Totila was defeated and slain in the first battle of the
campaign; Rome was again beleaguered and taken; and the last
blow needed to extinguish the Gothic kingdom in Italy was
given the following year (A. D. 553), when Totila's successor,
Teia, ended his life on another disastrous field of battle.
The Exarchate.
Italy was restored for the moment to the Empire, and was
placed under the government of an imperial viceroy, called
Exarch, which high office the valiant Narses was the first to
fill. His successors, known in history as the Exarchs of
Ravenna, resided in that capital for a long period, while the
arm of their authority was steadily shortened by the conquests
of new invaders, whose story is yet to be told.
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Events in the West.
Leaving Italy and Rome, once more in the imperial fold, but
mere provinces now of a distant and alienated sovereignty, it
is necessary to turn back to the West, and glance over the
regions in which, when we looked at them last, the
institutions of Roman government and society were being
dissolved and broken up by flood upon flood of barbaric
invasion from the Teutonic North.
Teutonic Conquest of Britain.
If we begin at the farthest West which the Roman dominion
reached, we shall find that the island of Britain was
abandoned, practically, by the imperial government earlier
than the year 410, when Rome was sinking under the blows of
Alaric. From that time the inhabitants were left to their own
government and their own defense. To the inroads of the savage
Caledonian Picts and Irish Scots, there were added, now, the
coast ravages of a swarm of ruthless pirates, which the tribes
of northwestern Europe had begun to launch upon the German or
North Sea. The most cruel and terrible of these ocean
freebooters were the Saxons, of the Elbe, and they gave their
name for a time to the whole. Their destructive raids upon the
coasts of Britain and Gaul had commenced more than a century
before the Romans withdrew their legions, and that part of the
British coast most exposed to their ravages was known as the
Saxon Shore. For about thirty years after the Roman and
Romanized inhabitants of Britain had been left to defend
themselves, they held their ground with good courage, as
appears; but the incessant attacks of the Picts wore out, at
last, their confidence in themselves, and they were fatally
led to seek help from their other enemies, who scourged them
from the sea. Their invitation was given, not to the Saxons,
but to a band of Jutes--warriors from that Danish peninsula in
which they have left their name. The Jutes landed at
Ebbsfleet, in the Isle of Thanet (A. D. 449 or 450), with two
chiefs, Hengest and Horsa, at their head. They came as allies,
and fought by the side of the Britons against the Picts with
excellent success. Then came quarrels, and presently, in 455,
the arms of Hengest and Horsa were turned against their
employers. Ten years later the Jutes had secure possession of
the part of Britain now called Kent, and Hengest was their
king, Horsa having fallen in the war. This was the beginning
of the transformation of Roman-Celtic Britain into the
Teutonic England of later history. The success of the Jutes
drew their cousins and piratical comrades, the Saxons and the
Angles, to seek kingdoms in the same rich island. The Saxons
came first, landing near Selsey, in 477, and taking gradual
possession of a district which became known as the kingdom of
the South Saxons, or Sussex. The next invasion was by Saxons
under Cerdic, and Jutes, who joined to form the kingdom of the
West Saxons, or Wessex, covering about the territory of modern
Hampshire. So much of their conquest was complete by the year
519. At about the same time, other colonies were established
and gave their names, as East Saxons and Middle Saxons, to the
Essex and Middlesex of modern English geography. A third tribe
from the German shore, the Angles, now came (A. D. 547) to
take their part in the conquest of the island, and these laid
their hands upon kingdoms in the East and North of England, so
much larger than the modest Jute and Saxon realms in the south
that their name fixed itself, at last, upon the whole country,
when it lost the name of Britain. Northumberland, which
stretched from the Humber to the Firth of Forth, Mercia, which
covered at one time the whole middle region of England, and
East Anglia, which became divided into the two English
counties of Norfolk (North-folk) and Suffolk (South-folk),
were the three great kingdoms of the Angles.
The Making of England.
Before the end of the sixth century, almost the whole of
modern England, and part of Scotland, on its eastern side, as
far to the north as Edinburgh, was in possession of the German
invaders. They had not merely subdued the former
possessors--Britons and Roman provincials (if Romans remained
in the island after their domination ceased),--but, in the
judgment of the best investigators of the subject, they had
practically swept them from all the parts of the island in
which their own settlements were established. That is to say,
the prior population was either exterminated by the merciless
swords of these Saxon and English pagans, or was driven into
the mountains of Wales, into the peninsula of Cornwall and
Devon, or into the Strathclyde corner of Scottish
territory,--in all which regions the ancient British race has
maintained itself to this day. Scarcely a vestige of its
existence remains elsewhere in England,--neither in language,
nor in local names, nor in institutions, nor in survivals of
any other kind; which shows that the inhabitants were effaced
by the conquest, as the inhabitants of Gaul, of Spain, and of
Italy, for example, were not.
The new society and the new states which now arose on the soil
of Britain, and began to shape themselves into the England of
the future, were as purely Germanic as if they had grown up in
the Jutish peninsula or on the Elbe. The institutions,
political and social, of the immigrant nations, had been
modified by changed circumstances, but they had incorporated
almost nothing from the institutions which they found existing
in their new home and which they supplanted. Broadly speaking,
nothing Roman and nothing Celtic entered into them. They were
constructed on German lines throughout.
The barbarism of the Saxons and their kin when they entered
Britain was far more unmitigated than that of most of the
Teutonic tribes which overwhelmed the continental provinces of
Rome had been. The Goths had been influenced to some extent
and for quite a period by Roman civilization, and had
nominally accepted Christian precepts and beliefs, before they
took arms against the Empire. The Franks had been allies of
Rome and in contact with the refinements of Roman Gaul, for a
century or two before they became masters in that province.
Most of the other nations which transplanted themselves in the
fifth century from beyond the Rhine to new homes in the
provinces of Rome, had been living for generations on the
borders of the Empire, or near; had acquired some
acquaintance, at least, with the civilization which they did
not share, and conceded to it a certain respect; while some of
them had borne arms for the Emperor and taken his pay. But the
Saxons, Angles and Jutes had thus far been remote from every
influence or experience of the kind.
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They knew the Romans only as rich strangers to be plundered
and foes to be fought. Christianity represented nothing to
them but an insult to their gods. There seems to be little
doubt, therefore, that the civilizing work which Rome had done
in western Europe was obliterated nowhere else so ruthlessly
and so wantonly as in Britain. Christianity, still sheltered
and strong in Ireland, was wholly extinguished in England for
a century and more, until the memorable mission of Augustine,
sent by Pope Gregory the Great (A. D. 597), began the
conversion of the savage islanders.
The Kingdom of the Franks.