the _Imperator_ or Emperor: the _Imperator_ being, as we remember, the
Commander-in-Chief of the Roman Army, upon which institution the Roman
State or Empire or civilization had depended for so many centuries.
When the Roman Army began to add to itself auxiliary troops (drilled of
course after the Roman fashion and forming one body with the Roman
forces, but contracted for “in bulk,” as it were) the chieftains of
these barbaric and often small bodies were called in the official
language, _Reges_. Thus Alaric, a Roman officer and nothing more, was
the _Rex_ of his officially appointed auxiliary force; and since the
nucleus of that force had _once_ been a small body of Goths, and since
Alaric held his position as an officer of that auxiliary force because
he had once been, by inheritance, a chieftain of the Goths, the word
_Rex_ was attached to his Imperial Commission in the Roman Army, and
there was added to it the name of that particular barbaric tribe with
which his command had originally been connected. He was _Rex_ of the
Roman auxiliary troops called “Goths.” The “_Rex_” in Spain was “_Rex
Gotorum_,” not “_Rex Hispaniæ_”—that was altogether a later idea. The
Rex in Northern France was not _Rex Galliæ_, he was “_Rex Francorum_.”
In each case he was the _Rex_ of the particular auxiliary troop from
which his ancestors—sometimes generations before—had originally drawn
their Imperial Commission and their right to be officers in the Roman
Army.
Thus you will have the _Rex Francorum_, or King of the Franks, so
styled in the Palatium at Paris, as late as, say, 700 A.D. Not because
any body of “Franks” still survived as a separate corps—they had been
but a couple of regiments or so [Footnote: We have documentary record.
The greater part of the Frankish auxiliaries under Clovis were baptized
with their General. They came to 4,000 men.] two hundred years before
and had long disappeared—but because the original title had derived
from a Roman auxiliary force of Franks.
In other words, the old Roman local legislative and taxing power, the
reality of which lay in the old surviving Roman machinery of a
hierarchy of officials with their titles, writs, etc., was vested in
the hands of a man called “_Rex_,” that is, “Commander” of such and
such an auxiliary force; Commander of the Franks, for instance, or
Commander of the Goths. He still commanded in the year 550 a not very
large military force on which local government depended, and in this
little army the barbarians were still probably predominant because, as
we have seen, towards the end of the Empire the stuff of the army had
become barbaric and the armed force was mainly of barbaric recruitment.
But that small military force was also, and as certainly, very mixed
indeed; many a slave or broken Roman freedman would enlist, for it had
privileges and advantages of great value; [Footnote: Hence the “leges”
or codes specially regulating the status of these Roman troops and
called in documents the laws of the “Goths” or “Burgundians,” as the
case may he. There is a trace of old barbaric customs in some of these,
sometimes of an exclusive rule of marriage; but the mass of them are
obviously Roman privileges.] no one cared in the least whether the
members of the armed forces which sustained society were Roman, Gallic,
Italian or German in racial origin. They were of all races and origins.
Very shortly after—by, say, 600, at latest—the Army had become a
universal rough levy of all sorts and kinds, and the restriction of
race was forgotten save in a few customs still clinging by hereditary
right to certain families and called their “laws.”
Again, there was no conception of rebellion against the Empire in the
mind of a _Rex_. All these _Reges_ without exception held their
military office and power originally by a commission from the Empire.
All of them derived their authority from men who had been regularly
established as Imperial functionaries. When the central power of the
Emperor had, as a fact, broken down, the _Rex_ as a fact administered
the whole machinery without control.
But no _Rex_ ever tried to emancipate himself from the Empire or warred
for independence against the Emperor. The _Rex_, the local man,
undertook all government simply because the old Government above him,
the central Government, had failed. No _Rex_ ever called himself a
local _Imperator_ or dreamed of calling himself so; and that is the
most significant thing in all the transition between the full
civilization of the old Empire and the Dark Ages. The original Roman
armies invading Gaul, Spain, the western Germanies and Hungary, fought
to conquer, to absorb, to be masters of and makers of the land they
seized. No local governor of the later transition, no _Rex_ of Vandal,
Goth, Hun, Frank or Berber or Moor troop ever dreamt of such a thing.
He might fight another local _Rex_ to get part of his taxing-power or
his treasure. He might take part in the great religious quarrels (as in
Africa) and act tyrannically against a dissident majority, but to fight
against the _Empire_ as such or to attempt _conquest_ and _rule_ over a
“subject population” would have meant nothing to him; in theory the
Empire was still under one control.
There, then, you have the picture of what held the levers of the
machine of government during the period of its degradation and
transformation, which followed the breakdown of central authority.
Clovis, in the north of France, the Burgundian chieftain at Arles,
Theodoric in Italy, Athanagild later at Toledo in Spain, were all of
them men who had stepped into the shoes of an unbroken local Roman
administration, who worked entirely by it, and whose machinery of
administration wherever they went was called by the Roman and official
name of _Palatium_.
Their families were originally of barbaric stock: they had for their
small armed forces a military institution descended and derived from
the Roman auxiliary forces; often, especially in the early years of
their power, they spoke a mixed and partly barbaric tongue [Footnote:
The barbaric dialects outside the Empire were already largely latinized
through commerce with the Empire and by its influence, and, of course,
what we call “Teutonic Languages” are in reality half Roman, long
before we get our first full documents in the eighth and ninth
centuries.] more easily than pure Latin; but every one of them was a
soldier of the declining Empire and regarded himself as a part of it,
not as even conceivably an enemy of it.
When we appreciate this we can understand how insignificant were those
changes of frontier which make so great a show in historical atlases.
The _Rex_ of such and such an auxiliary force dies and divides his
“kingdom” between two sons. What does that mean? Not that a nation with
its customs and its whole form of administration was suddenly divided
into two, still less that there has been what today we call
“annexation” or “partition” of states. It simply means that the honor
and advantage of administration are divided between the two heirs, who
take, the one the one area, the other the other, over which to gather
taxes and to receive personal profit. It must always be remembered that
the personal privilege so received was very small in comparison with
the total revenue to be administrated, and that the vast mass of public
work as carried on by the judiciary, the officers of the Treasury and
so forth, continued to be quite impersonal and fundamentally imperial.
This governmental world of clerks and civil servants lived its own life
and was only in theory dependent upon the _Rex_, and the _Rex_ was no
more than the successor of the chief local Roman official. [Footnote:
Our popular historical atlases render a very bad service to education
by their way of coloring these districts as though they were separate
modern nations. The real division right up to full tide of feudalism
was Christian and Pagan, and, within the former, Eastern and Western:
Greek and Latin.]
The _Rex_, by the way, called himself always by some definite inferior
Roman title, such as _Vir Illuster_, as an Englishman today might be
called “Sir Charles So and So” or “Lord So and So,” never anything
more; and often (as in the case of Clovis), he not only accepted
directly from the Roman Emperor a particular office, but observed the
old popular Roman customs, such as largesse and procession, upon his
induction into that office.
Now why did not this man, this _Rex_, in Italy or Gaul or Spain, simply
remain in the position of local Roman Governor? One would imagine, if
one did not know more about that society, that he should have done
this.
The small auxiliary forces of which he had been chieftain rapidly
merged into the body of the Empire, as had the infinitely larger mass
of slaves and colonists, equally barbarian in origin, for century after
century before that time. The body of civilization was one, and we
wonder, at first, why its moral unity did not continue to be
represented by a central Monarch. Though the civilization continued to
decline, its forms should, one would think, have remained unchanged and
the theoretic attachment of each of these subordinates to the Roman
Emperor at Constantinople should have endured indefinitely. As a fact,
the memory of the old central authority of the Emperor was gradually
forgotten; the _Rex_ and his local government as he got weaker also got
more isolated. He came to coining his own money, to treating directly
as a completely independent ruler. At last the idea of “kings” and
“kingdoms” took shape in men’s minds. Why?
The reason that the nature of authority very slowly changed, that the
last links with the Roman Empire of the East—that is, with the supreme
head at Constantinople—gradually dissolved in the West, and that the
modern _nation arose_ around these local governments of the _Reges_, is
to be found in that novel feature, the standing Council of great men
around the _Rex_, with whom everything is done.
This standing Council expresses three forces, which between them, were
transforming society. Those three forces were: first, certain vague
underlying national feelings, older than the Empire, Gallic, Brittanic,
Iberian; secondly, the economic force of the great Roman landowners,
and, lastly, the living organization of the Catholic Church.
On the economic, or material, side of society, the great landowners
were the reality of that time.
We have no statistics to go upon. But the facts of the time and the
nature of its institutions are quite as cogent as detailed statistics.
In Spain, in Gaul, in Italy, as in Africa, economic power had
concentrated into the hands of exceedingly few men. A few hundred men
and women, a few dozen corporations (especially the episcopal sees) had
come to own most of the land on which these millions and millions
lived; and, with the land, most of the implements and of the slaves.
As to the descent of these great landowners none asked or cared. By the
middle of the sixth century only a minority perhaps were still of
unmixed blood, but quite certainly none were purely barbaric. Lands
waste or confiscated through the decline of population or the effect of
the interminable wars and the plagues, lay in the power of the
_Palatium_, which granted them out again (strictly under the eye of the
Council of Great Men) to new holders.
The few who had come in as original followers and dependents of the
“chieftain” of the auxiliary forces benefited largely; but the thing
that really concerns the story of civilization is not the origin of
these immensely rich owners (which was mixed), nor their sense of race
(which simply did not exist), but the fact that they were so few. It
explains both what happened and what was to happen.
That a handful of men, for they were no more than a handful, should
thus be in control of the economic destinies of mankind—the result of
centuries of Roman development in that direction—is the key to all the
material decline of the Empire. It should furnish us, if we were wise,
with an object lesson for our own politics today.
The decline of the Imperial power was mainly due to this extraordinary
concentration of economic power in the hands of a few. It was these few
great Roman landowners who in every local government endowed each of
the new administrators, each new _Rex_, with a tradition of imperial
power, not a little of the dread that went with the old imperial name,
and the armed force which it connoted: everywhere the _Rex_ had to
reckon with the strength of highly concentrated wealth. This was the
first element in that standing “Council of Great Men” which was the
mark of the time in every locality and wore down the old official,
imperial, absolute, local power.
There was, however, as I have said, another and a much more important
element in the Council of Great Men, besides the chief landowners; it
consisted of the Hierarchy of the Catholic Church.
Every Roman city of that time had a principal personage in it, who knew
its life better than anybody else, who had, more than anyone else,
power over its morals and ideas, and who in many cases actually
administered its affairs. That person was the Bishop.
Throughout Western Europe at that moment men’s interest and
preoccupation was not race nor even material prosperity, but religion.
The great duel between Paganism and the Catholic Church was now
decided, after two hard centuries of struggle, in favor of the latter.
The Catholic Church, from a small but definite and very tenacious
organization within the Empire, and on the whole antagonistic to it,
had risen, _first_, to be the only group of men which knew its own mind
(200 A.D.); _next_ to be the official religion (300 A.D.); _finally_ to
be the cohesive political principle of the great majority of human
beings (400 A.D.).
The modern man can distinctly appreciate the phenomenon, if for “creed”
he will read “capital,” and for the “Faith,” “industrial civilization.”
For just as today men principally care for great fortunes, and in
pursuit of them go indifferently from country to country, and sink, as
unimportant compared with such an object, the other businesses of our
time, so the men of the fifth and sixth centuries were intent upon the
_unity_ and _exactitude_ of religion. That the religion to which the
Empire was now converted, the religion of the Catholic Church, should
triumph, was their one preoccupation. For _this_ they exiled
themselves; for _this_ they would and did run great risks; as minor to
_this_ they sank all other things.
The Catholic hierarchy with its enormous power at that moment, civil
and economic as well as religious, was not the creator of such a
spirit, it was only its leader. And in connection with that intense
preoccupation of men’s minds, two factors already appear in the fourth
century and are increasingly active through the fifth and sixth. The
first is the desire that the living Church should be as free as
possible; hence the Catholic Church and its ministers everywhere
welcome the growth of local as against centralized power. They do so
unconsciously but none the less strongly. The second factor is
Arianism: to which I now return.
Arianism, which both in its material success and in the length of its
duration, as well as in its concept of religion, and the character of
its demise, is singularly parallel to the Protestant movement of recent
centuries, had sprung up as the official and fashionable Court heresy
opposed to the orthodoxy of the Church.
The Emperor’s Court did indeed at last—after many variations—abandon
it, but a tradition survived till long after (and in many places) that
Arianism stood for the “wealthy” and “respectable” in life.
Moreover, of those barbarians who had taken service as auxiliaries in
the Roman armies, the greater part (the “Goths,” for instance, as the
generic term went, though that term had no longer any national meaning)
had received their baptism into civilized Europe from Arian sources,
and this in the old time of the fourth century when Arianism was “the
thing.” Just as we see in eighteenth century Ireland settlers and
immigrants accepting Protestantism as “gentlemanly” or “progressive”
(some there are so provincial as still to feel thus), so the _Rex_ in
Spain and the _Rex_ in Italy had a family tradition; they, and the
descendants of their original companions, were of what had been the
“court” and “upper class” way of thinking. They were “Arians” and proud
of it. The number of these powerful heretics in the little local courts
was small, but their irritant effect was great.
It was the one great quarrel and problem of the time.
No one troubled about race, but everybody was at white heat upon the
final form of the Church.
The populace felt it in their bones that if Arianism conquered, Europe
was lost: for Arianism lacked vision. It was essentially a hesitation
to accept the Incarnation and therefore it would have bred sooner or
later a denial of the Sacrament, and at length it would have relapsed,
as Protestantism has, into nothingness. Such a decline of imagination
and of will would have been fatal to a society materially decadent. Had
Arianism triumphed, the aged Society of Europe would have perished.
Now it so happened that of these local administrators or governors who
were rapidly becoming independent, and who were surrounded by a
powerful court, _one_ only was not Arian.
That one was the _Rex Francorum_ or chieftain of the little barbaric
auxiliary force of “Franks” which had been drawn into the Roman system
from Belgium and the banks of the lower Rhine. This body at the time
when the transformation took place between the old Imperial system and
the beginnings of the nations, had its headquarters in the Roman town
of Tournai.
A lad whose Roman name was Clodovicus, and whom his parents probably
called by some such sound as Clodovig (they had no written language),
succeeded his father, a Roman officer, [Footnote: He was presumably
head of auxiliaries. His tomb has been found. It is wholly Roman.] in
the generalship of this small body of troops at the end of the fifth
century. Unlike the other auxiliary generals he was pagan. When with
other forces of the Roman Army, he had repelled one of the last of the
barbaric invaders close to the frontier at the Roman town of Tolbiacum,
and succeeded to the power of local administration in Northern Gaul, he
could not but assimilate himself with the civilization wherein he was
mixed, and he and most of his small command were baptized. He had
already married a Christian wife, the daughter of the Burgundian _Rex_;
but in any case such a conclusion was inevitable.
The important historical point is not that he was baptized; for an
auxiliary general to be baptized was, by the end of the fifth century,
as much a matter of course as for an Oriental trader from Bombay, who
has become an English Lord or Baronet in London in our time, to wear
trousers and a coat. The important thing is that he was received and
baptized by _Catholics_ and not by _Arians_—in the midst of that
enormous struggle.
Clodovicus—known in history as Clovis—came from a remote corner of
civilization. His men were untouched by the worldly attraction of
Arianism; they had no tradition that it was “the thing” or “smart” to
adopt the old court heresy which was offensive to the poorer mass of
Europeans. When, therefore, this _Rex Francorum_ was settled in
Paris—about the year 500—and was beginning to administer local
government in Northern Gaul, the weight of his influence was thrown
with the popular feeling and against the Arian _Reges_ in Italy and
Spain.
The new armed forces of the _Rex Francorum_, a general levy continuing
the old Roman tradition, settling things once and for all by battle
carried orthodox Catholic administration all over Gaul. They turned the
Arian _Rex_ out of Toulouse, they occupied the valley of the Rhone. For
a moment it seemed as though they would support the Catholic populace
against the Arian officials in Italy itself.
At any rate, their championship of popular and general religion against
the irritant, small, administrative Arian bodies in the _Palatium_ of
this region and of that, was a very strong lever which the people and
the Bishops at their head could not but use in favor of the _Rex
Francorum’s_ independent power. It was, therefore, indirectly, a very
strong lever for breaking up the now (500-600) decayed and almost
forgotten administrative unity of the Roman world.
Under such forces—the power of the Bishop in each town and district,
the growing independence of the few and immensely rich great
landowners, the occupation of the _Palatium_ and its official machinery
by the chieftains of the old auxiliary forces—Western Europe, slowly,
very slowly, shifted its political base.
For three generations the mints continued to strike money under the
effigy of the Emperor. The new local rulers never took, or dreamed of
taking, the Imperial title; the roads were still kept up, the Roman
tradition in the arts of life, though coarsened, was never lost. In
cooking, dress, architecture, law, and the rest, all the world was
Roman. But the visible unity of the Western or Latin Empire not only
lacked a civilian and military centre, but gradually lost all need for
such a centre.
Towards the year 600, though our civilization was still one, as it had
always been, from the British Channel to the Desert of Sahara, and even
(through missionaries) extended its effect a few miles eastward of the
old Roman frontier beyond the Rhine, men no longer thought of that
civilization as a highly defined area within which they could always
find the civilian authority of one organ. Men no longer spoke of our
Europe as the _Respublica_ or “common weal.” It was already beginning
to become a mass of small and often overlapping divisions. The things
that are older than, and lie beneath, all exact political institutions,
the popular legends, the popular feelings for locality and
countrysides, were rising everywhere; the great landowners were
appearing as semi-independent rulers, each on his own estates (though
the many estates of one man were often widely separated).
The daily speech of men was already becoming divided into an infinity
of jargons.
Some of these dialects were of Latin origin, some as in the Germanies
and Scandinavia, mixed original Teutonic and Latin; some, as in
Brittany, were Celtic; some, as in the eastern Pyrenees, Basque; in
North Africa, we may presume, the indigenous tongue of the Berbers
resumed its sway; Punic also may have survived in certain towns and
villages there. [Footnote: We have evidence that it survived in the
fifth century.] But men paid no attention to the origin of such
diversities. The common unity that survived was expressed in the fixed
Latin tongue, the tongue of the Church; and the Church, now everywhere
supreme in the decay of Arianism and of paganism alike, was the
principle of life throughout all this great area of the West.
So it was in Gaul, and with the little belt annexed to Gaul that had
risen in the Germanies to the east of the Rhine; so with nearly all
Italy and Dalmatia, and what today we call Switzerland and a part of
what today we call Bavaria and Baden; so with what today we call Spain
and Portugal; and so (after local adventures of a parallel sort,
followed by a reconquest against Arians by Imperial officers and
armies) with North Africa and with a strip of Andalusia.
But _one_ part of _one_ province _did_ suffer a limited and local—but
sharp—change: on one frontier belt, narrow but long, came something
much more nearly resembling a true barbaric success, and the results
thereof, than anything which the Continent could show. There was here a
real breach of continuity with Roman things.
This exceptional strip was the eastern coast belt of the province of
Britain; and we have next to ask: “_What happened in Britain when the
rest of the Empire was being transformed, after the breakdown of
central Imperial power?_” Unless we can answer that question we shall
fail to possess a true picture of the continuity of Europe and of the
early perils in spite of which that continuity has survived.