THE BARBARIC DESTRUCTION OF THE EMPIRE[133]
The Latinizing of northern Italy, Spain, and Gaul was part of the
expansion of Roman dominion. Throughout these lands, alien peoples
submitted to the Roman order and acquired new traits from the training of
its discipline. Voluntarily or under compulsion they exchanged their
institutions and customs for those of Roman Italy, and their native
tongues for Latin. The education and culture of the upper classes became
identical with that gained in the schools about the Forum, and Roman
literature was the literature which they studied and produced. In a
greater or less degree their characters were Latinized, while their
traditions were abandoned for those of Rome. Yet, although Romanized and
Latinized, these peoples were not Roman. Their culture was acquired, their
characters were changed, yet with old traits surviving. In character and
faculties, as in geographical position, they were intermediate, and in
rôle they were mediatorial. Much of what they had received, and what they
had themselves become, they perforce transmitted to the ruder humanity
which, as the Empire weakened, pressed in, serving, plundering, murdering,
and finally amalgamating with these provincials. The surviving Latin
culture passed to the mingled populations which were turning to inchoate
Romance nations in Italy, Spain, and Gaul. Likewise Christianity,
Romanized, paganized, barbarized, had been accepted through these
countries. And now these mingled peoples, these inchoate Romance nations,
were to accomplish a broader mediation in extending the rudiments of
Latin culture, along with the great new Religion, to the barbarous peoples
beyond the Romance pale.
The mediating rôles of the Roman provincials began with their first
subjection to Roman order. For barbarians were continually brought into
the provinces as slaves or prisoners of war. Next, they entered to serve
as auxiliary troops, coming especially from the wavering Teutonic
outskirts of the Empire. And during that time of misrule and military
anarchy which came between the death of Commodus (A.D. 192) and the
accession of Diocletian (A.D. 284), Teutonic inroads threatened the
imperial fabric. But, apart from palpable invasions, there was a constant
increase in the Teutonic inflow from the close of the second century. More
and more the Teutons tilled the fields; more and more they filled the
armies. They became officers of the army and officials of the Government.
So long as the vigour of life and growth continued in the Latinized
population of the Empire, and so long as the Roman law and order held, the
assimilative power of Latin culture and Roman institutions was enormous;
the barbarians became Romanized. But when self-conserving strength and
coercive energy waned with Romans and provincials, when the law’s
protection was no longer sure, and a dry rot infected civic institutions,
then Roman civilization lost some of its transforming virtue. The
barbarism of the Teutonic influx became more obstinate as the transmuting
forces of civilization weakened. Evidently the decadent civilization of
the Empire could no longer raise these barbarians to the level of its
greater periods; it could at most impress them with such culture and such
order as it still possessed. Moreover, reacting upon these disturbed and
infirm conditions, barbarism put forth a positive transforming energy,
tending to barbarize the Empire, its government, its army, its
inhabitants. The decay of Roman institutions and the grafting of Teutonic
institutions upon Roman survivals were as universal as the mingling of
races, tempers, and traditions. The course of events may briefly be
reviewed.
In the third century the Goths began, by land and sea, to raid the eastern
provinces of the undivided Roman Empire; down the Danube they sailed, and
out upon the Euxine; then their plundering fleets spread through the
eastern Mediterranean. They were attacked, repulsed, overthrown, and
slaughtered in hordes in the year 270. Some of the survivors remained in
bondage, some retired north beyond the Danube. Aurelian gave up to them
the province of Dacia: the latest conquest of the Empire, the first to be
abandoned. These Dacian settlers thenceforth appear as Visigoths. For a
century the Empire had no great trouble from them. Dacia was the scene of
the career of Ulfilas (b. 311, d. 380), the Arian apostle of the Goths.
They became Christian in part, and in part remained fiercely heathen.
About 372, harassed by the Huns, they pressed south to escape over the
Danube. Valens permitted them to cross; then Roman treachery followed,
answered by desperate Gothic raids in Thrace, till at last Valens was
defeated and slain at Hadrianople in 378.
It was sixteen years after this that Theodosius the Great marched from the
East to Italy to suppress Arbogast, the overweening Frank, who had cast
out his weak master Valentinian. The leader of the Visigothic auxiliaries
was Alaric. When the great emperor died, Alaric was proclaimed King of the
Visigoths, and soon proceeded to ravage and conquer Greece. Stilicho, son
of a Vandal chief--one sees how all the high officers are Teutons--was the
uncertain stay of Theodosius’s weakling sons, Honorius and Arcadius. In
400 Alaric attempted to invade Italy, but was foiled by Stilicho, who five
years later circumvented and destroyed another horde of Goths, both men
and women, who had penetrated Italy to the Apennines. In 408 Alaric made a
second attempt to enter, and this time was successful, for Stilicho was
dead. Thrice he besieged Rome, capturing it in 410. Then he died, his
quick death to be a warning to Attila. The new Gothic king, Ataulf,
conceived the plan of uniting Romans and Goths in a renewed and
strengthened kingdom. But this task was not for him, and in two years he
left Italy with his Visigoths to establish a kingdom in the south of Gaul.
Attila comes next upon the scene. The eastern Empire had endured the
oppression of this terrible Turanian, and had paid him tribute for some
years, before he decided to march westward by a route north of the Alps,
and attack Gaul. He penetrated to Orleans, which he besieged in vain. Many
nations were in the two armies that were now to meet in battle on the
“Catalaunian Plains.” On Attila’s side, besides his Huns, were subject
Franks, Bructeri, Thuringians, Burgundians, and the hosts of Gepidae and
Ostrogoths. Opposed were the Roman forces, Bretons, Burgundians, Alans,
Saxons, Salian Franks, and the army of the Visigoths. Defeated, but not
overthrown, the lion Hun withdrew across the Rhine; but the next spring,
in 452, he descended from the eastern Alps upon Aquileia and destroyed it,
and next sacked the cities of Venetia and the Po Valley as far as Milan.
Then he passed eastward to the river Mincio, where he was met by a Roman
embassy, in which Pope Leo was the most imposing figure. Before this
embassy the Scourge of God withdrew, awed or persuaded, or in
superstitious fear. The following year, upon Attila’s death, his realm
broke up; Gepidae and Goths beat the Huns in battle, and again Teutons
held sway in Central Europe.
The fear of the Hun had hardly ceased when the Vandals came from Africa,
and leisurely plundered Rome. They were Teutons, perhaps kin to the Goths.
But theirs had been a far migration. At the opening of the fifth century
they had entered Gaul and fought the Franks, then passed on to Spain,
where they were broken by the Visigoths. So they crossed to Africa and
founded a kingdom there, whence they invaded Italy. By this time, the
middle of the fifth century, the fighting and ruling energy in the western
Empire was barbarian. The stocks had become mixed through intermarriage
and the confusion of wars and frequent change of sides. An illustrative
figure is Count Ricimer, whose father was a noble Suevian, while his
mother was a Visigothic princess. He directed the Roman State from 456 to
472, placing one after another of his Roman puppets on the imperial
throne.
In the famous year 476 the Roman army was made up of barbarians, mainly
drawn from lands now included in Bohemia, Austria, and Hungary. There were
large contingents of Rugii and Heruli, who had flocked in bands to Italy
as adventurers. Such troops had the status of _foederati_, that is,
barbarian auxiliaries or allies. Suddenly they demanded one-third of the
lands of Italy.[134] Upon refusal of their demand, they made a king from
among themselves, the Herulian Odoacer, and Romulus Augustulus flitted
from the shadowy imperial throne. By reason of his dramatic name, rather
than by any marked circumstance of his deposition, he has come to typify
with historians the close of the line of western emperors.
The Herulian soldier-king or “Patrician,” Odoacer, a nondescript
transition personage, ruled twelve years. Then the nation of the
Ostrogoths, which had learned much from the vicissitudes of fortune in the
East, obtained the eastern emperor’s sanction, and made its perilous way
to the gates of Italy under the king, Theodoric. This invading people
numbered perhaps two hundred thousand souls; their fighting men were forty
thousand. Odoacer was beaten on the river Isonzo; he retreated to the line
of the Adige, and was again defeated at Verona. After standing a long
siege in Ravenna, he made terms with Theodoric, and was murdered by him.
The Goths were among the best of the barbarians, and Theodoric was the
greatest of the Goths. The eastern emperors probably regarded him as their
representative in Italy; and he coined money only with the Emperor’s
image. But in fact he was a sovereign; and, through his sovereignty over
both Goths and Romans, from a Teutonic king he became an absolute monarch,
even as his contemporary Clovis became, under analogous circumstances. He
was a just despot, with his subjects’ welfare at heart. The Goths received
one-third of the Italian lands, in return for which their duty was to
defend the whole. This third may have been that previously possessed by
Odoacer’s troops. Under Theodoric the relations between Goths and “Romans”
were friendly. It was from the Code of Theodosius and other Roman sources
that he drew the substance of his legislation, the _Edictum_ which about
the year 510 he promulgated for both Goths and Romans (_barbari
Romanique_).[135] His aim--and here the influence of his minister
Cassiodorus appears--was to harmonize the relations of the two peoples and
assimilate the ways of the Goths to those of their more civilized
neighbours. But if his rule brought prosperity to Italy, after his death
came desolating wars between the Goths under their noble kings, and
Justinian’s great generals, Belisarius and Narses. These wars ruined the
Ostrogothic nation. Only some remnants were left to reascend the Alps in
553. Behind them Italy was a waste.
An imperial eastern Roman restoration followed. It was not to endure. For
already the able and savage Lombard Alboin was making ready to lead down
his army of Lombards, Saxons, Gepidae and unassorted Teutons, and perhaps
Slavs. No strength was left to oppose him in plague-stricken Italy. So the
Lombard conquered easily, and set up a kingdom which, united or divided
under kings and dukes, endured for two hundred years. Then
Charlemagne--his father Pippin had been before him--at the entreaty of the
Pope, invaded Italy with a host of mingled Teuton tribes, and put an end
to the Lombard kingdom, but not to Lombard blood and Lombard traits.
The result of all these invasions was a progressive barbarization of
Italy, which was not altogether unfortunate, because fraught with some
renewal of strength. The Teutons brought their customs; and at least one
Teuton people, the Lombards, maintained them masterfully. The Ostrogoth,
Theodoric, had preserved the Italian municipal organization, and had drawn
his code for all from Roman sources. But the first Lombard Code, that of
King Rothari, promulgated about 643, ignored Roman law, and apparently the
very existence of Romans. Though written in barbarous Latin, it is Lombard
through and through. So, to a scarcely less degree, is the Code of King
Liutprand, promulgated about 725.[136] Even then the Lombards looked upon
themselves as distinct from the “Romans.” Their laws were still those of
the Lombards, yet of Lombards settling down to urban life. Within Lombard
territories the “Romans” were subjects. In Liutprand’s Code they seem to
be referred to under the name of _aldii_ and _aldiae_, male and female
persons, who were not slaves and yet not free. Instead of surrendering
one-third of the land, the Romans were obliged to furnish one-third of its
produce. Hence their Lombard masters were interested in keeping them fixed
to the soil, perhaps in a state of serfdom. Little is known as to the
intermarriage of the stocks, or when the Lombards adopted a Latin
speech.[137]
It is difficult, either in Italy or elsewhere, to follow the changes and
reciprocal working of Roman and Teutonic institutions through these
obscure centuries. They wrought upon each other universally, and became
what neither had been before. The Roman State was there no longer; where
the names of its officials survived they stood for altered functions. The
Roman law prevailed within the dominions of the eastern Empire and the
popes. Everywhere the crass barbarian law and the pure Roman institution
was passing away, or changing into something new. In Italy another
pregnant change was taking place, the passing of the functions of
government to the bishops of Rome. Its stages are marked by the names of
great men upon whose shoulders fell the authority no longer held by a
remote ruler. Leo the Great heads the embassy which turns back the Hun; a
century and a half afterwards Gregory the Great leads the opposition to
the Lombards, still somewhat unkempt savages. Thereafter each succeeding
pope, in fact the papacy by necessity of its position and its aspirations,
opposes the Lombards when they have ceased to be either savage or Arian.
It is an absent supporter that the papacy desires, and not a rival close
at hand: Charlemagne, not Desiderius.
When the Visigoths under Ataulf left Italy they passed into southern Gaul,
and there established themselves with Toulouse as the centre of the
Visigothic kingdom. They soon extended their rule to Spain, with the
connivance of sundry Roman rulers. Some time before them Vandals, Suevi
and Alans, having crossed the Rhine into Gaul, had been drawn across the
Pyrenees by half-traitorous invitations of rival Roman governors. The
Visigoths now attacked these peoples, with the result that the Suevi
retreated to the north-west of the peninsula, and at length the restless
Vandals accepted the invitation of the traitor Count Boniface, and crossed
to Africa. Visigothic fortunes varied under an irregular succession of
non-hereditary and occasionally murdered kings. Their kingdom reached its
farthest limit in the reign of Euric (466-486), who extended its
boundaries northward to the Loire and southward over nearly all of
Spain.[138]
Under the Visigoths the lot of the Latinized provincials, who with their
ancestors had long been Roman citizens, was not a hard one. The Roman
system of quartering soldiers upon provincials, with a right to one-third
of the house, afforded precedent for the manner of settlement of the
Visigoths and other Teuton invaders after them. The Visigoths received
two-thirds not only of the houses but also of the lands, which indeed were
bare of cultivators. The municipal organization of the towns was left
intact, and in general the nomenclature and structure of Roman officialdom
were preserved. As the Romans were the more numerous and the cleverer,
they regained their wealth and social consideration. In 506, Alaric II.
promulgated his famous code, the _Lex Romana Visigothorum_, usually called
the “Breviarium,” for his Roman subjects. Although the next year Clovis
broke down the Visigothic kingdom in Gaul, and confined it to narrow
limits around Narbonne, this code remained in force, a lasting source of
Roman law for the inhabitants of the south and west of Gaul.[139]
Throughout Visigothic Spain there existed, in conflict if not in force, a
complex mass of diverse laws and customs, written and unwritten, Roman,
Gothic, ecclesiastical. Soon after the middle of the seventh century a
general code was compiled for both Goths and Roman provincials, between
whom marriages were formally sanctioned. This codification was the legal
expression of a national unity, which however had no great political
vigour. For what with its inheritance of intolerable taxation, of
dwindling agriculture, of enfeebled institutions and social degeneracy,
the Visigothic state fell an easy victim before the Arabs in 711. It had
been subject to all manner of administrative abuse. In name the government
was secular. But in fact the bishops of the great sees were all-powerful
to clog, if not to administer, justice and the affairs of State within
their domains; the nobles abetted them in their misgovernment. So it came
that instead of a united Government supported by a strong military power,
there was divided misrule, and an army without discipline or valour. This
misrule was also cruelly intolerant. The bitter persecution of the Jews,
and the law that none but a Catholic should live in Spain, if not causes,
were at least symptoms, of a fatal impotence, and prophetic of like
measures taken by later rulers in that chosen land of religious
persecution.[140]
In Gaul, contact between Latinized provincials and Teutonic invaders
produced interesting results. Mingled peoples came into being, whose
polity and institutions were neither Roman nor Teutonic, and whose
literature and intellectual achievement were to unite the racial qualities
of both. The hybrid political and social phenomena of the Frankish period
were engendered by a series of events which may be outlined as follows.
The Franks, Salic and Ripuarian, were clustered in the region of the lower
and middle Rhine. Like other Teutonic groups dwelling near the boundaries
of the weakening Empire, they were alternately plunderers of Roman
territory and auxiliaries in the imperial army, or its independent allies
against Huns or Saxons or Alans. One Childeric, whose career opens in saga
and ends in history, was king or hereditary leader of a part of the Salian
Franks. This active man appears in frequent relations with Aegidius, the
half-independent Roman ruler of that north-western portion of Gaul which
was not held by Visigoths or Burgundians. If Childeric’s forefathers had
oftener been enemies than allies of the Empire, he was its ally, and
perhaps commander of the forces which helped to preserve this outlying
portion of its territory.
Aegidius died in 463, and the territories ruled by him passed to his son
Syagrius practically as an independent kingdom. Childeric in the next
eighteen years increased his power among the Salian Franks, and extended
his territories through victories over other Teutonic groups. Upon his
death in 481 his kingdom passed to his son Chlodoweg, or, as it is easier
to call him, Clovis, then in his sixteenth year. The next five years were
employed by this precocious genius of barbarian craft in strengthening his
kingship among the Salians. At the age of twenty he attacked Syagrius, and
overthrew his power at Soissons. The last Roman ruler of a part of Gaul
fled to the Visigoths for refuge: their king delivered him to Clovis, who
had him killed. So Clovis’s realm was extended first to the Seine and then
to the Loire. The Gallo-Romans were not driven out or dispossessed, but
received a new master, who on his part treated them forbearingly and
accepted them as subjects. The royal domains of Syagrius perhaps were
large enough to satisfy the cupidity of the victors.
Clovis was now king of Gallo-Romans as well as Salian Franks. Thus
strengthened he could fight other Franks with success, and carry on a
great war against the Alemanni to the south-east. At the “battle of
Tolbiac,” in which he finally overthrew these people, the heathen Frank
invoked the Christian God (so tells Gregory of Tours), and vowed to accept
the Faith if Christ gave him the victory. This is like the legend of
Constantine at the battle of the Malvern Bridge, nor is the probability of
its essential truth lessened because of this resemblance. Both Roman
emperor and Frankish king turned from heathenism to Christianity as to the
stronger supernatural support. And if ever man received tenfold reward in
this world from his faith it was this treacherous and bloody Frank.
Hitherto the Teuton tribes, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, Burgundians
who had accepted Christianity, were Arians by reason of the circumstances
of their “conversion.” On the other hand, the Romanized inhabitants of
Italy, Spain, and Gaul were Catholics, and the influence of their
Arian-hating clergy was enormous. Evidently when Clovis, under the
influence of Catholic bishops and a Catholic wife, became a Catholic, the
power of the Church and the sympathy of the laity would make his power
irresistible. For the Catholic population was greatly in the majority,
even in the countries held by Burgundian or Visigothic kings. The
Burgundian rulers had half turned to Catholicism, and the Visigothic
monarchy treated it with respect. Yet the Burgundian kings did not win the
Church’s confidence, nor did the Visigoths disarm its active hostility.
With such ability as Clovis and his sons possessed, their conversion to
Catholicism ensured victory over their rivals, and made a bond of
friendship between them and their Gallo-Roman subjects.[141]
The extension of Clovis’s kingdom, his overthrow of the Visigothic power,
his partial conquest of the Burgundians, would have been even more rapid
and decisive but for the opposing diplomacy of the great Arian ruler,
Theodoric the Ostrogoth, whose prestige and power even the bold Frank
dared not defy. Moreover, the Burgundians stood well with their Roman
subjects, whom they treated generously, and permitted to live under a code
of Roman law. When it came to war between them and Clovis, the advantage
rested with the latter; but possibly the fear of Theodoric, or the
pressure of war with the Alemanni, deferred the final conquest of the
Burgundian kingdom for another generation.
In 507 Clovis attacked the Visigothic kingdom, and incorporated it with
his dominions in the course of the next year. Whether or not he had cried
out, in the words of Gregory of Tours, “it is a shame that these Arians
should hold a part of Gaul; let us attack them with God’s help and take
their land,” at all events the war had a religious sanction, and its
successful issue was facilitated by the Catholic clergy within the
Visigothic territory. Clovis’s career was now nearing its end. In his last
years, by treachery, murder, and open war when needed, he made himself
king of all the Franks, Ripuarian and Salian. The intense partisan
sympathy of the Church for this its eldest royal Teuton son speaks in the
words of Gregory of Tours, concluding his recital of these deeds of
incomparable villainy: “Thus day by day God cast down his (Clovis’s)
enemies before him, because he did what was right in His eyes”!
The unresting sons and grandsons of Clovis not only conquered Burgundy,
but extended their rule far to the east, into the heart of Germany, and
Merovingians became masters of Thuringia and Bavaria. That such a realm
should hold together was impossible. From Clovis to Charlemagne it was the
regular practice to divide the realm at death among the ruler’s sons, and
for the ablest among them to pursue and slay the others, and so unite the
realm again. Besides this principle of internecine conflict, differences
of race and language and degrees of Latinization ensured eventual
disruption.
Nothing passes away, and very little quite begins, but all things change;
and so the verity of social and political phenomena lies in the
_becoming_, rather than in any temporary phase--as one may perceive in the
Merovingian, later Carolingian, _regnum Francorum_. Therein Roman
institutions survived either as decayed actualities or as names or
effigies; therein were conditions and even institutions which arose and
were developed through the decay of previous institutions, through the
weakening of the imperial peace and justice, the growth of abuses, and the
need of the weak to put themselves under the protection of the nearest
strong. This huge conglomerate of a government also held sturdy Teuton
elements. There was the kingship and the strong body of personal
followers, the latter an outgrowth of the _comitatus_, or rather of the
needs of any barbaric chieftaincy. There was _wergeld_, not so much
exclusively a Teutonic institution, as belonging to a rough society which
sees the need of checking feuds, and finds the means in a system of
compensation to the injured person or his kin, who would otherwise make
reprisals; there was also _Sippe_, the rights and duties of kin among
themselves, and of the kinship as a corporate unit toward the world
without; and therein, in general, was continuance of the warrior spirit of
the Franks and other Teutons, of their social ways and mode of dress, of
their methods of warfare and their thoughts of barbaric hardihood.
These elements, and much more besides, were in process of mutual interplay
and amalgamation. Childeric had been king of some of the Salian Franks,
and had allied himself with the last fragment of the Roman Empire in Gaul.
Clovis, his son, is greater: he makes himself king of more Franks, and
becomes the head of the Roman-Frankish combination by overthrowing
Syagrius and taking his place as lord of the Gallo-Romans. As towards them
he becomes even as Syagrius and the emperors before him, absolute ruler,
_princeps_. This authority enhanced the dignity of Clovis’s kingship over
his own Franks and the Alemanni, and his personal power increased with
each new conquest. He became a novel sort of monarch, combining
heterogeneous prerogatives. Hence his sovereignty and that of his
successors was not a simple development of Teutonic kingship, nor was it a
continuation of Roman imperial or proconsular rule, but rather a new
composite evolution. Some of its contradictions and anomalies were
symbolized by Clovis’s acceptance of the title of Consul and stamping the
effigies of the eastern emperors upon his coins--as if they held any power
in the _regnum Francorum_! As between Gallo-Romans and Franks, the
headship had gone over to the latter; yet there was neither hatred on the
one side nor oppression from the other. A common catholicism and many
similarities of condition promoted mutual sympathy and union. For example,
through the decay of the imperial power, oppression had increased, and the
common Gallo-Roman people were compelled to place themselves under the
patronage of powerful personages who could give them the protection which
they could no longer look for from the Government. So relationships of
personal dependence developed, not essentially dissimilar from those
subsisting between the Franks and their kings, when the kings were mere
leaders of small tribes or war bands. But the vastness of the Salian realm
impaired the personal relationship between king and subjects, and again
the latter, Frankish or Gallo-Roman, needed nearer protectors, and found
them in neighbouring great proprietors and functionaries, Frankish or
Gallo-Roman as the case might be.[142]
Through all the turmoil of the Merovingian period, there was doubtless
individual injustice and hardship everywhere, but no racial tyranny. The
Gallo-Roman kept his language and property, and continued to live under
the Roman law. He was not inferior to the Frank, except that the latter
was entitled to a higher _wergeld_ for personal injury, which, however,
soon was equalized. The Frank also lived under his own law, Salic or
Ripuarian. But the general mingling of peoples in the end made it
impossible to distinguish the law personally applicable; and thereupon,
both as to Franks and Gallo-Romans, the territorial law superseded the law
of race.[143] And when, after two centuries, the Merovingian kingdom,
through change of dynasty, became the Carolingian, political discrepancies
between Frank and Gallo-Roman had passed away. Yet this huge colossus of a
realm with its shoulders of iron and its feet of clay, still included
enough disparities of race and land, language and institution, to ensure
its dissolution.