or supposed, had decided the Goths to deliver up the sister of the
emperor was Constantius, her old lover, he who had delayed her
marriage with Ataulfus and who now determined to marry her himself.
It was in 416 that Placidia returned to Ravenna. In the following year
Honorius gave her to Constantius, then his colleague in the consular
office for the second time. The marriage ceremony of very great
splendour took place in Ravenna; and in the same year was born of that
marriage Honoria, who was to offer herself to Attila, and in 419
Valentinian, one day to be emperor.
That marriage soon had the result Constantius had intended. In 421
Honorius was compelled to associate him with himself on the imperial
throne and to give to Placidia the title of Augusta. The new emperor,
however, survived his elevation to the throne but seven months and
once more Placidia was a widow. Her life, never a happy one, if we
except the few years in which she was the wife of Ataulfus, whom she
seems really to have loved, became unbearable after the death of
Constantius. At the mercy of her brother who was fast sinking, at the
age of thirty-nine, into a vicious and idiotic senility, she, always a
sincere Catholic in spite of her romantic marriage with the Arian
Ataulfus, seems to have been forced into a horrible intimacy with him;
at least we know that he obliged her to receive his obscene kisses,
even in public, to the scandal and perhaps the amusement of that
corrupt society. And then suddenly her brother's dreadful love seems
to have turned to hate and she is a fugitive again with her two
children at the court of her nephew Theodosius II. at Constantinople.
In the very year of her flight Honorius died and the throne of the
West was vacant.
It was filled by the obscure civil servant Joannes, the chief of the
notaries, the creature of some palace intrigue. But such a choice
could not be tolerated by Theodosius, who immediately confirmed
Placidia in her title of Augusta, which had not before been recognised
at Constantinople, and accepted Valentinian, whose title was
Nobilissimus, as the heir to the western throne, giving him the title
of Caesar. To suppress the usurper Joannes, Theodosius despatched an
army to bring Placidia and her children to Ravenna. After a short
campaign in northern Italy, by a miracle, according to the
contemporary historian Socrates, the troops of Theodosius arrived
before Ravenna. "The prayer of the pious emperor again prevailed. For
an angel of God, under the semblance of a shepherd, undertook the
guidance of Aspar and his troops, and led them through the lake near
Ravenna. Now no one had ever been known to ford that lake before; but
God then caused that to be possible which before had been impossible.
But when they had crossed the lake, as if going over dry land, they
found the gates of the city open and seized the tyrant Joannes."[1]
[Footnote 1: Socrates, vii. 23. Cf. Hodgkin, _op cit_. i. 847.]
So the Augusta with the young Caesar and her daughter Honoria entered
Ravenna, to reign there, first as regent and then as the no less
powerful adviser of her son, for some twenty-five years.
When Ravenna opened its gates some eighteen months had passed since
the death of Honorius. But the appearance of that "angel of God under
the semblance of a shepherd" had not been the only miracle that had
occurred on the return of Placidia to the imperial city by the eastern
sea. For it seems that on her voyage either from Constantinople to
Aquileia, where she remained till Ravenna was taken, or from Aquileia
to Ravenna, Placidia and her children were caught in a great storm at
sea and came near to suffer shipwreck. Then Placidia prayed aloud,
invoking the aid of S. John the Evangelist for deliverance from so
great a peril, and vowing to build a church in his honour in Ravenna
if he would bring them to land. And immediately the winds and the
waves abated and the ship came safely to port.[2] It was in fulfilment
of her vow that Placidia built in Ravenna the Basilica of S. John the
Evangelist.
[Footnote 2: The invocation of S. John is curious, and we have not the
key to it. For though he was a fisherman, so was S. Peter for
instance. It is interesting, though not perhaps really significant, to
note that it is only S. John who notes in his Gospel (vi. 21) that,
when the Apostles saw Our Lord walking on the water in the great
storm, and had received Him into their ship, "immediately the ship was
at the land."]
The city of Ravenna at this time would seem to have been full of
churches. Its first bishop, S. Apollinaris, had been the friend of S.
Peter who, as it was believed, had appointed him to the see of
Ravenna. That was in the earliest days of the Christian Church. But we
find the tradition still living in the fourth century when Severus,
bishop of Ravenna, miraculously chosen to fill the see, sat in the
council of Sardica in 344 and refused to make any alteration in the
Nicene Creed. About the end of the century Ursus had been bishop and
had built the great cathedral church, the Basilica Ursiana, dedicated
in honour of the Resurrection, with its five naves and fifty-six
columns of marble, its _schola cantorum_ in the midst, and its
mosaics, all of which were finally and utterly destroyed in 1733.
There was too the baptistery which remains and the church of S. Agata
and many others which have perished.
With the church of S. Agata we connect one of the great bishops of the
fifth century, Joannes Angeloptes, who was there served at Mass by an
angel. While with the beautiful little chapel in the bishop's palace,
which still, in some sort at least, remains to us, we connect perhaps
the greatest bishop Ravenna can boast of, S. Peter Chrysologus, for he
built it.
Nor was Placidia herself slow to add to the ecclesiastical splendour
of her city. We have already seen that she built S. Giovanni
Evangelista, rebuilt in the thirteenth century, in fulfilment of her
vow and in memory of her salvation from shipwreck. Close to her palace
she built another church in honour of the Holy Cross, and attached to
it she erected her mausoleum, which remains perhaps the most precious
monument in the city. The church and the monastery which her niece
Singleida built beside it have perished.
But though during the lifetime of Placidia Italy was free from foreign
invasion, the decay of the western empire, of what had been the
western empire, was by no means arrested; on the contrary, Britain,
Gaul, Spain, and Africa were finally lost. Two appalling catastrophes
mark her reign, the Vandal invasion of the province of Africa and the
ever growing cloud of Huns upon the north-eastern frontiers.
[Illustration: THE APSE OF S. GIOVANNI EVANGELISTA]
Placidia's two chief ministers were Boniface and Aetius, either of
whom, according to Procopius, "had the other not been his
contemporary, might truly have been called the last of the Romans."
Their simultaneous appearance, however, finally destroyed all hope of
an immediate resurrection of civilisation in the West. For Boniface,
whose "one great object was the deliverance of Africa from all sorts
of barbarians," betrayed Africa to the Vandals, and to this he was led
by the rivalry and intrigue of Aetius who, on the other hand, must
always be remembered for his heroic and glorious victory over Attila
at Chalons which delivered Gaul from the worst deluge of all--that of
the Huns.
The truth would seem to be that while corruption of every sort, and
especially political corruption, was destroying the empire, the
importance of Christianity was vastly increasing. The great quarrel
was really that between Catholicism and heresy. This was a living
issue while the cause of the empire as a political entity was already
dead. Placidia certainly eagerly considered all sorts of
ecclesiastical problems and provided and legislated for their
solution. We do not find her seeking the advice and offensive and
defensive alliance of Constantinople for the restoration of her
provinces. It might seem almost as though the mind of her time was
unable to fix itself upon the vast political and economic problem that
now for many generations had demanded a solution in vain. No one seems
to have cared in any fundamental way, or even to have been aware, that
the empire as a great state was gradually being ruined, was indeed
already in full decadence--a thing to despair of. That is the curious
thing--no one seems to have despaired. On the other hand, every one
was keenly interested in the religious controversy of the time which,
because we cannot fully understand that time, seems to us so futile.
But it is only what is in the mind that is fundamentally important to
man, and that will force him to action. The council of Ephesus which
destroyed Nestorius in 431, the council of Chalcedon which condemned
Dioscorus in 451, seemed to be the important things, and one day we
may come to think again, that on those great decisions, and not on the
material defence, both military and economic, of the West, depended
the future of the world. If this be so, it would at least explain the
hopeless variance of East and West, which, almost equally concerned in
the material problem, were by no means at one in philosophy.
[Illustration: THE MAUSOLEUM OF GALLA PLACIDIA]
Nevertheless, although Theodosius II. had not trodden "the narrow path
of orthodoxy with reputation unimpaired," as Placidia certainly had,
the material alliance of East and West were seen to be so important
that in 437 Valentinian III., the son of Placidia, and emperor in the
West, was married to Eudoxia, the daughter of Theodosius II., in
Constantinople.
Neither the accession of her son nor his marriage seem to have made
any real difference in the power of Placidia who, we may believe, not,
as Procopius asserts, by a cunning system of training by which she had
ruined his character, but rather by reason of her innate virility,
retained the reins of government in her own hands. Certainly she
ruled, the Augusta of the West, during the twelve years that remained
to her after her son's marriage. And when at last she died in Rome in
450, on the 27th November,[1] in the sixtieth year of her age, and a
few months after her nephew Theodosius II., and was borne in a last
triumph along the Via Flaminia, to be laid, seated in a chair of
cedar, in a sarcophagus of alabaster in the gorgeous mausoleum she had
prepared for herself beside the church of S. Croce in Ravenna, she
left Italy at least in a profound peace, so secure, as it seemed, that
the whole court had in that very year removed to Rome. It might appear
as though the barbarian had but awaited her passing to descend once
more upon the citadel of Europe.
[Footnote 1: Agnellus asserts that on the Ides of March in the year
following Placidia's death Ravenna suffered from a great fire, in
which many buildings perished, but he does not tell us what they
were.]
V
THE FALL OF THE EMPIRE IN THE WEST
For more than ten years before the death of Placidia both East and
West had been aware of a new cloud in the north-east. This darkness
was the vast army of Huns, which, in the exodus from Asia proper,
under Attila, threatened to overrun the empire and to lay it waste. In
447, indeed, Attila fell upon the Adriatic and Aegean provinces of the
eastern empire and ravaged them till he was bought off with a shameful
tribute. His thoughts inevitably turned towards the capital, and it is
said, I know not with how much truth, that in the very year of their
death both Placidia and Theodosius received from this new barbarian an
insolent message which said: "Attila, thy master and mine, bids thee
prepare a palace for him."
Theodosius II., however, was succeeded upon the Eastern throne by his
sister Pulcheria who shared her government with the virile and bold
soldier Marcian. But upon Placidia's death, on the other hand, the
government of the West fell into the hands of her weak and sensual son
Valentinian III.
Placidia's greatest failure, indeed, was in the training and education
of her children. Valentinian was incapable and vicious, while Honoria,
who had inherited much of the romantic temperament of her mother, was
both unscrupulous and irresponsible. Sent to Constantinople on account
of an intrigue with her chamberlain, Honoria, bored by the ascetic
life in which she found herself and furious at her virtual
imprisonment, sent her ring to Attila and besought him to deliver her
and make her his wife as Ataulfus had done Placidia her mother.
Though, it seems, the Hun disdained her, he made this appeal his
excuse. Within a year of the death of Theodosius and Placidia he
decided that the way of least resistance lay westward. If he were
successful he could make his own terms, and, among his spoil, if he
cared, should be the sister of the emperor.
At first it was Gaul that was to be plundered; but there, as we know,
the wild beast was met by Aetius who defeated him at the battle of
Chalons and thus saved the western provinces. But that victory was not
followed up. Attila and his vast army were allowed to retreat; and
though Gaul was saved, Italy lay at their mercy. That was in 451.
Attila retreated into Pannonia, and prepared for a new raid in the
following year.
He came, as Alaric had done, through the Julian Alps; and before
spring had gone Aquileia was not, Concordia was utterly destroyed,
Altinum became nothing. Nor have these cities ever lived again; out of
their ruin Venice sprang in the midst of the lagoons. All the
Cisalpine plain north of the Po was in Attila's hands; Vicenza,
Verona, Brescia, Bergamo, Pavia, even Milan opened their gates. No
defence was offered, they saved themselves alive. And southward, over
the Po, between the mountains and the sea, the gate which Ravenna held
stood open wide. Italy without defence lay at the mercy of the Asiatic
invader.
Without defence! Valentinian and his court were in Rome; no one armed
and ready waited in impregnable Ravenna to break the Hun as with a
hammer when he should venture to take the road through the narrow pass
between the mountains and the sea. The great defence was not to be
held; the road, as once before, lay open and unguarded. In this
moment, one of the greatest crises in the history of Europe, suddenly,
and without warning, the reality of that age, which had changed so
imperceptibly, was revealed. The material civilisation and defence of
the empire were, at least as organised things, seen to be dead; its
spiritual virility and splendour were about to be made manifest.
For it was not any emperor or great soldier at the head of an army
that faced Attila by the Mincio on the Cisalpine plain and saved
Italy, but an old and unarmed man, alone and defenceless. Our saviour
was pope Leo the Great; but above him, in the sky, the Hun perceived
the mighty figures, overshadowing all that world, of S. Peter and S.
Paul, and his eyes dazzled, he bowed his head. "What," he asked
himself, "if I conquer like Alaric only to die as he did?" He yielded
and consented to retreat, Italy was saved. The new emperor, the true
head and champion of the new civilisation that was to arise out of all
this confusion, had declared himself. It was the pope.
There, it might seem, we have the truth at last, the explanation,
perhaps, of all the extraordinary ennui and neglect that had made such
an invasion as that of Alaric, as that of Radagaisus, as this of
Attila, possible. For it is only what is in the mind that is of any
importance. The empire rightly understood was not about to die, but to
change into a new spiritual kingdom in the hearts of men; and there,
in the place of the emperor, would sit God's Vicegerent, till in the
fullness of time the material empire should be re-established and that
Vicegerent should place the imperial crown once more upon a merely
royal head. The force of the old empire had always lain in wholly
material things and its excuse had been its material success; but it
was a servile state, and after the advent of Christianity it was
inevitable that it should change or perish. It changed. The force of
the new empire was to be so completely spiritual that to-day we can
scarcely understand it. Upon the banks of the Mincio it declared
itself; and when, twenty-three years later, Odoacer the barbarian
deposed Romulus Augustulus and made himself king of Italy, the true
champion of all that Latin genius had established was already
enthroned in Rome; but the throne was Peter's, and men called him not
Emperor but Father.
Those twenty-three years, so brief a period, are, as we might imagine,
full of confusion and strange barbarian voices.
After Leo had turned him back from Italy there by the Mincio, Attila
retreated again into Pannonia, but he still insisted "on this point
above all, that Honoria, the sister of the emperor and the daughter of
the Augusta Placidia, should be sent to him with the portion of the
royal wealth which was her due; and he threatened that unless this
were done he would lay upon Italy a far heavier punishment than any
which it had yet borne." But within a year Attila was dead in a
barbaric marriage-bed by the Danube, and his empire destroyed. And as
for Honoria we know no more of her, she disappears from history,
though tradition has it that she spent the rest of her life in a
convent in southern Italy.
The two heroes of the Hunnish deluge in the West were Aetius, the
great general who broke Attila upon the plain of Chalons, and Leo the
pope surnamed the Great. Aetius had been unable to persuade his
victorious troops to march to the defence of Italy, and in this again
we see the growing failure of the imperial idea; but he was a great
soldier, and certainly the greatest minister that Valentinian III.
could boast. Nevertheless, after the death of Attila he seemed to the
emperor both dangerous and useless; dangerous because, like Stilicho,
he thought of the empire for his son, and useless because Valentinian
had recently placed his confidence in another, the eunuch Heraclius.
Just as Honorius contrived the murder of Stilicho, so did Valentinian
contrive to rid himself of Aetius, and with his own hand, for
Valentinian stabbed him himself in his palace on the Palatine Hill in
Rome, towards the end of 454. Six months, however, had not gone by
when Aetius was avenged and Valentinian lay dead in the Campus Martius
stabbed by two soldiers of barbarian origin. Beside him, dead too, lay
the eunuch Heraclius. This was the vengeance of the friends of Aetius,
and of him who was to be emperor, Petronius Maximus, whose wife
Valentinian had ravished.
With Valentinian III., who had no children, the great line of
Theodosius came to an end both in the East and in the West, for
Pulcheria had died in 453. In Constantinople Marcian continued to rule
till 457, when he was succeeded by Leo I. the Thracian. In Rome he who
had so signally avenged himself, Petronius Maximus, a senator, sixty
years of age, reigned during seventy days in which he was rather a
prisoner than a monarch. During those seventy days, whether moved by
lust or revenge we know not, he attempted to make the widow of
Valentinian his wife. This brought all down, for Eudoxia, without a
friend in the world, followed the fatal example of Honoria and called
in the Vandal to her assistance. And when Genseric was on his way to
answer her from Carthage, the terrified City, by the hands of the
imperial servants and the soldiers, tore the emperor limb from limb
and flung what remained into the Tiber so that even burial was denied
him. But the Vandal came on, and in spite of Leo, as we know, sacked
the City and departed--to lose the mighty booty in the midst of the
sea.
What are we to say of the years which follow, and what are we to say
of those ghostly figures, which hover, always uncertainly and briefly,
about the imperial throne after the assassination of Valentinian III.
and the second sack of the City? There was Avitus the Gaul (455-456),
Majorian (457-461), Libius Severus (461-465), Anthemius (467-472),
Olybrius (472), Glycerius (473-474), Julius Nepos (474-475), and at
last the pitiful boy Romulus Augustulus (475-476). Nothing can be said
of them; they are less than shadows, and their empire, the material
empire they represented, was no longer conscious of itself, was no
longer a reality, but an hallucination, haunting the mind. It is true
that the chief seat of their government, if government it can be
called, was Ravenna, and that the city is concerned with most of the
incidents of those vague and confused years; the proclamations of
Majorian, of Severus, of Glycerius, and of Romulus Augustulus, the
abdication of the last and the fight in the pinewood in which his
uncle Paulus was broken and Odoacer made himself master. But they are,
for the most part, the years of Ricimer the patrician, for they are
full of his puppets.
This man is another Stilicho, another Aetius, a great and heroic
soldier, but of a sinister and subtle policy without loyalty or
scruple. His is a figure that often appears about the death-bed of
dying states, but his genius has not so often been matched. The son of
a Suevic father, his mother the daughter of Wallia, the successor and
avenger of Ataulfus the Visigoth, he was the champion of the empire
against the Vandal, that is to say, against her most relentless foe.
His success in this was the secret of his power. Pondering the fate of
his predecessors he determined he would not end as they did. Therefore
he determined to make whom he would emperor and to depose him when he
had done with him; in a word, he meant to be the master as well as the
saviour of Italy. In this he was successful. He deposed Avitus and
caused him to be consecrated bishop of Placentia. In his place he set
a man of his own choice, Majorian, whom he raised to the empire on
April 1, 457, in the camp at Columellae, at the sixth milestone, it
seems, from Ravenna; and upon August 2,461, he caused him to be put to
death near Tortona.
He chose Libius Severus to fill the place of Majorian and had him
proclaimed in Ravenna upon November 19, 461; and upheld him for nearly
four years till he died in Rome on August 15, 465, poisoned, men said,
by Ricimer. Then the "king-maker" allied himself with Constantinople
and placed Anthemius, son-in-law of Marcian, upon the throne of the
West, in 467, kept him there till 472, and then proclaimed Olybrius,
another Byzantine, emperor; laid siege to Anthemius in Rome, took the
City, slew Anthemius, and forty days later himself died, leaving the
command of his army to his nephew Gundobald, one of the princes of the
Burgundians. Seven months later Olybrius died.