their gates at their approach, for the terror which they inspired was on
every heart. In these towns, and in Milan and Pavia (Ticinum), which
followed their example, the Huns enjoyed doubtless to the full their
wild revel of lust and spoliation, but they left the buildings unharmed,
and they carried captive the inhabitants instead of murdering them.
The valley of the Po was now wasted to the heart's content of the
invaders. Should they cross the Apennines and blot out Rome as they had
blotted out Aquileia from among the cities of the world? This was the
great question that was being debated in the Hunnish camp, and, strange
to say, the voices were not all for war. Already Italy began to strike
that strange awe into the hearts of her northern conquerors which so
often in later ages has been her best defence. The remembrance of
Alaric, cut off by a mysterious death immediately after his capture of
Rome, was present in the mind of Attila, and was frequently insisted
upon by his counsellors, who seem to have had a foreboding that only
while he lived would they be great and prosperous.
While this discussion was going forward in the barbarian camp, all
voices were hushed, and the attention of all was aroused by the news of
the arrival of an embassy from Rome. What had been going on in that city
it is not easy to ascertain. The Emperor seems to have been dwelling
there, not at Ravenna. Aetius shows a strange lack of courage or of
resource, and we find it difficult to recognize in him the victor of the
Mauriac plains. He appears to have been even meditating flight from
Italy, and to have thought of persuading Valentinian to share his
exile. But counsels a shade less timorous prevailed. Some one suggested
that possibly even the Hun might be satiated with havoc, and that an
embassy might assist to mitigate the remainder of his resentment.
Accordingly ambassadors were sent in the once mighty name of "the
Emperor and the Senate and People of Rome" to crave for peace, and these
were the men who were now ushered into the camp of Attila.
The envoys had been well chosen to satisfy that punctilious pride which
insisted that only men of the highest dignity among the Romans should be
sent to treat with the lord of Scythia and Germany. Avienus, who had,
two years before, worn the robes of consul, was one of the ambassadors.
Trigetius, who had wielded the powers of a prefect, and who, seventeen
years before, had been despatched upon a similar mission to Genseric the
Vandal, was another. But it was not upon these men, but upon their
greater colleague, that the eyes of all the barbarian warriors and
statesmen were fixed. Leo, bishop of Rome, had come, on behalf of his
flock, to sue for peace from the idolater.
The two men who had thus at last met by the banks of the Mincio are
certainly the grandest figures whom the fifth century can show to us, at
any rate since Alaric vanished from the scene.
Attila we by this time know well enough; adequately to describe Pope Leo
I, we should have to travel too far into the region of ecclesiastical
history. Chosen pope in the year 440, he was now about half way through
his long pontificate, one of the few which have nearly rivalled the
twenty-five years traditionally assigned to St. Peter. A firm
disciplinarian, not to say a persecutor, he had caused the
Priscillianists of Spain and the Manichees of Rome to feel his heavy
hand. A powerful rather than subtle theologian, he had asserted the
claims of Christian common-sense as against the endless refinements of
oriental speculation concerning the nature of the Son of God. Like an
able Roman general he had traced, in his letters on the Eutychian
controversy, the lines of the fortress in which the defenders of the
Catholic verity were thenceforward to intrench themselves and from which
they were to repel the assaults of Monophysites on the one hand and of
Nestorians on the other. These lines had been enthusiastically accepted
by the great council of Chalcedon--held in the year of Attila's Gaulish
campaign--and remain from that day to this the authoritative utterance
of the Church concerning the mysterious union of the Godhead and the
manhood in the person of Jesus Christ.
And all these gifts of will, of intellect, and of soul were employed by
Leo with undeviating constancy, with untired energy, in furthering his
great aim, the exaltation of the dignity of the popedom, the conversion
of the admitted primacy of the bishops of Rome into an absolute and
world-wide spiritual monarchy. Whatever our opinions may be as to the
influence of this spiritual monarchy on the happiness of the world, or
its congruity with the character of the Teacher in whose words it
professed to root itself, we cannot withhold a tribute of admiration for
the high temper of this Roman bishop, who in the ever-deepening
degradation of his country still despaired not, but had the courage and
endurance to work for a far-distant future, who, when the Roman was
becoming the common drudge and footstool of all nations, still
remembered the proud words "_Tu regere imperio populos, Romane,
memento!_" and under the very shadow of Attila and Genseric prepared for
the city of Romulus a new and spiritual dominion, vaster and more
enduring than any which had been won for her by Julius or by Hadrian.
Such were the two men who stood face to face in the summer of 452 upon
the plains of Lombardy. The barbarian King had all the material power in
his hand, and he was working but for a twelvemonth. The pontiff had no
power but in the world of intellect, and his fabric was to last fourteen
centuries. They met, as has been said, by the banks of the Mincio.
Jordanes tells us that it was "where the river is crossed by many
wayfarers coming and going." Some writers think that these words point
to the ground now occupied by the celebrated fortress of Peschiera,
close to the point where the Mincio issues from the Lake of Garda.
Others place the interview at Governolo, a little village hard by the
junction of the Mincio and the Po. If the latter theory be true, and it
seems to fit well with the route which would probably be taken by
Attila, the meeting took place in Vergil's country, and almost in sight
of the very farm where Tityrus and Meliboeus chatted at evening under
the beech-tree.
Leo's success as an ambassador was complete. Attila laid aside all the
fierceness of his anger and promised to return across the Danube, and to
live thenceforward at peace with the Romans. But in his usual style, in
the midst of reconciliation he left a loophole for a future wrath, for
"he insisted still on this point above all, that Honoria, the sister of
the Emperor, and the daughter of the Augusta Placidia, should be sent to
him with the portion of the royal wealth which was her due; and he
threatened that unless this was done he would lay upon Italy a far
heavier punishment than any which it had yet borne."
But for the present, at any rate, the tide of devastation was turned,
and few events more powerfully impressed the imagination of that new and
blended world which was now standing at the threshold of the dying
empire than this retreat of Attila, the dreaded king of kings, before
the unarmed successor of St. Peter.
Attila was already predisposed to moderation by the counsels of his
ministers. The awe of Rome was upon him and upon them, and he was forced
incessantly to ponder the question, "What if I conquer like Alaric, to
die like him?" Upon these doubts and ponderings of his supervened the
stately presence of Leo, a man of holy life, firm will, dauntless
courage--that, be sure, Attila perceived in the first moments of their
interview--and, besides this, holding an office honored and venerated
through all the civilized world. The barbarian yielded to his spell as
he had yielded to that of Lupus of Troyes, and, according to a
tradition, which, it must be admitted, is not very well authenticated,
he jocularly excused his unaccustomed gentleness by saying that "he knew
how to conquer men, but the lion and the wolf (Leo and Lupus) had
learned how to conquer him."
The tradition which asserts that the republic of Venice and its neighbor
cities in the lagoons were peopled by fugitives from the Hunnish
invasion of 452, is so constant and in itself so probable that we seem
bound to accept it as substantially true, though contemporary or nearly
contemporary evidence to the fact is utterly wanting.
The thought of "the glorious city in the sea" so dazzles our
imaginations when we turn our thoughts toward Venice that we must take a
little pains to free ourselves from the spell and reproduce the aspect
of the desolate islands and far-stretching wastes of sand and sea to
which the fear of Attila drove the delicately nurtured Roman provincials
for a habitation.
If we examine on the map the well-known and deep recess of the Adriatic
Sea, we shall at once be struck by one marked difference between its
eastern and its northern shores. For three hundred miles down the
Dalmatian coast not one large river, scarcely a considerable stream,
descends from the too closely towering Dinaric mountains to the sea. If
we turn now to the northwestern angle which formed the shore of the
Roman province of Venetia, we find the coast line broken by at least
seven streams, two of which are great rivers.
These seven streams, whose mouths are crowded into less than eighty
miles of coast, drain an area which, reckoning from Monte Viso to the
Terglon Alps--the source of the Ysonzo--must be four hundred and fifty
miles in length, and may average two hundred miles in breadth, and this
area is bordered on one side by the highest mountains in Europe,
snow-covered, glacier-strewn, wrinkled and twisted into a thousand
valleys and narrow defiles, each of which sends down its river or its
rivulet to swell the great outpour.
For our present purpose, and as a worker out of Venetian history, Po,
notwithstanding the far greater volume of his waters, is of less
importance than the six other small streams which bear him company. He,
carrying down the fine alluvial soil of Lombardy, goes on lazily adding,
foot by foot, to the depth of his delta, and mile by mile to its extent.
They, swiftly hurrying over their shorter course from mountain to sea,
scatter indeed many fragments, detached from their native rocks, over
the first meadows which they meet with in the plain, but carry some also
far out to sea, and then, behind the bulwark which they thus have made,
deposit the finer alluvial particles with which they, too, are laden.
Thus we get the two characteristic features of the ever-changing coast
line, the Lido and the Laguna. The Lido, founded upon the masses of
rock, is a long, thin slip of the _terra firma_, which form a sort of
advance guard of the land.
The Laguna, occupying the interval between the Lido and the true shore,
is a wide expanse of waters, generally very few feet in depth, with a
bottom of fine sand, and with a few channels of deeper water, the
representatives of the forming rivers winding intricately among them. In
such a configuration of land and water the state of the tide makes a
striking difference in the scene. And unlike the rest of the
Mediterranean, the Adriatic does possess a tide, small, it is true, in
comparison with the great tides of ocean--for the whole difference
between high and low water at the flood is not more than six feet, and
the average flow is said not to amount to more than two feet six
inches--but even this flux is sufficient to produce large tracts of sea
which the reflux converts into square miles of oozy sand.
Here, between sea and land, upon this detritus of the rivers, settled
the detritus of humanity. The Gothic and the Lombard invasions
contributed probably their share of fugitives, but fear of the Hunnish
world-waster--whose very name, according to some, was derived from one
of the mighty rivers of Russia--was the great "degrading" influence that
carried down the fragments of Roman civilization and strewed them over
the desolate lagoons. The inhabitants of Aquileia, or at least the
feeble remnants that escaped the sword of Attila, took refuge at Grado.
Concordia migrated to Caprularia (now Caorle). The inhabitants of
Altinum, abandoning their ruined villas, founded their new habitations
upon seven islands at the mouth of the Piave, which, according to
tradition, they named from the seven gates of their old city--Torcellus,
Maiurbius, Boreana, Ammiana, Constantiacum, and Anianum. The
representatives of some of these names, Torcello, Mazzorbo, Burano, are
familiar sounds to the Venetian at the present day.
From Padua came the largest stream of emigrants. They left the tomb of
their mythical ancestor, Antenor, and built their humble dwellings upon
the islands of the rivers Altus and Methamaucus, better known to us as
Rialto and Malamocco. This Paduan settlement was one day to be known to
the world by the name of Venice. But let us not suppose that the future
"Queen of the Adriatic" sprang into existence at a single bound like
Constantinople or Alexandria. For two hundred and fifty years, that is
to say for eight generations, the refugees on the islands of the
Adriatic prolonged an obscure and squalid existence--fishing, salt
manufacturing, damming out the waves with wattled vine-branches, driving
piles into the sand-banks, and thus gradually extending the area of
their villages. Still these were but fishing villages, loosely
confederated together, loosely governed, poor and insignificant, so that
the anonymous geographer of Ravenna, writing in the seventh century, can
only say of them, "In the country of Venetia there are some few islands
which are inhabited by men." This seems to have been their condition,
though perhaps gradually growing in commercial importance, until at the
beginning of the eighth century the concentration of political authority
in the hands of the first doge, and the recognition of the Rialto
cluster of islands as the capital of the confederacy, started the
republic on a career of success and victory, in which for seven
centuries she met no lasting check.
But this lies far beyond the limit of our present subject. It must be
again said that we have not to think of "the pleasant place of all
festivity," but of a few huts among the sand-banks, inhabited by Roman
provincials, who mournfully recall their charred and ruined habitations
by the Brenta and the Piave. The sea alone does not constitute their
safety. If that were all, the pirate ships of the Vandal Genseric might
repeat upon their poor dwellings all the terror of Attila. But it is in
their amphibious life, in that strange blending of land and sea which is
exhibited by the lagunes, that their safety lies. Only experienced
pilots can guide a vessel of any considerable draught through the mazy
channels of deep water which intersect these lagoons; and should they
seem to be in imminent peril from the approach of an enemy, they will
defend themselves not like the Dutch by cutting the dikes which
barricade them from the ocean, but by pulling up the poles which even
those pilots need to indicate their pathway through the waters. There,
then, engaged in their humble, beaver-like labors, we leave for the
present the Venetian refugees from the rage of Attila.
But even while protesting, it is impossible not to let into our minds
some thought of what those desolate fishing villages will one day
become. The dim religious light, half revealing the slowly gathered
glories of St. Mark's; the Ducal Palace, that history in stone; the
Rialto, with the babble of many languages; the Piazza, with its flock of
fearless pigeons; the Brazen Horses, the Winged Lion, the Bucentaur, all
that the artists of Venice did to make her beautiful, her ambassadors to
make her wise, her secret tribunals to make her terrible; memories of
these things must come thronging upon the mind at the mere mention of
her spell-like name. Now, with these pictures glowing vividly before
you, wrench the mind away with sudden effort to the dreary plains of
Pannonia. Think of the moody Tartar, sitting in his log-hut, surrounded
by his barbarous guests; of Zercon, gabbling his uncouth mixture of
Hunnish and Latin; of the bath-man of Onégesh, and the wool-work of
Kreka, and the reed candles in the village of Bleda's widow; and say if
cause and effect were ever more strangely meted in history than the rude
and brutal might of Attila with the stately and gorgeous and subtle
republic of Venice.
One more consideration is suggested to us by that which was the noblest
part of the work of Venice, the struggle which she maintained for
centuries, really in behalf of all Europe, against the Turk. Attila's
power was soon to pass away, but, in the ages that were to come, another
Turanian race was to arise, as brutal as the Huns, but with their
fierceness sharp-pointed and hardened into a far more fearful weapon of
offence by the fanaticism of Islam. These descendants of the kinsfolk of
Attila were the Ottomans, and but for the barrier which, like their own
_murazzi_ against the waves, the Venetians interposed against the
Ottomans, it is scarcely too much to say that half Europe would have
undergone the misery of subjection to the organized anarchy of the
Turkish pachas. The Tartar Attila, when he gave up Aquileia and her
neighbor cities to the tender mercies of his myrmidons, little thought
that he was but the instrument in an unseen Hand for hammering out the
shield which should one day defend Europe from Tartar robbers such as he
was. The Turanian poison secreted the future antidote to itself, and the
name of that antidote was Venice.
JOHN RUSKIN
In the olden days of travelling, now to return no more, in which
distance could not be vanquished without toil, but in which that toil
was rewarded, partly by the power of deliberate survey of the countries
through which the journey lay, and partly by the happiness of the
evening hours, when, from the top of the last hill he had surmounted,
the traveller beheld the quiet village where he was to rest, scattered
among the meadows beside its valley stream; or, from the long-hoped-for
turn in the dusty perspective of the causeway, saw, for the first time,
the towers of some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset--hours of
peaceful and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in
the railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men, an
equivalent--in those days, I say, when there was something more to be
anticipated and remembered in the first aspect of each successive
halting-place, than a new arrangement of glass roofing and iron girder,
there were few moments of which the recollection was more fondly
cherished by the traveller than that which brought him within sight of
Venice, as his gondola shot into the open Lagoon from the canal of
Mestre.
Not but that the aspect of the city itself was generally the source of
some slight disappointment, for, seen in this direction, its buildings
are far less characteristic than those of the other great towns of
Italy; but this inferiority was partly disguised by distance, and more
than atoned for by the strange rising of its walls and towers, out of
the midst, as it seemed, of the deep sea, for it was impossible that the
mind or the eye could at once comprehend the shallowness of the vast
sheet of water which stretched away in leagues of rippling lustre to the
north and south, or trace the narrow line of islets bounding it to the
east. The salt breeze, the white moaning sea-birds, the masses of black
weed separating and disappearing gradually, in knots of heaving shoal,
under the advance of the steady tide, all proclaimed it to be indeed the
ocean on whose bosom the great city rested so calmly; not such blue,
soft, lake-like ocean as bathes the Neapolitan promontories or sleeps
beneath the marble rocks of Genoa, but a sea with the bleak power of our
own northern waves, yet subdued into a strange spacious rest, and
changed from its angry pallor into a field of burnished gold, as the sun
declined behind the belfry tower of the lonely island church, fitly
named "St. George of the Sea-weed."
As the boat drew nearer to the city, the coast which the traveller had
just left sank behind him into one long, low, sad-colored line, tufted
irregularly with brushwood and willows: but, at what seemed its northern
extremity, the hills of Arqua rose in a dark cluster of purple pyramids,
balanced on the bright mirage of the Lagoon; two or three smooth surges
of inferior hill extended themselves about their roots, and beyond
these, beginning with the craggy peaks above Vicenza, the chain of the
Alps girded the whole horizon to the north--a wall of jagged blue, here
and there showing through its clefts a wilderness of misty precipices,
fading far back into the recesses of Cadore, and itself rising and
breaking away eastward, where the sun struck opposite upon its snow,
into mighty fragments of peaked light, standing up behind the barred
clouds of evening, one after another, countless, the crown of the Adrian
Sea, until the eye turned back from pursuing them, to rest upon the
nearer burning of the campaniles of Murano, and on the great city, where
it magnified itself along the waves, as the quick silent pacing of the
gondola drew nearer and nearer. And at last, when its walls were
reached, and the outmost of its untrodden streets was entered, not
through towered gate or guarded rampart, but as a deep inlet between two
rocks of coral in the Indian sea; when first upon the traveller's sight
opened the long ranges of columned palaces--each with its black boat
moored at the portal--each with its image cast down, beneath its feet,
upon that green pavement which every breeze broke into new fantasies of
rich tessellation; when first, at the extremity of the bright vista, the
shadowy Rialto threw its colossal curve slowly forth from behind the
palace of the Camerlenghi; that strange curve, so delicate, so
adamantine, strong as a mountain cavern, graceful as a bow just bent;
when first, before its moonlike circumference was all risen, the
gondolier's cry, "Ah! Stali," struck sharp upon the ear, and the prow
turned aside under the mighty cornices that half met over the narrow
canal, where the plash of the water followed close and loud, ringing
along the marble by the boat's side; and when at last that boat darted
forth upon the breadth of silver sea, across which the front of the
Ducal Palace, flushed with its sanguine veins, looks to the snowy dome
of Our Lady of Salvation, it was no marvel that the mind should be so
deeply entranced by the visionary charm of a scene so beautiful and so
strange as to forget the darker truths of its history and its being.
Well might it seem that such a city had owed her existence rather to the
rod of the enchanter than the fear of the fugitive; that the waters
which encircled her had been chosen for the mirror of her state rather
than the shelter of her nakedness; and that all which in nature was wild
or merciless--Time and Decay, as well as the waves and tempests--had
been won to adorn her instead of to destroy, and might still spare, for
ages to come, that beauty which seemed to have fixed for its throne the
sands of the hour-glass as well as of the sea.
And although the last few eventful years, fraught with change to the
face of the whole earth, have been more fatal in their influence on
Venice than the five hundred that preceded them; though the noble
landscape of approach to her can now be seen no more, or seen only by a
glance, as the engine slackens its rushing on the iron line; and though
many of her palaces are forever defaced and many in desecrated ruins,
there is still so much of magic in her aspect that the hurried
traveller, who must leave her before the wonder of that first aspect has
been worn away, may still be led to forget the humility of her origin
and to shut his eyes to the depth of her desolation. They, at least, are
little to be envied in whose hearts the great charities of the
imagination lie dead, and for whom the fancy has no power to repress the
importunity of painful impressions or to raise what is ignoble and
disguise what is discordant in a scene so rich in its remembrances, so
surpassing in its beauty. But for this work of the imagination there
must be no permission during the task which is before us.