salary as a general, and a district which he may not only command, but
plant with his few followers. Even in the height of his success, Alaric
again demands the thing which was nearest his heart, the supreme and
entirely Roman title of _Magister Militum_, the highest post in the
hierarchy of military advancement. But the Emperor again refuses to
give that. Alaric again marches on Rome, a Roman officer followed by a
rebellious Roman Army. He forces the Senate to make Attalus nominal
Emperor of the West, and Attalus to give him the desired title, his
very craving for which is most significant of the Roman character of
the whole business. Alaric then quarrels with his puppet, deprives him
of the insignia of the Empire, and sends them to Honorius; quarrels
again with Honorius, reënters Rome and pillages it, marches to Southern
Italy, dies, and his small army is dismembered.
There is the story of Alaric as it appears from documents and as it was
in reality. There is the truth underlying the false picture with which
most educated men were recently provided by the anti-Roman bias of
recent history.
Certainly the story of Alaric’s discontent with his salary and the
terms of his commission, his raiding marches, his plunder of the
capital, shows how vastly different was the beginning of the fifth
century from the society of three hundred years before. It is
symptomatic of the change, and it could only have been possible at a
moment when central government was at last breaking down. But it is
utterly different in motive and in social character from the vague
customary conception of a vast barbarian “invasion,” led by a German
“war lord” pouring over the Alps and taking Roman society and its
capital by storm. It has no relation to such a picture.
If all this be true of the dramatic adventure of Alaric, which has so
profoundly affected the imagination of mankind, it is still truer of
the other contemporary events which false history might twist into a
“conquest” of the Empire by the barbarian.
There was no such conquest. All that happened was an internal
transformation of Roman society, in which the chief functions of local
government fell to the heads of local auxiliary forces in the Roman
Army. As these auxiliary forces were now mainly barbaric, so were the
personalities of the new local governors.
I have only dealt with the particular case of Alaric because it is the
most familiar, and the most generally distorted: a test, as it were, of
my theme.
But what is true of him is true of all other auxiliaries in the
Armies—even of the probably Slavonic Vandals. These did frankly loot a
province—North Africa—and they (and they alone of the auxiliary troops)
did revolt against the Imperial system and defy it for a century: but
the Vandals themselves were already, before their adventure, a part of
the Imperial forces; they were but a nucleus for a mixed host made up
of all the varied elements of rebellion present in the country; and
their experiment in separation went down at last forever before the
Imperial armies. Meanwhile the North African society on which the
rebels lived, and which, with their various recruits—Moors, escaped
slaves, criminals—they maladministered and half ruined, was and
remained Roman.
In the case of local Italian government the case is quite clear. There
was never any question of “invasion” or “conquest.”
Odoacer held a regular Roman commission; he was a Roman soldier:
Theodoric supplanted him by leave of, and actually under orders from,
the Emperor. The last and greatest example, the most permanent, Gaul,
tells the same story. The Burgundians are auxiliaries regularly planted
after imploring the aid of the Empire and permission to settle. Clovis,
the Belgian Fleming, fights no Imperial Army. His forebears were Roman
officials: his little band of perhaps 8,000 men was victorious in a
small and private civil war which made him Master in the North over
other rival generals. He defended the Empire against the Eastern
barbaric German tribes. He rejoiced in the titles of Consul and
Patrician.
There was no destruction of Roman society, there was no breach of
continuity in the main institutions of what was now the Western
Christian world; there was no considerable admixture (in these local
civil wars) of German, Slav, or outer Celtic blood—no appreciable
addition at least to the large amount of such blood which, through the
numerous soldiers and much more numerous slaves, had already been
incorporated with the population of the Roman world.
But in the course of this transformation in the fifth and sixth
centuries local government _did_ fall into the hands of those who
happened to command the main local forces of the Roman Army, and these
were by descent barbarian because the Army had become barbarian in its
recruitment.
Why local government gradually succeeded the old centralized Imperial
Government, and how, in consequence, there slowly grew up the modern
nations, we will next examine.
IV
THE BEGINNING OF THE NATIONS
European civilization, which the Catholic Church has made and makes, is
by that influence still one. Its unity now (as for three hundred years
past) is suffering from the grievous and ugly wound of the Reformation.
The earlier wounds have been healed; that modern wound we hope may
still be healed—we hope so because the alternative is death. At any
rate unity, wounded or unwounded, is still the mark of Christendom.
That unity today falls into national groups. Those of the West in
particular are highly differentiated. Gaul (or France as we now call
it) is a separate thing. The Iberian or Spanish Peninsula (though
divided into five particular, and three main, regions, each with its
language, of which one, Portugal, is politically independent of the
rest) is another. The old European and Roman district of North Africa
is but partially re-occupied by European civilization. Italy has quite
recently appeared as another united national group. The Roman province
of England has (south of the border) formed one united nation for a
longer period than any of the others. To England Scotland has been
added.
How did these modern nations arise in the transformation of the Roman
Empire from its old simple pagan condition to one complex Christian
civilization? How came there to be also nations exterior to the Empire;
old nations like Ireland, new nations like Poland? We must be able to
answer this question if we are to understand, not only that European
civilization has been continuous (that is, one in time as well as one
in spirit and in place), but also if we are to know _why_ and _how_
that continuity was preserved. For one we are and will be, all
Europeans. The moment something threatens our common morals from
within, we face it, however tardily. We have forgotten what it is to
feel a threat from without: but it may come.
We are already familiar with the old popular and false explanation of
the rise of the European nations. This explanation tells us that great
numbers of vigorous barbarians entered the Roman Empire, conquered it,
established themselves as masters, and parceled out its various
provinces.
We have seen that such a picture is fantastic and, when it is accepted,
destroys a man’s historic sense of Europe.
We have seen that the barbarians who burst through the defence of
civilization at various times (from before the beginnings of recorded
history; through the pagan period prefacing Our Lord’s birth; during
the height of the Empire proper, in the third century; again in the
fourth and the fifth) never had the power to affect that civilization
seriously, and therefore were invariably conquered and easily absorbed.
It was in the natural course of things this should be so.
I say “in the natural course of things.” Dreadful as the irruption of
barbarians into civilized places must always be, even on a small scale,
the _conquest_ of civilization by barbarians is always and necessarily
impossible. Barbarians may have the weight to _destroy_ the
civilization they enter, and in so doing to destroy themselves with it.
But it is inconceivable that they should impose their view and manner
upon civilized men. Now to impose one’s view and manner, _dare leges_
(to give laws), is to conquer.
Moreover, save under the most exceptional conditions, a civilized army
with its training, discipline and scientific traditions of war, can
always ultimately have the better of a horde. In the case of the Roman
Empire the armies of civilization did, as a fact, always have the
better of the barbarian hordes. Marius had the better of the barbarians
a hundred years before Our Lord was born, though their horde was not
broken until it had suffered the loss of 200,000 dead. Five hundred
years later the Roman armies had the better of another similar horde of
barbarians, the host of Radagasius, in their rush upon Italy; and here
again the vast multitude lost some 200,000 killed or sold into slavery.
We have seen how the Roman generals, Alaric and the others, destroyed
them.
But we have also seen that within the Roman Army itself certain
auxiliary troops (which may have preserved to some slight extent traces
of their original tribal character, and probably preserved for a
generation or so a mixture of Roman speech, camp slang, and the
original barbaric tongues) assumed greater and greater importance in
the Roman Army towards the end of the imperial period—that is, towards
the end of the fourth, and in the beginning of the fifth, centuries
(say, 350-450).
We have seen why these auxiliary forces continued to increase in
importance within the Roman Army, and we have seen how it was only as
Roman soldiers, and as part of the regular forces of civilization, that
they had that importance, or that their officers and generals, acting
as _Roman_ officers and generals, could play the part they did.
The heads of these auxiliary forces were invariably men trained as
Romans. They knew of no life save that civilized life which the Empire
enjoyed. They regarded themselves as soldiers and politicians of the
State _in_ which—not _against_ which—they warred. They acted wholly
within the framework of Roman things. The auxiliaries had no memory or
tradition of a barbaric life beyond the Empire, though their stock in
some part sprang from it; they had no liking for barbarism, and no
living communication with it. The auxiliary soldiers and their generals
lived and thought entirely within those imperial boundaries which
guarded paved roads, a regular and stately architecture, great and
populous cities, the vine, the olive, the Roman law and the bishoprics
of the Catholic Church. Outside was a wilderness with which they had
nothing to do.
Armed with this knowledge (which puts an end to any fantastic theory of
barbarian “conquest”), let us set out to explain that state of affairs
which a man born, say, a hundred years after the last of the mere raids
into the Empire was destroyed under Radagasius, would have observed in
middle age.
Sidonius Apollinaris, the famous Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand, lived and
wrote his classical work at such a date after Alaric’s Roman adventure
and Radagasius’ defeat that the life of a man would span the distance
between them; it was a matter of nearly seventy years between those
events and his maturity. A grandson of his would correspond to such a
spectator as we are imagining; a grandson of that generation might be
born before the year 500. Such a man would have stood towards
Radagasius’ raid, the last futile irruption of the barbarian, much as
men, old today, in England, stand to the Indian Mutiny and the Crimean
War, to the second Napoleon in France, to the Civil War in the United
States. Had a grandson of Sidonius traveled in Italy, Spain and Gaul in
his later years, this is what he would have seen:
In all the great towns Roman life was going on as it had always gone
on, so far as externals were concerned. The same Latin speech, now
somewhat degraded, the same dress, the same division into a minority of
free men, a majority of slaves, and a few very rich masters round whom
not only the slaves but the mass of the free men also were grouped as
dependents.
In every city, again, he would have found a Bishop of the Catholic
Church, a member of that hierarchy which acknowledged its centre and
headship to be at Rome. Everywhere religion, and especially the
settlement of divisions and doubts in religion, would have been the
main popular preoccupation. And everywhere _save in Northern Gaul_ he
would have perceived small groups of men, wealthy, connected with
government, often bearing barbaric names, and sometimes (perhaps) still
partly acquainted with barbaric tongues. Now these few men were as a
rule of a special set in religion. They were called _Arians_; heretics
who differed in religion from the mass of their fellow citizens very
much as the minority of Protestants in an Irish county today differ
from the great mass of their Catholic fellows; and that was a point of
capital importance.
The little provincial courts were headed by men who, though Christian
(with the Mass, the Sacraments and all Christian things), were yet out
of communion with the bulk of their officials, and all their taxpayers.
They had inherited that odd position from an accident in the Imperial
history. At the moment when their grandfathers had received Baptism the
Imperial Court had supported this heresy. They had come, therefore, by
family tradition, to regard their separate sect (with its attempt to
rationalize the doctrine of the Incarnation) as a “swagger.” They
thought it an odd title to eminence. And this little vanity had two
effects. It cut them off from the mass of their fellow citizens in the
Empire. It made their tenure of power uncertain and destined to
disappear very soon at the hands of men in sympathy with the great
Catholic body—the troops led by the local governors of Northern France.
We shall return to this matter of Arianism. But just let us follow the
state of society as our grandson of Sidonius would have seen it at the
beginning of the Dark Ages.
The armed forces he might have met upon the roads as he traveled would
have been rare; their accoutrements, their discipline, their words of
command, were still, though in a degraded form, those of the old Roman
Army. There had been no breach in the traditions of that Army or in its
corporate life. Many of the bodies he met would still have borne the
old imperial insignia.
The money which he handled and with which he paid his bills at the
inns, was stamped with the effigy of the reigning Emperor at Byzantium,
or one of his predecessors, just as the traveler in a distant British
colony today, though that province is virtually independent, will
handle coins stamped with the effigies of English Kings. But though the
coinage was entirely imperial, he would, upon a passport or a receipt
for toll and many another official document he handled, often see side
by side with and subordinate to the imperial name, the name of _the
chief of the local government_.
This phrase leads me to a feature in the surrounding society which we
must not exaggerate, but which made it very different from that united
and truly “Imperial” form of government which had covered all
civilization two hundred to one hundred years before.
_The descendants of those officers who from two hundred to one hundred
years before had only commanded regular or auxiliary forces in the
Roman Army, were now seated as almost independent local administrators
in the capitals of the Roman provinces_.
They still thought of themselves, in 550, say, as mere provincial
powers within the one great Empire of Rome. But there was now no
positive central power remaining in Rome to control them. The central
power was far off in Constantinople. It was universally accepted, but
it made no attempt to act.
Let us suppose our traveler to be concerned in some commerce which
brought him to the centres of local government throughout the Western
Empire. Let him have to visit Paris, Toledo, Ravenna, Arles. He has,
let us say, successfully negotiated some business in Spain, which has
necessitated his obtaining official documents. He must, that is, come
into touch with _officials_ and with the actual _Government_ in Spain.
Two hundred years before he would have seen the officials of, and got
his papers from, a government directly dependent upon Rome. The name of
the Emperor alone would have appeared on all the papers and his effigy
on the seals. Now, in the sixth century, the papers are made out in the
old official way and (of course) in Latin, all the public forces are
still Roman, all the civilization has still the same unaltered Roman
character; has anything changed at all?
Let us see.
To get his papers in the Capital he will be directed to the
“_Palatium_.” This word does not mean “Palace.”
When we say “palace” today we mean the house in which lives the real or
nominal ruler of a monarchical state. We talk of Buckingham Palace, St.
James’ Palace, the Palace in Madrid, and so on.
But the original word _Palatium_ had a very different meaning in late
Roman society. It signified the _official seat_ of Government, and in
particular the centre from which the writs for Imperial taxation were
issued, and to which the proceeds of that taxation were paid. The name
was originally taken from the Palatine Hill in Rome, on which the
Cæsars had their private house. As the mask of private citizenship was
gradually thrown off by the Emperors, six hundred to five hundred years
before, and as the commanders-in-chief of the Roman Army became more
and more true and absolute sovereigns, their house became more and more
the official centre of the Empire.
The term “_Palatium_” thus became consecrated to a particular use. When
the centre of Imperial power was transferred to Byzantium the word
“_Palatium_” followed it; and at last it was applied to _local centres_
as well as to the Imperial city. In the laws of the Empire then, in its
dignities and honors, in the whole of its official life, the _Palatium_
means the machine of government, local or imperial. Such a traveler as
we have imagined in the middle of the sixth century comes, then, to
that Spanish _Palatium_ from which, throughout the five centuries of
Imperial rule, the Spanish Peninsular had been locally governed. What
would he find?
He would find, to begin with, a great staff of clerks and officials, of
exactly the same sort as had always inhabited the place, drawing up the
same sort of documents as they had drawn up for generations, using
certain fixed formulæ, and doing everything in the Latin tongue. No
local dialect was yet of the least importance. But he would also find
that the building was used for acts of authority, and that these acts
were performed in the name of a _certain person_ (who was no longer the
old Roman Governor) _and his Council_. It was this local person’s name,
rather than the Emperor’s, which usually—or at any rate more and more
frequently—appeared on the documents.
Let us look closely at this new person seated in authority over Spain,
and at his Council: for from such men as he, and from the districts
they ruled, the nations of our time and their royal families were to
spring.
The first thing that would be noticed on entering the presence of this
person who governed Spain, would be that he still had all the insignia
and manner of Roman Government.
He sat upon a formal throne as the Emperor’s delegate had sat: the
provincial delegate of the Emperor. On official occasions he would wear
the official Roman garments: the orb and the sceptre were already his
symbols (we may presume) as they had been those of the Emperor and the
Emperor’s local subordinates before him. But in two points this central
official differed from the old local Governor whom he exactly
succeeded, and upon whose machinery of taxation he relied for power.
These two points were, first, that he was surrounded by a very powerful
and somewhat jealous body of Great Men; secondly, that he did not
habitually give himself an imperial Roman title, but was called _Rex_.
Let us consider these points separately.
As to the first point, the Emperor in Byzantium, and before that in
Rome or at Ravenna, worked, as even absolute power must work, through a
multitude of men. He was surrounded by high dignitaries, and there
devolved from him a whole hierarchy of officials, with the most
important of whom he continually consulted. But the Emperor had not
been officially and regularly bound in with such a Council. His formulæ
of administration were personal formulæ. Now and then he mentioned his
great officials, but he only mentioned them if he chose.
This new local person, who had been very gradually and almost
unconsciously substituted for the old Roman Governors, the _Rex_, was,
on the contrary, a part of his own Council, and all his formulæ of
administration mentioned the Council as his coadjutors and assessors in
administration. This was necessary above all (a most important point)
in anything that regarded the public funds.
It must not be imagined for a moment that the _Rex_ issued laws or
edicts, or (what was much more common and much more vital) levied
taxation under the dominion of, or subject to the consent of, these
great men about him. On the contrary, he spoke as absolutely as ever
the Imperial Governors had done in the past, and indeed he could not do
otherwise because the whole machinery he had inherited presupposed
absolute power. But some things were already said to be done “with”
these great men: and it is of capital importance that we should note
this word “with.” The phrases of the official documents from that time
run more and more in one of half-a-dozen regular formulæ, all of which
are based upon this idea of the Council and are in general such words
as these: “So and so, _Rex_, ordered and commanded (_with his chief
men_) that so and so … should be done.”
As to the second point: we note the change of title. The authority of
the Palatium is a _Rex_; not a Legate nor a Governor, nor a man sent
from the Emperor, nor a man directly and necessarily nominated by him,
but a _Rex_. Now what is the meaning of that word _Rex_?
It is usually translated by our word “King.” But it does not here mean
anything like what our word “King” means when we apply it today—or as
we have applied it for many centuries. It does not mean the ruler of a
large independent territory. It means a combination of two things when
it is used to name these local rulers in the later Roman Empire. It
means (1) The _chieftain_ of an auxiliary _group of soldiers_ who holds
an Imperial commission: and it means (2) That man acting as a local
governor.
Centuries and centuries before, indeed a thousand years before, the
word _Rex_ had meant the chieftain of the little town and petty
surrounding district of Rome or of some similar neighboring and small
state. It had in the Latin language always retained some such
connotation. The word “_Rex_” was often used in Latin literature as we
use the word “King” in English: _i.e._, to describe the head of a state
great or small. But as applied to the local rulers of the fifth century
in Western Europe, it was not so used. It meant, as I have said,
Chieftain or Chief officer of auxiliaries. A _Rex_ was not then, in
Spain, or in Gaul, a King in our modern sense of the word: he was only
the military head of a particular armed force. He was originally the
commander (hereditary or chosen or nominated by the Emperor) of an
auxiliary force serving as part of the Roman Army. Later, when these
troops—originally recruited perhaps from some one barbaric
district—changed by slow degrees into a body half police, half noble,
their original name would extend to the whole local army. The “Rex” of,
say, Batavian auxiliaries, the commander of the Batavian Corps, would
probably be a man of Batavian blood, with hereditary position and would
be called “_Rex Bataviorum_.” Afterwards, when the recruiting was
mixed, he still kept that title and later still, when the _Batavii_, as
such, had disappeared, his fixed title would remain.
There was no similarity possible between the word _Rex_ and the word
_Imperator_, any more than there is between the words “Miners’ Union”
or “Trade Conference” and the word “England.” There was, of course, no
sort of equality. A Roman General in the early part of the process
planning a battle would think of a _Rex_ as we think of a Divisionary
General. He might say: “I shall put my regulars here in the centre. My
auxiliaries (Huns or Goths or Franks or what not) I shall put here.
Send for their ‘Rex’ and I will give him his orders.”