century, may indeed gild, but never save, the remains of those mightier
ages to which they are attached like climbing flowers; and they must be
torn away from the magnificent fragments, if we would see them as they
stood in their own strength. Those feelings, always as fruitless as they
are fond, are in Venice not only incapable of protecting, but even of
discerning, the objects to which they ought to have been attached. The
Venice of modern fiction and drama is a thing of yesterday, a mere
efflorescence of decay, a stage dream which the first ray of daylight
must dissipate into dust. No prisoner, whose name is worth remembering,
or whose sorrow deserved sympathy, ever crossed that "Bridge of Sighs,"
which is the centre of the Byronic ideal of Venice; no great merchant of
Venice ever saw that Rialto under which the traveller now passes with
breathless interest: the statue which Byron makes Faliero address as of
one of his great ancestors was erected to a soldier of fortune a hundred
and fifty years after Faliero's death; and the most conspicuous parts of
the city have been so entirely altered in the course of the last three
centuries that if Henry Dandolo or Francis Foscari could be summoned
from his tomb, and stood each on the deck of his galley at the entrance
of the Grand Canal, that renowned entrance, the painter's favorite
subject, the novelist's favorite scene, where the water first narrows by
the steps of the Church of La Salute--the mighty doges would not know in
what spot of the world they stood, would literally not recognize one
stone of the great city, for whose sake, and by whose ingratitude, their
gray hairs had been brought down with bitterness to the grave.
The remains of _their_ Venice lie hidden behind the cumbrous masses
which were the delight of the nation in its dotage; hidden in many a
grass-grown court and silent pathway and lightless canal, where the slow
waves have sapped their foundations for five hundred years, and must
soon prevail over them forever. It must be our task to glean and gather
them forth, and restore out of them some faint image of the lost city,
more gorgeous a thousandfold than that which now exists, yet not created
in the day-dream of the prince nor by the ostentation of the noble, but
built by iron hands and patient hearts, contending against the adversity
of nature and the fury of man, so that its wonderfulness cannot be
grasped by the indolence of imagination, but only after frank inquiry
into the true nature of that wild and solitary scene whose restless
tides and trembling sands did indeed shelter the birth of the city, but
long denied her dominion.
When the eye falls casually on a map of Europe, there is no feature by
which it is more likely to be arrested than the strange sweeping loop
formed by the junction of the Alps and Apennines, and enclosing the
great basin of Lombardy. This return of the mountain chain upon itself
causes a vast difference in the character of the distribution of its
_débris_ on its opposite sides. The rock fragments and sediment which
the torrents on the north side of the Alps bear into the plains are
distributed over a vast extent of country, and, though here and there
lodged in beds of enormous thickness, soon permit the firm substrata to
appear from underneath them; but all the torrents which descend from the
southern side of the High Alps and from the northern slope of the
Apennines meet concentrically in the recess or mountain-bay which the
two ridges enclose; every fragment which thunder breaks out of their
battlements, and every grain of dust which the summer rain washes from
their pastures, is at last laid at rest in the blue sweep of the
Lombardic plain; and that plain must have risen within its rocky
barriers as a cup fills with wine, but for two contrary influences which
continually depress, or disperse from its surface, the accumulation of
the ruins of ages.
I will not tax the reader's faith in modern science by insisting on this
singular depression of the surface of Lombardy, which appears for many
centuries to have taken place steadily and continually; the main fact
with which we have to do is the gradual transport, by the Po and its
great collateral rivers, of vast masses of the finer sediment to the
sea. The character of the Lombardic plains is most strikingly expressed
by the ancient walls of its cities, composed for the most part of large
rounded Alpine pebbles alternating with narrow courses of brick, and was
curiously illustrated in 1848 by the ramparts of these same pebbles
thrown up four or five feet high round every field, to check the
Austrian cavalry in the battle under the walls of Verona.
The finer dust among which these pebbles are dispersed is taken up by
the rivers, fed into continual strength by the Alpine snow, so that,
however pure their waters may be when they issue from the lakes at the
foot of the great chain, they become of the color and opacity of clay
before they reach the Adriatic; the sediment which they bear is at once
thrown down as they enter the sea, forming a vast belt of low land along
the eastern coast of Italy. The powerful stream of the Po of course
builds forward the fastest; on each side of it, north and south, there
is a tract of marsh, fed by more feeble streams, and less liable to
rapid change than the delta of the central river. In one of these tracts
is built Ravenna, and in the other Venice.
What circumstances directed the peculiar arrangement of this great belt
of sediment in the earliest times, it is not here the place to inquire.
It is enough for us to know that from the mouths of the Adige to those
of the Piave there stretches, at a variable distance of from three to
five miles from the actual shore, a bank of sand, divided into long
islands by narrow channels of sea. The space between this bank and the
true shore consists of the sedimentary deposits from these and other
rivers, a great plain of calcareous mud, covered, in the neighborhood of
Venice, by the sea at high water, to the depth in most places of a foot
or a foot and a half, and nearly everywhere exposed at low tide, but
divided by an intricate network of narrow and winding channels, from
which the sea never retires.
In some places, according to the run of the currents, the land has risen
into marshy islets, consolidated, some by art, and some by time, into
ground firm enough to be built upon or fruitful enough to be cultivated:
in others, on the contrary, it has not reached the sea-level; so that,
at the average low water, shallow lakelets glitter among its irregularly
exposed fields of seaweed. In the midst of the largest of these,
increased in importance by the confluence of several large river
channels toward one of the openings in the sea-bank, the city of Venice
itself is built, on a crowded cluster of islands; the various plots of
higher ground which appear to the north and south of this central
cluster have at different periods been also thickly inhabited, and now
bear, according to their size, the remains of cities, villages, or
isolated convents and churches, scattered among spaces of open ground,
partly waste and encumbered by ruins, partly under cultivation for the
supply of the metropolis.
The average rise and fall of the tide are about three feet--varying
considerably with the seasons--but this fall, on so flat a shore, is
enough to cause continual movement in the waters, and in the main canals
to produce a reflux which frequently runs like a mill-stream. At high
water no land is visible for many miles to the north or south of Venice,
except in the form of small islands crowned with towers or gleaming with
villages; there is a channel, some three miles wide, between the city
and the mainland, and some mile and a half wide between it and the sandy
breakwater called the Lido, which divides the Lagoon from the Adriatic,
but which is so low as hardly to disturb the impression of the city's
having been built in the midst of the ocean, although the secret of its
true position is partly, yet not painfully, betrayed by the clusters of
piles set to mark the deep-water channels, which undulate far away in
spotty chains like the studded backs of huge sea-snakes, and by the
quick glittering of the crisped and crowded waves that flicker and dance
before the strong winds upon the unlifted level of the shallow sea.
But the scene is widely different at low tide. A fall of eighteen or
twenty inches is enough to show ground over the greater part of the
Lagoon; and at the complete ebb the city is seen standing in the midst
of a dark plain of sea-weed, of gloomy green, except only where the
larger branches of the Brenta and its associated streams converge toward
the port of the Lido. Through this salt and sombre plain the gondola and
the fishing-boat advance by tortuous channels, seldom more than four or
five feet deep, and often so choked with slime that the heavier keels
furrow the bottom till their crossing tracks are seen through the clear
sea-water like the ruts upon a wintry road, and the oar leaves blue
gashes upon the ground at every stroke, or is entangled among the thick
weed that fringes the banks with the weight of its sullen waves, leaning
to and fro upon the uncertain sway of the exhausted tide.
The scene is often profoundly oppressive, even at this day, when every
plot of higher ground bears some fragment of fair building: but, in
order to know what it was once, let the traveller follow in his boat at
evening the windings of some unfrequented channel far into the midst of
the melancholy plain; let him remove, in his imagination, the brightness
of the great city that still extends itself in the distance, and the
walls and towers from the islands that are near; and so wait, until the
bright investiture and sweet warmth of the sunset are withdrawn from the
waters, and the black desert of their shore lies in its nakedness
beneath the night, pathless, comfortless, infirm, lost in dark languor
and fearful silence, except where the salt runlets plash into the
tideless pools, or the sea-birds flit from their margins with a
questioning cry; and he will be enabled to enter in some sort into the
horror of heart with which this solitude was anciently chosen by man for
his habitation.
They little thought, who first drove the stakes into the sand, and
strewed the ocean reeds for their rest, that their children were to be
the princes of that ocean, and their palaces its pride; and yet, in the
great natural laws that rule that sorrowful wilderness, let it be
remembered what strange preparation had been made for the things which
no human imagination could have foretold, and how the whole existence
and fortune of the Venetian nation were anticipated or compelled, by the
setting of those bars and doors to the rivers and the sea. Had deeper
currents divided their islands, hostile navies would again and again
have reduced the rising city into servitude; had stronger surges beaten
their shores, all the richness and refinement of the Venetian
architecture must have been exchanged for the walls and bulwarks of an
ordinary seaport. Had there been no tide, as in other parts of the
Mediterranean, the narrow canals of the city would have become noisome,
and the marsh in which it was built pestiferous. Had the tide been only
a foot or eighteen inches higher in its rise, the water access to the
doors of the palaces would have been impossible; even as it is, there is
sometimes a little difficulty, at the ebb, in landing without setting
foot upon the lower and slippery steps: and the highest tides sometimes
enter the court-yards, and overflow the entrance halls.
Eighteen inches more of difference between the level of the flood and
ebb would have rendered the doorsteps of every palace, at low water, a
treacherous mass of weeds and limpets, and the entire system of
water-carriage for the higher classes, in their easy and daily
intercourse, must have been done away with. The streets of the city
would have been widened, its network of canals filled up, and all the
peculiar character of the place and the people destroyed.
The reader may perhaps have felt some pain in the contrast between this
faithful view of the site of the Venetian throne, and the romantic
conception of it which we ordinarily form; but this pain, if he have
felt it, ought to be more than counterbalanced by the value of the
instance thus afforded to us at once of the inscrutableness and the
wisdom of the ways of God. If, two thousand years ago, we had been
permitted to watch the slow settling of the slime of those turbid rivers
into the polluted sea, and the gaining upon its deep and fresh waters of
the lifeless, impassable, unvoyageable plain, how little could we have
understood the purpose with which those islands were shaped out of the
void, and the torpid waters enclosed with their desolate walls of sand!
How little could we have known, any more than of what now seems to us
most distressful, dark, and objectless, the glorious aim which was then
in the mind of Him in whose hand are all the corners of the earth! How
little imagined that in the laws which were stretching forth the gloomy
margins of those fruitless banks, and feeding the bitter grass among
their shallows, there was indeed a preparation, and _the only
preparation possible_, for the founding of a city which was to be set
like a golden clasp on the girdle of the earth, to write her history on
the white scrolls of the sea-surges, and to word it in their thunder,
and to gather and give forth, in world-wide pulsation, the glory of the
West and of the East, from the burning heart of her Fortitude and
Splendor.
CLOVIS FOUNDS THE KINGDOM OF THE FRANKS: IT BECOMES CHRISTIAN
A.D. 486-511
FRANÇOIS P.G. GUIZOT
Clovis, the sturdy Frank, wrought marvellous changes in Gaul. His
marriage to the Christian princess Clotilde was followed by the
conversion of himself and, gradually, that of his people. With a
well-disciplined army he pulled down and swept away the last
pillars of Roman power out of Gaul. Guizot gives a graphic account
of the transition of the Franks, during two hundred and fifty
years, from being isolated wandering tribes, each constantly
warring against the other, to a well-ordered Christian kingdom,
which led to the establishment of the French monarchy. The climax
of this period of transition came in the reign of Clovis, with whom
commences the real history of France. Under his strong hand the
various tribes were gradually brought under his sole rule.
When Clovis, at the age of fifteen, succeeded his father,
Childeric, as king of the Salian tribe, his people were mainly
pagans; the Salian domain was very limited, the treasury empty, and
there was no store of either grain or wine. But these difficulties
were overcome by him; he subjugated the neighboring tribes, and
made Christianity the state religion. The new faith was accorded
great privileges and means of influence, in many cases favorable to
humanity and showing respect to the rights of individuals. So great
an advance in civilization is an early milestone on the path of
progress.
About A.D. 241 or 242 the Sixth Roman legion, commanded by Aurelian, at
that time military tribune, and thirty years later emperor, had just
finished a campaign on the Rhine, undertaken for the purpose of driving
the Germans from Gaul, and was preparing for eastern service, to make
war on the Persians. The soldiers sang:
"We have slain a thousand Franks and a thousand
Sarmatians; we want a thousand, thousand,
Thousand Persians."
That was, apparently, a popular burthen at the time, for on the days of
military festivals, at Rome and in Gaul, the children sang, as they
danced:
"We have cut off the heads of a thousand, thousand, thousand
Thousand;
One man hath cut off the heads of a thousand, thousand, thousand,
Thousand thousand;
May he live a thousand thousand years, he who
Hath slain a thousand thousand!
Nobody hath so much of wine as he
Hath of blood poured out."
Aurelian, the hero of these ditties, was indeed much given to the
pouring out of blood, for at the approach of a fresh war he wrote to the
senate:
"I marvel, conscript fathers, that ye have so much misgiving about
opening the Sibylline books, as if ye were deliberating in an assembly
of Christians, and not in the temple of all the gods. Let inquiry be
made of the sacred books, and let celebration take place of the
ceremonies that ought to be fulfilled. Far from refusing, I offer, with
zeal, to satisfy all expenditure required with _captives of every
nationality_, victims of royal rank. It is no shame to conquer with the
aid of the gods; it is thus that our ancestors began and ended many a
war."
Human sacrifices, then, were not yet foreign to pagan festivals, and
probably the blood of more than one Frankish captive on that occasion
flowed in the temple of all the gods.
It is the first time the name of _Franks_ appears in history; and it
indicated no particular, single people, but a confederation of Germanic
peoplets, settled or roving on the right bank of the Rhine, from the
Main to the ocean. The number and the names of the tribes united in this
confederation are uncertain. A chart of the Roman Empire, prepared
apparently at the end of the fourth century, in the reign of the emperor
Honorius--which chart, called _tabula Peutingeri_, was found among the
ancient MSS. collected by Conrad Peutinger, a learned German
philosopher, in the fifteenth century--bears, over a large territory on
the right bank of the Rhine, the word _Francia_, and the following
enumeration: "The Chaucians, the Ampsuarians, the Cheruscans, and the
Chamavians, who are also called Franks;" and to these tribes divers
chroniclers added several others, "the Attuarians, the Bructerians, the
Cattians, and the Sicambrians."
Whatever may have been the specific names of these peoplets, they were
all of German race, called themselves Franks, that is "freemen," and
made, sometimes separately, sometimes collectively, continued incursions
into Gaul--especially Belgica and the northern portions of Lyonness--at
one time plundering and ravaging, at another occupying forcibly, or
demanding of the Roman emperors lands whereon to settle. From the middle
of the third to the beginning of the fifth century the history of the
Western Empire presents an almost uninterrupted series of these
invasions on the part of the Franks, together with the different
relationships established between them and the imperial government. At
one time whole tribes settled on Roman soil, submitted to the emperors,
entered their service, and fought for them even against their own German
compatriots. At another, isolated individuals, such and such warriors of
German race, put themselves at the command of the emperors, and became
of importance. At the middle of the third century the emperor Valerian,
on committing a command to Aurelian, wrote, "Thou wilt have with thee
Hartmund, Haldegast, Hildmund, and Carioviscus."
Some Frankish tribes allied themselves more or less fleetingly with the
imperial government, at the same time that they preserved their
independence; others pursued, throughout the empire, their life of
incursion and adventure. From A.D. 260 to 268, under the reign of
Gallienus, a band of Franks threw itself upon Gaul, scoured it from
northeast to southeast, plundering and devastating on its way; then it
passed from Aquitania into Spain, took and burned Tarragona, gained
possession of certain vessels, sailed away, and disappeared in Africa,
after having wandered about for twelve years at its own will and
pleasure. There was no lack of valiant emperors, precarious and
ephemeral as their power may have been, to defend the empire, and
especially Gaul, against those enemies, themselves ephemeral, but
forever recurring; Decius, Valerian, Gallienus, Claudius Gothicus,
Aurelian, and Probus gallantly withstood those repeated attacks of
German hordes. Sometimes they flattered themselves they had gained a
definitive victory, and then the old Roman pride exhibited itself in
their patriotic confidence. About A.D. 278, the emperor Probus, after
gaining several victories in Gaul over the Franks, wrote to the senate:
"I render thanks to the immortal gods, conscript fathers, for that they
have confirmed your judgment as regards me. Germany is subdued
throughout its whole extent; nine kings of different nations have come
and cast themselves at my feet, or rather at yours, as suppliants with
their foreheads in the dust. Already all those barbarians are tilling
for you, sowing for you, and fighting for you against the most distant
nations. Order ye, therefore, according to your custom, prayers of
thanksgiving, for we have slain four thousand of the enemy; we have had
offered to us sixteen thousand men ready armed; and we have wrested from
the enemy the seventy most important towns. The Gauls, in fact, are
completely delivered. The crowns offered to me by all the cities of Gaul
I have submitted, conscript fathers, to your grace; dedicate ye them
with your own hands to Jupiter, all-bountiful, all-powerful, and to the
other immortal gods and goddesses. All the booty is retaken, and,
further, we have made fresh captures, more considerable than our first
losses; the fields of Gaul are tilled by the oxen of the barbarians, and
German teams bend their necks in slavery to our husbandmen; divers
nations raise cattle for our consumption, and horses to remount our
cavalry; our stores are full of the corn of the barbarians--in one word,
we have left to the vanquished naught but the soil; all their other
possessions are ours. We had at first thought it necessary, conscript
fathers, to appoint a new governor of Germany; but we have put off this
measure to the time when our ambition shall be more completely
satisfied, which will be, as it seems to us, when it shall have pleased
divine Providence to increase and multiply the forces of our armies."
Probus had good reason to wish that "divine Providence might be pleased
to increase the forces of the Roman armies," for even after his
victories, exaggerated as they probably were, they did not suffice for
their task, and it was not long before the vanquished recommenced war.
He had dispersed over the territory of the empire the majority of the
prisoners he had taken. A band of Franks, who had been transported and
established as a military colony on the European shore of the Black Sea,
could not make up their minds to remain there. They obtained possession
of some vessels, traversed the Propontis, the Hellespont, and the
Archipelago, ravaged the coasts of Greece, Asia Minor, and Africa,
plundered Syracuse, scoured the whole of the Mediterranean, entered the
ocean by the Straits of Gibraltar, and, making their way up again along
the coasts of Gaul, arrived at last at the mouths of the Rhine, where
they once more found themselves at home among the vines which Probus, in
his victorious progress, had been the first to have planted, and with
probably their old taste for adventure and plunder.