Middle Ages; there is no trace of such a link. There is, on the
contrary, a very definite and clearly marked historical sequence
between Roman civilization and the feudal system, attested by
innumerable documents which, once read and compared in their order,
leave no sort of doubt that feudalism and the mediæval civilization
repose on purely Roman origins.
In a word, the gradual cessation of central Imperial rule in Western
Europe, the failure of the power and habit of one united organization
seated in Rome to color, define and administrate the lives of men, was
an internal revolution; it did not come from without. It was a change
from within; it was nothing remotely resembling an external, still less
a barbaric, conquest from without.
All that happened was that Roman civilization having grown very old,
failed to maintain that vigorous and universal method of local
government subordinated to the capital, which it had for four or five
hundred years supported. The machinery of taxation gradually weakened;
the whole of central bureaucratic action weakened; the greater men in
each locality began to acquire a sort of independence, and sundry
soldiers benefited by the slow (and enormous) change, occupied the
local “palaces” as they were called, of Roman administration, secured
such revenues as the remains of Roman taxation could give them, and,
conversely, had thrust upon them so much of the duty of government as
the decline of civilization could still maintain. That is what
happened, and that is all that happened.
As an historical phenomenon it is what I have called it—enormous. It
most vividly struck the imagination of men. The tremors and the
occasional local cataclysms which were the symptoms of this change of
base from the old high civilization to the Dark Ages, singularly
impressed the numerous and prolific writers of the time. Their terrors,
their astonishment, their speculations as to the result, have come down
to us highly emphasized. We feel after all those centuries the shock
which was produced on the literary world of the day by Alaric’s sack of
Rome, or by the march of the Roman auxiliary troops called “Visigoths”
through Gaul into Spain, or by the appearance of the mixed horde
called—after their leaders—“Vandals” in front of Hippo in Africa. But
what we do _not_ feel, what we do _not_ obtain from the contemporary
documents, what was a mere figment of the academic brain in the
generation now just passing away, is that anti-Catholic and
anti-civilized bias which would represent the ancient civilization as
conquered by men of another and of a better stock who have since
developed the supreme type of modern civilization, and whose contrast
with the Catholic world and Catholic tradition is at once applauded as
the principle of life in Europe and emphasized as the fundamental fact
in European history.
The reader will not be content with a mere affirmation, though the
affirmation is based upon all that is worth counting in modern
scholarship. He will ask what, then, did really happen? After all,
Alaric did sack Rome. The Kings of the Franks were Belgian chieftains,
probably speaking (at first) Flemish as well as Latin. Those of the
Burgundians were probably men who spoke that hotchpotch of original
barbaric, Celtic and Roman words later called “Teutonic dialects,” as
well as Latin. The military officers called (from the original
recruitment of their commands) “Goths,” both eastern and western, were
in the same case. Even that mixed mass of Slav, Berber, escaped slaves
and the rest which, from original leaders was called in North Africa
“Vandal,” probably had some considerable German nucleus.
The false history has got superficial ground to work upon. Many
families whose origins came from what is now German-speaking Central
Europe ruled in local government during the transition, and distinct
though small tribes, mainly German in speech, survived for a short time
in the Empire. Like all falsehood, the falsehood of the “Teutonic
theory” could not live without an element of truth to distort, and it
is the business of anyone who is writing true history, even in so short
an essay as this, to show what that ground was and how it has been
misrepresented.
In order to understand what happened we must first of all clearly
represent to ourselves the fact that the structure upon which our
united civilization had in its first five centuries reposed, was the
_Roman Army_. By which I do not mean that the number of soldiers was
very large compared with the civilian population, but that the organ
which was vital in the State, the thing that really counted, the
institution upon which men’s minds turned, and which they thought of as
the foundation of all, was the military institution.
The original city-state of the Mediterranean broke down a little before
the beginning of our era.
When (as always ultimately happens in a complex civilization of many
millions) self-government had broken down, and when it was necessary,
after the desperate faction fights which that breakdown had produced,
to establish a strong centre of authority, the obvious and, as it were,
necessary person to exercise that authority (in a State constituted as
was the Roman State) was the Commander-in-Chief of the army; all that
the word “Emperor”—the Latin word _Imperator_—means, is a
commander-in-chief.
It was the Army which made and unmade Emperors; it was the Army which
designed and ordered and even helped to construct the great roads of
the Empire. It was in connection with the needs of the Army that those
roads were traced. It was the Army which secured (very easily, for
peace was popular) the civil order of the vast organism. It was the
Army especially which guarded its frontiers against the uncivilized
world without; upon the edge of the Sahara and of the Arabian desert;
upon the edge of the Scotch mountains; upon the edge of the poor, wild
lands between the Rhine and Elbe. On those frontiers the garrisons made
a sort of wall within which wealth and right living could accumulate,
outside which small and impoverished bodies of men destitute of the
arts (notably of writing) save in so far as they rudely copied the
Romans or were permeated by adventurous Roman commerce, lived under
conditions which, in the Celtic hills, we can partially appreciate from
the analogy of ancient Gaul and from tenacious legends, but of which in
the German and Slavonic sand-plains, marshes and woods we know hardly
anything at all.
Now this main instrument, the Roman Army—the instrument, remember,
which not only preserved civil functions, but actually created the
master of all civic functions, the Government—went through three very
clear stages of change in the first four centuries of the Christian
era—up to the year A.D. 400 or so. And it is the transformation of the
Roman Army during the first four centuries which explains the otherwise
inexplicable change in society just afterwards, in the fifth and sixth
centuries—that is, from 400 to 600 A.D. The turn from the full
civilization of Rome to the beginning of the Dark Ages.
In its first stage, during the early Empire, just as the Catholic
Church was founded and was beginning to grow, the Roman Army was still
theoretically an army of true Roman citizens. [Footnote: A soldier was
still technically a citizen up to the very end. The conception of a
soldier as a citizen, the impossibility, for instance, of his being a
slave, was in the very bones of Roman thought. Even when the soldiers
were almost entirely recruited from barbarians, that is, from slave
stock, the soldiers themselves were free citizens always.]
As a matter of fact the Army was already principally professional, and
it was being recruited even in this first stage very largely from the
territories Rome had conquered.
Thus we have Cæsar raising a Gallic legion almost contemporaneous with
his conquest of Gaul. But for a long time after, well into the
Christian era, the Army was conceived of in men’s minds as a sort of
universal institution rooted in the citizenship which men were still
proud to claim throughout the Empire, and which belonged only to a
minority of its inhabitants; for the majority were slaves.
In the second phase (which corresponded with the beginning of a decline
in letters and in the arts, which carries us through the welter of
civil wars in the third century and which introduces the remodeled
Empire at their close) the Army was becoming purely professional and at
the same time drawn from whatever was least fortunate in Roman society.
The recruitment of it was treated much after the fashion of a tax; the
great landed proprietors (who, by a parallel development in the
decline, were becoming the chief economic feature in the Roman State)
were summoned to send a certain number of recruits from their estates.
Slaves would often be glad to go, for, hard as were the conditions of
military service, it gave them civic freedom, certain honors, a certain
pay, and a future for their children. The poorer freed men would also
go at the command of their lord (though only of course a certain
proportion—for the conscription was very light compared with modern
systems, and was made lighter by reënlistment, long service, absence of
reserves, and the use of veterans).
During this second stage, while the Army was becoming less and less
civic, and more and more a profession for the destitute and the
unfortunate, the unpopularity and the ignorance of military service
among the rest of the population, was increasing. The average citizen
grew more and more divorced from the Army and knew less and less of its
conditions. He came to regard it partly as a necessary police force or
defence of his frontiers, partly as a nuisance to him at home. He also
came to regard it as something with which he had nothing to do. It
lived a life separate from himself. It governed (through the power of
the Emperor, its chief); it depended on, and also supported or re-made,
the Imperial Court. But it was external, at the close of the Empire, to
general society.
Recruiting was meanwhile becoming difficult, and _the habit grew up of
offering the hungry tribes outside the pale of the Empire the advantage
of residence within it on condition that they should serve as Roman
soldiers_.
The conception of territories within the Empire which were affiliated
and allied to it rather than absorbed by it, was a very ancient one.
That conception had lost reality so far as the old territories it had
once affected were concerned; but it paved the way for the parallel
idea of troops affiliated and allied to the Roman Army, part of that
army in discipline and organization, yet possessed of considerable
freedom within their own divisions.
Here we have not only a constant and increasing use of barbaric troops
drafted into the regular corps, but also _whole bodies which were more
and more frequently accepted “en bloc” and, under their local leaders,
as auxiliaries to the Roman forces_.
Some such bodies appear to have been settled upon land on the
frontiers, to others were given similar grants at very great distances
from the frontiers. Thus we have a small body of German barbarians
settled at Rennes in Brittany. And, again, within the legions (who were
all technically of Roman citizenship and in theory recruited from the
full civilization of Rome), the barbarian who happened to find himself
within that civilization tended more than did his non-barbarian fellow
citizen (or fellow slave) to accept military service. He would nearly
always be poorer; he would, unless his experience of civilization was a
long one, feel the hardship of military service less; and in this
second phase, while the army was becoming more sedentary (more
attached, that is, to particular garrisons), more permanent, more of an
hereditary thing handed on from father to son, and distinguished by the
large element of what we call “married quarters,” it was also becoming
more and more an army of men who, whether as auxiliaries or as true
Roman soldiers, were in _blood, descent, and to some extent in manners
and less in language, barbarians_. There were negroes, there were
probably Celts, there were Slavs, Mongols of the Steppes, more numerous
Germans, and so forth.
In the third stage, which is the stage that saw the great convulsion of
the fifth century, the army though not yet wholly barbaric, had already
become in its most vital part, barbaric. It took its orders, of course,
wholly from the Roman State, but great groups within it were only
partly even Latin-speaking or Greek-speaking, and were certainly
regarded both by themselves and by their Roman masters as non-Roman in
manners and in blood.
It must most clearly be emphasized that not only no such thought as an
attack upon the Empire entered the heads of these soldiers, but that
the very idea of it would have been inconceivable to them. Had you
proposed it they would not even have known what you meant. That a
particular section of the army should fight against a particular
claimant to the Empire (and therefore and necessarily in favor of some
other claimant) they thought natural enough; but to talk of an attack
upon the Empire itself would have seemed to them like talking of an
attack upon bread and meat, air, water and fire. The Empire was the
whole method and meaning of their lives.
At intervals the high and wealthy civilization of the Roman Empire was,
of course, subjected to attempted pillage by small and hungry robber
bands without its boundaries, but that had nothing to do with the
barbaric recruitment of the Roman Army save when such bands were caught
and incorporated. The army was always ready at a moment’s order to cut
such foreign raiders to pieces—and always did so successfully.
The portion of the Army chosen to repel, cut up, and sell into slavery
a marauding band of Slavs or Germans or Celts, always had Celts or
Slavs or Germans present in large numbers among its own soldiery. But
no tie of blood interfered with the business. To consider such a thing
would have been inconceivable to the opponents on either side. The
distinction was not between speech and speech, still less between vague
racial customs. It was a distinction between the Imperial Service on
the one side, against the outer, unrecognized, savage on the other.
As the machinery of Government grew weak through old age, and as the
recruitment of the Army from barbarians and the large proportion of
auxiliary regular forces began to weaken that basis of the whole State,
the tendency of pillaging bands to break in past the frontiers into the
cultivated lands and the wealth of the cities, grew greater and
greater; but it never occurred to them to attack the Empire as such.
All they wanted was permission to enjoy the life which was led within
it, and to abandon the wretched conditions to which they were compelled
outside its boundaries.
Sometimes they were transformed from pillagers to soldiers by an offer
extended by the Roman authorities; more often they snatched a raid when
there was for the moment no good garrison in their neighborhood. Then a
Roman force would march against them, and if they were not quick at
getting away would cut them to pieces. But with the progress of the
central decline the attacks of these small bands on the frontiers
became more frequent. Frontier towns came to regard such attacks as a
permanent peril and to defend themselves against them. Little groups of
raiders would sometimes traverse great districts from end to end, and
whether in the form of pirates from the sea or of war bands on land,
the ceaseless attempts to enjoy or to loot (but principally to enjoy)
the conditions that civilization offered, grew more and more
persistent.
It must not be imagined, of course, that civilization had not
occasionally to suffer then, as it had had to suffer at intervals for a
thousand years past, the attacks of really large and organized barbaric
armies. [Footnote: For instance, a century and a half before the
breakdown of central Government, the Goths, a barbaric group, largely
German, had broken in and ravaged in a worse fashion than their
successors in the fifth century.] Thus in the year 404, driven by the
pressure of an Eastern invasion upon their own forests, a vast barbaric
host under one Radagasius pushed into Italy. The men bearing arms alone
were estimated (in a time well used to soldiery and to such estimates)
at 200,000.
But those 200,000 were wiped out. The barbarians were always wiped out
when they attempted to come as conquerors. Stilicho (a typical figure,
for he was himself of barbarian descent, yet in the regular Roman
service) cut to pieces one portion of them, the rest surrendered and
were sold off and scattered as slaves.
Immediately afterwards you have a violent quarrel between various
soldiers who desire to capture the Imperial power. The story is
fragmentary and somewhat confused: now one usurper is blamed, and now
another, but the fact common to all is that with the direct object of
usurping power a Roman General calls in barbarian bands of pillagers
(all sorts of small groups, Franks, Suevians, Vandals) to cross the
Rhine into Gaul, _not_ as barbarian “conquerors,” but as allies, to
help in a civil war.
The succeeding generation has left us ample evidence of the results. It
presents us with documents that do not give a picture of a ruined
province by any means; only of a province which has been traversed in
certain directions by the march of barbarian robber bands, who
afterwards disappeared, largely in fighting among themselves.
We have, later, the very much more serious business of the Mongol
Attila and his Huns, leading the great outer mass of Germans and Slavs
into the Empire on an enormous raid. In the middle of the fifth
century, fifty years after the destruction of Radagasius, these
Asiatics, leading more numerous other barbaric dependents of theirs
from the Germanies and the eastern Slavonic lands, penetrated for two
brief moments into Northern Italy and Eastern Gaul. The end of that
business—infinitely graver though it was than the raids that came
before it—is just what one might have expected. The regular and
auxiliary disciplined forces of the Empire destroy the barbarian power
near Chalons, and the last and worst of the invasions is wiped out as
thoroughly as had been all the others.
In general, the barbaric eruptions into the Empire failed wholly as
soon as Imperial troops could be brought up to oppose them.
What, then, were the supposed barbaric successes? What was the real
nature of the action of Alaric, for instance, and his sack of Rome; and
how, later, do we find local “kings” in the place of the Roman
Governors?
The real nature of the action of men like Alaric is utterly different
from the imaginary picture with which the _old_ picturesque popular
history recently provided us. That false history gives us the
impression of a barbarian Chieftain gathering his Clan to a victorious
assault on Rome. Consider the truth upon Alaric and contrast it with
this imaginary picture.
Alaric was a young noble of Gothic blood, but from birth a Roman; at
eighteen years of age he was put by the Court in command of a small
Roman auxiliary force _originally_ recruited from the Goths. He was as
much a Roman officer, as incapable of thinking of himself in any other
terms than those of the Roman Army, as any other one of his colleagues
about the throne. He had his commission from the Emperor Theodosius,
and when Theodosius marched into Gaul against the usurper Eugenius, he
counted Alaric’s division as among the most faithful of his Army.
It so happened, moreover, that those few original auxiliaries—mainly
Goths by race—were nearly all destroyed in the campaign. Alaric
survived. The remnant of his division was recruited, we know not how,
but probably from all kinds of sources, to its old strength. It was
still called “Gothic,” though now of the most mixed origin, and it was
still commanded by himself in his character of a Roman General.
Alaric, after this service to the Emperor, was rewarded by further
military dignities in the Roman military hierarchy. He was ambitious of
military titles and of important command, as are all soldiers.
Though still under twenty years of age and only a commander of
auxiliaries, he asks for the title of _Magister Militum_, with the
dignity which accompanied that highest of military posts. The Emperor
refuses it. One of the Ministers thereupon begins to plot with Alaric,
and suggests to him that he might gather other auxiliary troops under
his command, and make things uncomfortable for his superiors. Alaric
rebels, marches through the Balkan Peninsula into Thessaly and Greece,
and down into the Peloponesus; the regulars march against him
(according to some accounts) and beat him back into Albania.
There ends his first adventure. It is exactly like that of a hundred
other Roman generals in the past, and so are his further adventures. He
remains in Albania at the head of his forces, and makes peace with the
Government—still enjoying a regular commission from the Emperor.
He next tries a new adventure to serve his ambition in Italy, but his
army is broken to pieces at Pollentia by the armies in Italy—under a
general, by the way, as barbaric in mere descent as was Alaric, but,
like Alaric, wholly Roman in training and ideas.
The whole thing is a civil war between various branches of the Roman
service, and is motived, like all the Roman civil wars for hundreds of
years before, by the ambitions of generals.
Alaric does not lose his commission even after his second adventure; he
begins to intrigue between the Western and Eastern heads of the Roman
Empire. The great invasion under Radagasius interrupts this civil war.
That invasion was for Alaric, of course, as for any other Roman
officer, an invasion of barbaric enemies. That these enemies should be
called by this or that barbaric name is quite indifferent to him. They
come from outside the Empire and are therefore, in his eyes, cattle. He
helps to destroy them, and destroyed they are—promptly and thoroughly.
When the brief invasion was over, Alaric had the opportunity to renew
the civil wars within the Empire, and asked for certain arrears of pay
that were due to him. Stilicho, the great rival general (himself, by
the way, a Vandal in descent), admitted Alaric’s right to arrears of
pay, but just at that moment there occurred an obscure palace intrigue
which was based, like all the real movements of the time, on
differences of religion, not of race. Stilicho, suspected of attempting
to restore paganism, is killed. In the general confusion certain of the
families of the auxiliaries garrisoned in Italy are massacred by the
non-military population. As Alaric is a general in partial rebellion
against the Imperial authority, these auxiliaries join him.
The total number of Alaric’s men was at this moment very small; they
were perhaps 30,000. There was no trace of nationality about them. They
were simply a body of discontented soldiers; they had not come from
across the frontier; they were not invaders; they were part of the long
established and regular garrisons of the Empire; and, for that matter,
many garrisons and troops of equally barbaric origin, sided with the
regular authorities in the quarrel. Alaric marches on Rome with this
disaffected Roman Army, claiming that he has been defrauded of his due
in salary, and leaning upon the popularity of the dead Stilicho, whose
murder he says he will avenge. His thirty thousand claim the barbarian
slaves within the city, and certain sums of money which had been, the
pretext and motive of his rebellion.