properly before our minds, let us trace the fortunes of one person who
lived through it, a daughter, sister, wife and mother of Emperors, the
lady Galla Placidia. The daughter of Theodosius’s second marriage, she
lost her mother, Galla, when a child of five or six years old, and
her father in the following year. She appears to have been brought up
at Rome, perhaps by her kinswoman Serena, who possibly intended that
she should be the bride of her son, Eucherius. Her position was one
of forlorn splendour, that of an orphan with no sister and with two
such brothers as Arcadius and Honorius; nor does it appear to have
been cheered by any gleams of friendship between herself and the house
of Stilicho. When Alaric first appeared under the walls of Rome, the
resolution to put Serena to death as his suspected accomplice was taken
‘by the Senate and by the Emperor’s sister, Placidia[75].’ Probably the
name of a young maiden of twenty was somewhat ostentatiously used by the
Senate in order to justify their own action against the niece of the
great Theodosius: still it is impossible for the admirers of Placidia
(of whom I am one) not to regret that her influence on this occasion was
exerted on the side of vengeance rather than on the side of compassion.
It was probably at the end of the first siege of Rome that Placidia was
taken prisoner by the Goths, who retained her as a hostage, but treated
her with all outward show of honour and royal ministrations. She was
therefore doubtless present at the great assembly at Ariminum, where her
brother’s rival, Attalus, was deposed; she would hear from the Gothic
soldiers their histories of the sack of Rome; she perhaps saw the mighty
form of her conqueror outstretched in death in his tent by the Busentus.
Now, for the next five years, her history was to be singularly interwoven
with that of his brother-in-law and successor, Ataulfus.
[Sidenote: _Alaric’s successor, Ataulfus._]
This man, whose name is in fact the same as one of those borne by another
great Northern conqueror, Gustavus _Adolphus_, had joined Alaric with
reinforcements raised in Upper Pannonia in the year 409, and had taken
part in the skirmishes with Sarus before Ravenna, which preceded the
Third Siege of Rome. He was a blood-relation[76] of Alaric, as well
as his kinsman by marriage, and was by general acclamation hailed as
his successor and raised on the shield as king. Though not boasting
the full number of inches of a Gothic warrior, he was of shapely form
and noble countenance. He is especially interesting to us, because a
chance conversation with a Provincial, a conversation which passed at
Narbonne and was reported at Bethlehem, gives us a glimpse into his own
secret hopes and aspirations, such as we do not possess into the mind
of any other leader of the barbarians. Orosius tells us that when he
was at Bethlehem he heard a citizen of Narbonne, who had served under
Theodosius, and who was a wise and religious person, say that Ataulfus
had frequently told him ‘that his first thought when he entered on the
career of conquest had been to claim for the Goths all that leadership
of the world which had once belonged to the Romans, and to vindicate for
himself a position like that which had belonged to the mighty Augustus.
Gradually, however, the fashion of his dreams had changed. He saw that
it was not by the sword alone, but by law, that Rome had dominated the
world, and that his own countrymen, wild and impetuous, had not learned
that lesson of obedience to Law which alone could fit them to rule; and
now his whole desire was to restore and re-invigorate the great Roman
Commonwealth, transforming that which he once hoped to destroy.’
Consciously or unconsciously every really statesmanlike intellect among
the Northern chieftains must have gone through the same change and come
to the same conclusion. Out of the Goth, or the Frank, or the Saxon
alone it was not possible yet to form a law-abiding nation. Either
from the Roman State or the Roman Church they must learn those habits
of discipline and self-restraint which they did in the end learn, and
practise as no purely Romance nation, far less any purely Celtic nation,
has ever practised them. What Ataulfus saw to be the statesman’s true aim
was that which Theodoric accomplished with temporary, and Charlemagne
with somewhat more permanent success—that transfusion of fresh Teutonic
blood into the old Roman body which has in fact made modern Europe.
[Sidenote: _Loves of Ataulfus and Placidia._]
[Sidenote: _Their marriage at Narbonne, 414._]
The political conversion of Ataulfus was aided, as conversions have been
so often aided, by a woman. The fair Placidia, forced to follow all the
movements of the Gothic army, yet ‘treated with all honour and ever
tended with royal ministrations,’ vanquished his heart. The old saying
that ‘conquered Greece led her victor captive’ was renewed with Placidia
and Ataulfus; but with a delicacy which we should term chivalrous if we
were speaking of a later age, he refused to make her his bride, though
she too loved him, till the consent of her brother came from Ravenna.
After four years of weary negotiations this consent was obtained, but not
until the Goths had marched out of Italy into Gaul. In January, 414, the
marriage of the Gothic king and the Roman Lady was celebrated at Narbonne
at the house of a citizen named Ingenuus. The ‘wise and religious person’
who afterwards conversed with Jerome at Bethlehem was doubtless present
at the wedding, if indeed he were not (as is very probable) Ingenuus
himself. Men noticed with interest that Ataulfus entered the inner
apartment to claim his bride, dressed, not in the barbaric splendour of
his countrymen, but like a Roman Senator. They saw with admiration the
fifty goodly youths in silken robes, bearing plates filled with gold
and gems, who formed part of Ataulfus’ splendid _Morgen-gabe_[77] to
his bride. Then came music, and they saw, perhaps not without a touch
of scorn, Attalus, once Emperor of Rome, leading the dance and song in
honour of his great patron’s wedding.
[Sidenote: _Fortunes of the Visigothic kingdom._]
[Sidenote: _Death of Placidia’s child, and of Ataulfus, 415._]
Unhappily for the world, this union of Roman and barbarian led to no
abiding results. The kingdom set up by Ataulfus did indeed endure, though
not exactly in the shape which he had given to it. Established at first
chiefly as a South Gaulish kingdom, and remaining such till the conquests
of Clovis at the end of the fifth century, it then shifted its centre
of gravity southward of the Pyrenees and became that Visigothic kingdom
of Spain which was overthrown by the Moors in 711, and which gradually
crept back to life again under the kings of Leon, Castille, and Arragon.
But the dynasty of Ataulfus himself was short-lived. A child, named
Theodosius, was born to him by Placidia; but this child, around which so
many hopes centered, died, to the unspeakable grief of its parents, and
was buried in a silver coffin at Barcelona, where they then dwelt. Soon
after the infant’s death the father was stabbed in the back by one of his
servants, who thus avenged an old grudge for the execution of a former
master. His dying words to his brother were, ‘Live in peace with Rome and
restore Placidia to Honorius.’
[Sidenote: _416-423._]
[Sidenote: _Humiliations of Placidia._]
[Sidenote: _She is restored to Honorius, 416._]
The murder of Ataulfus was possibly connected with a sort of insurrection
against the Roman influences which had been of late so powerful in the
Gothic Court. His successor, the brutal Singeric, murdered the sons of
Ataulfus (the children of his first marriage) and forced Placidia to
walk as a captive before his chariot for twelve miles from the gates
of Barcelona. After only eight days’ reign however, this ruffian was
dethroned and slain, and the gallant Walia was acclaimed king, whose name
is one of the most distinguished in the early history of the Visigothic
monarchy. He renewed and strengthened the alliance with Rome, and gave
back Placidia to the Emperor, receiving in return the somewhat prosaic
ransom of 19,000 quarters of corn.
[Sidenote: _Her marriage to Constantius._]
Placidia was escorted by the Roman general who had received her from the
hands of the Goths to her brother’s Court at Ravenna, and there, nearly
two years after the death of Ataulfus, she gave her hand to this general,
an old lover of hers named Constantius.
[Sidenote: _Second widowhood and exile of Placidia._]
The union of Constantius and Placidia lasted four years, and the fruit
of it was a son and a daughter, the first named Valentinian (after his
maternal great-grandfather), the second, Honoria. Constantius, a brave
soldier, but a rough, sullen, unpopular man, was associated in the Empire
by his brother-in-law, and, after six months’ enjoyment of the Imperial
dignity, died, apparently of mere _ennui_, in 421. Two years after his
death, Placidia and her children withdrew to Constantinople, on account
of a quarrel which had broken out with her brother, who, as I suspect
from the description of his conduct, had begun to show symptoms of
softening of the brain.
[Sidenote: _Death of Honorius. Elevation of Joannes._]
[Sidenote: _423-425._]
In this same year (423) Honorius died at the age of thirty-nine, and
was buried in a gigantic marble sarcophagus, which may still be seen in
‘the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia’ at Ravenna. There was no member of
the family of Theodosius on the spot to claim the vacant diadem, and
Joannes, a somewhat obscure member of the Civil Service (_Primicerius
Notariorum_), was permitted to wear it, under the patronage of the
powerful _Magister Militum_, Castinus.
[Sidenote: _Theodosius II places the son of Placidia on the Western
throne._]
When the news of this event (usurpation we must not call it, for there
was no strict hereditary right in the Roman Empire) reached the Court of
Constantinople, the young Emperor Theodosius II, the son of Arcadius,
determined to send an expedition to the West to overthrow Joannes.
The expedition was commanded by two brave Alans—father and son—named
Ardaburius and Aspar; and, after one or two reverses, was in the end
completely successful. Joannes was brought as a prisoner to Aquileia;
his right hand was cut off, he was paraded round the city upon an ass,
and, after some more ungenerous insults of this kind, he was put to
death. Ravenna, which had sympathised with the elevation of Joannes,
was punished by being sacked by the soldiers of Ardaburius. Rome was
flattered by the young Valentinian III, a boy of seven years old, being
sent there to assume the purple. At Constantinople, Theodosius II and his
people, who were assembled in the Hippodrome when the news of victory
arrived, walked in procession to the great Basilica, singing praises to
God for his deliverance.
[Sidenote: _Placidia as regent, 425-450._]
From 425 to 450, that is, from the thirty-eighth to the sixty-third year
of her life, Placidia was virtually the sovereign of what remained of the
Western Empire. She was already styled Augusta in right of her husband
Constantius’ six months’ wearing of the purple. She was, in accordance
with one or two precedents, entitled to hold the reins of power (with the
rank, though not the precise title, of Regent) during her son’s minority:
and as that son was idle and pleasure-loving, reproducing only the weaker
features of the Theodosian character, she continued to hold them after he
had grown to manhood, and until her own death in 450.
[Sidenote: _Events of Placidia’s regency._]
Great events, disastrous events, were happening during this second
quarter of the fifth century. In the Church of the East the wind was
rising for that great storm of the Monophysite controversy which for
a hundred years took peace from the earth. In the West, Carthage was
being conquered by the Vandals, Gaul and Spain were being more and
more hopelessly lost to the Empire, ‘the groans of the Britons’ were
being borne across the sea to ‘Aetius, thrice Consul.’ All these events
Placidia had to witness with failing heart from her palace at Ravenna by
the Pine Wood and the sea.
[Sidenote: _Her chief adviser, Aetius._]
[Sidenote: _Danger from the Huns._]
If the Augusta did not herself display any conspicuous faculty of rule
during these twenty-five years of decline, she at least had the merit
of loyally supporting the one man who, like Stilicho in the previous
generation, was best able to sustain the falling Empire. This was that
‘Aetius thrice Consul’ to whom allusion has just been made. He was born
at Silistria, on the Danube, the son of Gaudentius, an official of high
rank in the Western Empire. If he was not of barbarian extraction, a
point on which we cannot speak with certainty, the events of his life
threw him into close intercourse with the barbarians. For three years a
hostage in the camp of the Visigoths, and then, for an indefinite time,
hostage in the country of the Huns, he had contracted friendships with
the leading men of both nations, had perhaps learned something of their
language, had doubtless observed their tactics and formed his own opinion
of the best means of defeating them[78]. After the death of Honorius
he had adhered to the party of Joannes, but, not having been able to
avert his overthrow, he had accepted high command under Placidia and
Valentinian, whom he served loyally to the end of his days[79]. Loyally,
that is, as far as his sovereigns were concerned. If the hitherto
accepted story of his quarrel with Bonifacius, governor of Africa, be
correct, there was deep disloyalty on the part of Aetius towards his
greatest colleague in the Imperial service, and that disloyalty cost a
province to the Empire; but the account of these transactions may be
reserved till the next lecture, in which I shall have to speak of the
conquests of the Vandals. During ten years, from 429 to 439, the energies
of Aetius were chiefly directed to maintaining some hold on the East and
Centre of Gaul, with which object he waged war with diverse success on
the Visigoths, the Franks, and the Burgundians, and it is noteworthy
that in these wars the most useful auxiliaries of Aetius were men of
the Hunnish nation. During the last nine years of the life of Placidia
(441-450) the chief factor in European politics, the care that bit most
deeply into the hearts both of the Eastern and Western Sovereigns of the
Empire, was the menacing might of ATTILA, king of the HUNS. To these
savage Asiatic marauders it is now time to turn our attention.
[Sidenote: _History of the Huns after 374._]
For more than fifty years after the Huns crossed the Sea of Azof, and
fell like a thunderbolt on the kingdom of Hermanric the Ostrogoth, their
history is almost a blank. They had set in motion an avalanche of ruin
on the Empire, but they themselves, though doubtless spreading wide the
terror of their name through Southern Russia and Hungary, and though once
travelling southward as far as Antioch on a marauding expedition, did
not often during this period come forward as claimants for the goods of
the dying Empire. In fact, as we have already seen, on several occasions
the Hunnish soldier seems to have been the bravest and most faithful of
the auxiliaries of Rome. In part this was probably due to common enmity
to the intervening Visigoths. The Roman Provincial hated and feared the
Goth: the Goth feared and loathed the Hun: accordingly the Roman and the
Hun found it for their interest to be friends.
[Sidenote: _Attila’s accession, 433._]
[Sidenote: _His character and appearance._]
[Sidenote: _The sword of Mars._]
In the year 433, Attila and his brother Bleda mounted the throne of
the Huns. Twelve years later Bleda died, having been, according to
some accounts, craftily slain by order of his brother. At all times
Attila’s was the commanding personality, and with him alone need we here
concern ourselves. Let us hear how he is described by the historian of
the Goths[80]: ‘Attila was a man born into the world to agitate the
nations, the fear of all lands, one who, I hardly know how, terrified
all by the awful apprehensions spread abroad concerning him. He was
proud in his gait, rolling his eyes hither and thither, so that the
elation of his heart showed itself even by every movement of his body: a
lover of war, but not himself given to acts of violence[81], mighty in
counsel, placable by those who humbled themselves before him, favourable
to those whom he had admitted to his fealty: short of stature, broad
of chest, with an over-large head, with little eyes, thin beard, hair
sprinkled with grey, turned-up nose, muddy complexion. All these were
the characteristics which recalled his origin’ [or, to use our modern
phraseology, the distinctive marks of the Mongol race]. ‘By natural
temperament he was always confident that he should do great things, but
this confidence of his was increased by finding “the sword of Mars,”
which is ever held sacred by the Scythian kings, and which is said to
have been discovered in this way. A certain herdsman saw one of his
heifers limping, and being anxious to discover the cause of her wound,
carefully followed her bleeding footprints through the grass, till at
length he came to the sword, upon which the heifer had incautiously
trodden while grazing, and having dug it up he at once carried it to
Attila. He, having gratified the herdsman with a generous present, deemed
himself to be now appointed sovereign of the whole world, and victory in
all wars to be assured to him in right of the sword of Mars.’
[Sidenote: _433. Hunnish demands at Constantinople._]
Immediately upon the accession of Attila and Bleda, they demanded and
obtained from the Eastern Emperor the duplication of their yearly
_stipendium_, or, as they more truly called it, tribute, which was now
raised from £14,000 to £28,000. At the same time they insisted on the
return of all Huns or Romans who had fled from the Hunnish dominions and
taken refuge under the ineffectual aegis of Rome. This demand for the
surrender of refugees, the result, doubtless, of the barbarous despotism
of the Huns, was afterwards frequently renewed, and its imperfect
fulfilment was a standing grievance against the Eastern Emperor.
[Sidenote: _433-441. Extent of Attila’s Empire._]
For the next eight years, however, we hear but little of diplomatic
relations between Attila and the Empire. There can be little doubt
that during these years he was engaged in consolidating his dominions
northwards and eastwards. His own peculiar territory was evidently
the flat land of what we now call Hungary, between the Danube and the
Carpathians; but the nations which owned his over-lordship stretched
probably from the Caspian to the Rhine. Very loose and ill-compacted,
no doubt, was the Empire of the Huns; but the kings of the Ostrogoths,
Gepidae, Alans, Suevi, and Heruli, all followed Attila to battle, all
formed part of that confederacy of rapine which he could hurl whenever it
pleased him against a civilised and wealthy foe.
[Sidenote: _His campaigns in Asia._]
[Sidenote: _Did he drive our Saxon forefathers from their homes?_]
In the East another Tartar horde, the Geougen, perhaps even more savage
than the Huns themselves, threatened the new barbarian Empire; but Attila
appears to have formed an alliance with China which neutralised their
hostility, and left him free to prosecute his designs of conquest west of
the Ural mountains and south of the Caspian. He marched from the latter
sea fifteen days southward into the Persian kingdom, and ravaged the
ancient province of Media. He evidently ruled without a rival in European
Russia, or at least in that part of it which was then worthy of even a
barbarian’s notice, and—what is more important to us—he had, we are told,
‘subjected the islands in the ocean to his sway.’ These ‘islands in the
ocean’ can be none other than the islands and peninsula of Denmark and
the southern part of Sweden, which the geographers of the time considered
to be an island. Now, however transient may have been the Hunnish
conquest of those Baltic lands, of Holstein, Jutland, and South Sweden,
it was sufficient to produce results of world-historical importance.
In those lands our fathers, the Saxons, the Jutes, the Angles, were
dwelling at the commencement of the fifth century, making doubtless
many a piratical raid against the ‘_Litus Saxonicum_’ in Britain, but,
as a rule, returning with their plunder to their homes by the Baltic.
From those lands, before the year 441, they had begun to swarm forth,
alighting upon the eastern and southern coasts of Britain, coming
probably with wives and children, and coming to conquer and to _remain_.
Why this new and sudden change in the current of the nation’s thoughts?
Surely it was the swarthy Hunnish riders, the same who had scared the
Visigoths across the Danube, who sent the Angle and the Saxon in their
long ships scudding across the German Ocean. If this be so, the obscure
movements of this squalid Hunnish people not only threw down the Empire
of Rome, but indirectly caused the building up of the Empire of England.
[Sidenote: _Attila torments the Eastern and Western Courts with his
embassies, 441-450._]
With the year 441, Attila re-enters the arena of Imperial politics. For
the next nine years he sends ceaseless embassies to the Eastern and
Western Empires, ostensibly to press for the redress of grievances,
really in order to claim higher and ever higher terms for the maintenance
of peace, and to enrich his favourites at Court by the presents which he
well knows that the trembling Augusti at Constantinople and Ravenna will
give them in order to purchase their good offices with their master.
The standing grievance against the Eastern Court was, as has been said,
the alleged failure to surrender the fugitives, Hunnish princes or Roman
merchants, who had escaped from Attila’s dominions. The chief grievances
against Placidia and Valentinian were two: the vases of Sirmium and the
dowry of the lady Honoria.
[Sidenote: _The matter of the Sirmian vases._]
(1) A certain Gaulish provincial named Constantius, who filled the post
of Secretary to Attila, when the city of Sirmium was besieged by the
Huns, received from the Bishop of that city a deposit of the rich gold
Communion-plate of the Church, in trust to apply the proceeds to the
ransoming of the Bishop and his flock. Regardless, however, of this
trust, he carried off the sacred vessels to Rome and raised a large sum
of money upon them from the goldsmith, Silvanus. Eventually Sirmium
was taken; Constantius, a traitor to all parties, was crucified; and
Attila, claiming a sort of ‘resulting trust’ of the vases for himself as
conqueror, insisted that Silvanus should be surrendered to him as having
stolen _his_ property.
[Sidenote: _Honoria’s ring._]
(2) Honoria, the sister of Valentinian III, a young and giddy girl, had
compromised her reputation by an intrigue with an Imperial chamberlain,
and was sent by her mother to the Court of Constantinople in a kind of
honourable imprisonment. Her spirit chafed at the seclusion in which
she was kept by her four middle-aged and almost nun-like cousins, and
she formed the wild scheme of plighting her troth to the King of the
Huns, and calling upon him to be her deliverer. Attila received the ring
which she sent him, and, though he had already many wives, disdained not
to add Honoria to the number, so far at least as this that ‘he claimed
as her betrothed husband one half of the Western Empire which had been
bequeathed to Honoria by her father, but out of which she was kept by her
brother’s covetousness.’
[Sidenote: _Embassy of 448._]
[Sidenote: _Imperial plot for Attila’s assassination._]
The most important of the return-embassies was that which was sent
by Theodosius II, in the year 448, to the Court of Attila. The chief
ambassador was Maximin, a man of illustrious birth and high official
rank; and the official whom we should call the Secretary of Legation
was Priscus, to whose able pen we owe a minute account of the embassy,
which is certainly the most interesting historical document of the
century. Both Maximin and Priscus were Pagans, and both were men of high
character. They were used, however, to cloak an infamous plot which
had been concerted at the Court of Constantinople, but of which they
were themselves ignorant, for the assassination of Attila by one of the
nobles of his guard named Edeco. It is like reading a chapter of _Quentin
Durward_ or _Les Trois Mousquetaires_, to see the way in which the plot
is hatched, developed, and finally detected: and the honest indignation
of Attila against ‘his slave, Theodosius, who paid him tribute but dared
to plot the assassination of his master,’ is finely expressed, and puts
the savage Hun for the time immeasurably above the cultured and nominally
Christian Emperor. I have no space here, however, to insert these
details; but, though it has been often quoted before, I must transcribe
Priscus’s account of Attila’s palace and of a banquet therein, to which
he and his chief were invited.
[Sidenote: _Attila’s palace._]