characteristic of the reign of Theodoric and could only have been
carried out by Roman officials and workmen. It is especially frequent
in Ravenna and in Rome. Theodoric will, if he can help it, have
nothing more destroyed. He is afraid of destruction, and that is a
mark of the barbarian. He wishes, Cassiodorus tells us, "to build new
edifices without despoiling the old. But we are informed that in your
municipality (of Aestunae) there are blocks of masonry and columns,
formerly belonging to some building, now lying absolutely useless and
unhonoured. If this be so, send these slabs of marble and columns by
all means to Ravenna that they may again be made beautiful and take
their place in a building there."[1] And again: "We rely upon your
zeal and prudence to see that the required blocks of marble are
forwarded from Faenza to Ravenna without any extortion from private
persons; so that, on the one hand, our desire for the adornment of
that city may be gratified, and, on the other, there may be no cause
for complaint on the part of our subjects.[2]
His care and adornment of Ravenna are remarkable. It was his capital
and he built there with a truly Roman splendour. We hear vaguely of a
Basilica of Hercules which was to be adorned with a mosaic, though
what this may have been we do not know; but we still have the
magnificent Arian church of S. Apollinare, which he called S. Martin
_de Coelo Aureo_ because of its beautiful gilded roof; and less
perfectly there remains to us the Arian church he built, called then
S. Theodore and now S. Spirito, and the Arian baptistery beside it;
the ruin, known as his palace, and his mighty tomb.
The government of Theodoric was great and generous, Roman in its
completeness and in its largeness; but he did not succeed in
establishing a new kingdom, a nation of Goths and Romans in Italy.
Why?
The answer to that question must be given and it is this: Theodoric
and his Goths were Arians. Much more than race or nationality religion
forms and inspires a people, welds them into one or divides them
asunder. Even though there had been no visible difference in culture
and civilisation between the Goths, when for a generation they had
been settled south of the Alps, and the Romans of the plain and of
Italy, nevertheless they would have remained barbarians, for Arianism
at this time was the certain mark of barbarism.[3] Had the barbarians
not fallen into this strange heresy, had the Goths, above all, been
Catholics, who knows what new nation might have arisen upon the ruin
of the Western empire to create, more than five hundred years before,
as things were, it was to blossom, the rose of the Middle Age?
[Footnote 1: Cassiodorus, op cit. iii. 9. Trs. Hodgkin, op. cit.]
[Footnote 2: Cassiodorus, op. cit. v. 8.]
[Footnote 3: Heathenism even more so of course. It cannot be
altogether a cooincidence that those barbarians which first became
Catholic, though they had been ruder and rougher than the rest, were
destined to re-establish the empire in the West--the Franks.]
[Illustration: S. APOLLINARE IN CLASSE]
[Illustration: Colour Plate THE MAUSOLEUM OF THEODORIC]
But this was not to be. The work of Theodoric, a useful work as we
shall see, was serving quite another purpose than that of establishing
a new Gothic kingdom. As for him and his government, they were utterly
to pass away and by reason of the religion they professed.
The first blow at the endurance and security of the Ostrogothic
hegemony was the conversion of Clovis to Catholicism in 496. This
changed the political relations, not only of every state in Gaul, but
of every state in Europe, and enormously to the disadvantage of the
Arians. The second was the reconciliation, in 519, of the pope and the
emperor, which rightly understood was the death warrant of the Gothic
kingdom. Had the Goths been Catholic, either that reconciliation would
not have taken place, or it would have been without ill results for
them. As it was it was fatal, though not all at once.
The Arian heresy, if we are to understand it aright, must be
recognised as an orientalism having much in common with Judaism and
the later Mahometanism. It denied several of the statements of the
Nicene Creed, those monoliths upon which the new Europe was to be
founded. It maintained that the Father and the Son are distinct
Beings; that the Son though divine is not equal to the Father; that
the Son had a state of existence previous to His appearance upon
earth, but is not from Eternity; that Christ Jesus was not really man
but a divine being in a case of flesh. Already against it the future
frowned dark and enormous as the Alps.
Such was the heresy at the root of the Ostrogothic kingdom, and it is
significant that the cause of the first open alienation between
Theodoric and the Catholics of Italy was concerned with the Jews. It
seems that the Jews, whom Theodoric had always protected, had, during
his absence from Ravenna, mocked the Christian rite of baptism and
made sport of it by throwing one another into one of the two muddy
rivers of that city, and also by some blasphemous foolishness aimed at
the Mass. The Catholic population had naturally retaliated by burning
all the Jewish synagogues to the ground. Theodoric, like all the
Gothic Arians, sided with the Jews and fined the Catholic citizens of
Ravenna, publicly flogging those who could not pay, in order that the
synagogues might be rebuilt. Such was the first open breach between
the king and the Romans, who now began to remind themselves that there
was an Augustus at Constantinople. This memory, which had slumbered
while pope and emperor were in conflict--such is the creative and
formative power of religion--was stirred and strengthened by the
reconciliation between the emperor Justin and the Holy See. It is
curious that the man who was to lead the Catholic party and to suffer
in the national cause had translated thirty books of Aristotle into
Latin; his name was Boethius and he was master of the offices.
This great and pathetic figure had been till the year 523 continually
in the favour of Theodoric. In that year suddenly an accusation was
brought against the patrician Albinus of "sending letters to the
emperor Justin hostile to the royal rule of Theodoric." In the debate
which followed, Boethius claimed to speak and declared that the
accusation was false, "but whatever Albinus did, I and the whole
senate of Rome with one purpose did the same." We may well ask for a
clear statement of what they had done; we shall get no answer.
Boethius himself speaks of "the accusation against me of having hoped
for Roman freedom," and adds: "As for Roman freedom, what hope is left
to us of that? Would that there were any such hope." To the charge of
"hoping for Roman freedom" was added an accusation of sorcery.
Boethius was tried in the senate house in Rome while he was lying in
prison in Pavia. Without being permitted to answer his accusers or to
be heard by his judges he was sentenced to death by the intimidated
senate whose freedom he was accused of seeking to establish. From
Pavia, where in prison awaiting death he had written his _De
Consolatione Philosophiae_ which was so largely to inform the new
Europe, he was carried to "the _ager Calventianus_" a few miles from
Milan; where he was tortured, a cord was twisted round his forehead
till his eyes burst from their sockets, and then he was clubbed to
death. This occurred in 524, and in that same year throughout the
empire we find the great movement against Arianism take on new life.
[Illustration: CAPITAL FROM S. VITALE]
This irresistible attack began in the East and Theodoric seems at once
to have seen in it the culmination of all those dangers he had to
fear. He recognised, too, at last, that it was Catholicism he had to
face. Therefore he sent for pope John I. When the pope, old and
infirm, appeared in Ravenna, Theodoric made the greatest diplomatic
mistake of his life. He bade the pope go to Constantinople to the
emperor and tell him that "he must not in any way attempt to win over
those whom he calls heretics to the Catholic religion."
Apart from the impertinence of this command to the emperor from the
king of the Goths, it was foolish in the extreme. His object should
have been, above all else, to keep the emperor and the pope apart, but
by this act he forced them together; only anger can have suggested
such an impolitic move. "The king," says the chronicler[1], "returning
in great anger [from the murder of Boethius] and unmindful of the
blessings of God, considered that he might frighten Justin by an
embassy. Therefore he sent for John the chief of the Apostolic See to
Ravenna and said to him, 'Go to Justin the emperor and tell him that
among other things he must restore the converted heretics to the
(Arian) faith.' And the pope answered, 'What thou doest do quickly.
Behold here I stand in thy sight. I will not promise to do this thing
for thee nor to say this to the emperor. But in other matters, with
God's help, I may succeed.' Then the king being angered ordered a ship
to be prepared and placed the pope aboard together with other bishops,
namely, Ecclesius of Ravenna, Eusebius of Fano, Sabinus of Campania,
and two others with the following senators, Theodorus, Importunus,
Agapitus, and another Agapitus. But God, who does not forsake those
who are faithful, brought them prosperously to their journey's end.
Then the emperor Justin met the pope on his arrival as though he were
St. Peter himself[2], and when he heard his message promised that he
would comply with all his requests, but _the converts who had given
themselves to the Catholic Faith he could by no means restore to the
Arians_."
[Footnote 1: Anon. Valesii, _ut supra_.]
[Footnote 2: "Prone on the ground the emperor, whom all other men
adored, adored the weary pontiff.... When Easter-day came, the pope,
taking the place of honour at the right hand of the patriarch of
Constantinople, celebrated Mass according to the Latin use in the
great cathedral."--Marcellinus Comes, quoted by Hodgkin, _op. cit_.
iii. p. 463.]
That was a great day not only for the papacy but for Italy. The pope
can never have hoped that Theodoric would open to him so great an
opportunity for confirming the reconciliation between the emperor and
the papacy which was the great need of the Latin cause. There can be
little doubt that pope John used his advantage to the utmost. Early in
526 he returned to Ravenna to find Theodoric beside himself with
anger. The barbarian who had perfidiously murdered Odoacer his rival,
and most foully tortured the old philosopher Boethius to death, was
not likely to shrink from any outrage that he thought might serve him,
even though his victim were the pope. Symmachus, the father-in-law of
Boethius, a venerable and a saintly man, was barbarously done to death
and Pope John and his colleagues were thrown into prison in Ravenna,
where the pope died on May 18 of that same year, and one hundred and
four days later was followed to the grave by the unhappy Gothic king.
[Illustration: CAPITAL FROM SANTO SPIRITO]
Theodoric had utterly failed in everything he had attempted. His
Romano-Gothic kingdom proved to be a hopeless chimaera, and this
because he had not been able to understand the forces with which he
had to deal. Nor was he capable of learning from experience. Even
after the death of Pope John he countersigned the death warrant of his
kingdom by an edict, issued with the signature of a Jewish treasury
clerk, that all the Catholic churches of Italy should be handed over
to the Arians. He had scarcely published this amazing document,
however, when he died after three days of pain on August 30, 526, the
very day the revolution was to have taken place.
The Gothic king was buried outside Ravenna upon the north-east and in
the mighty tomb--a truly Roman work--that the Romans, at his orders,
had prepared for him: a marvellous mausoleum of squared stones in two
stories, the lower a decagon, the upper an octagon covered by a vast
dome hewn out of a single block of Istrian marble. There in a porphyry
vase reposed all that was mortal of the great barbarian who failed to
understand what the Roman empire was, but who almost without knowing
it rendered it, as we shall see, so great a service. But the body of
Theodoric did not long remain in the enormous silence of that
sepulchre. Even in the time of Agnellus (ninth century) the body was
no longer in the mausoleum and what had become of it will always
remain a mystery. A weird and awful legend, in keeping with the
tremendous tragedy that was played out in his time and in which he had
filled the main role, relates how a holy hermit upon the island of
Lipari on the day and in the hour of the great king's death saw him,
his hands and feet bound, his garments all disarrayed, dragged up the
mountain of Stromboli by his two victims, pope John and Symmachus, the
father-in-law of Boethius, and hurled by them into the fiery crater of
the volcano.
Agnellus, of Ravenna, who records that the body of Theodoric was no
longer in the great mausoleum, tells us that as it seems to him it was
cast forth out of that sepulchre. A later suggestion would lead us to
suppose that this was done by the monks of a neighbouring monastery,
who are said to have cast the body in its golden armour into the
Canale Corsini close by[1]. A few pieces of a golden cuirass
discovered there and now in the museum of Ravenna, seem to confirm
this story, which certainly is not unreasonable though of course it is
the merest conjecture. It is possible that the body of Theodoric did
not rest longer in its tomb than the Gothic power remained in Italy.
For already within a year of the death of Theodoric the new saviour
had appeared. Once more a great man sat upon the throne of the empire,
in whose mind and in whose will was set the dream of the reconquest,
of the re-establishment of the empire through the West, of the
promulgation of the great code by which the new Europe was to realise
itself. Justinian reigned in the New Rome upon the Bosphorus.
[Footnote 1: There is apparently no foundation for the assertion of
Fra Salimbene, the thirteenth-century chronicler of Parma (_Cronica_,
ed Holder-Egger, pp 209-210), that it was S. Gregory the Great himself
who ordered the body of Theodoric to be cast forth from its tomb. Cf.
E.G. Gardner _The Dialogues of S. Gregory_ (1911), p 273]
VII
THE RECONQUEST
VITIGES, BELISARIUS, TOTILA, NARSES
The failure of Theodoric, the failure of barbarism, of Arianism that
is, for barbarism and civilisation were now for all intents and
purposes mere synonyms for heresy and Catholicism, was probably fully
appreciated by the Gothic king, who was, nevertheless, incapable of
mastering his fate. The great lady who succeeded to his power in Italy
as the guardian of her son, his heir, Athalaric, was certainly as
fully aware as Theodoric may have been of the cause of that failure,
and she made the attempt, which he had not wished or dared to make, to
save the kingdom. The value of her heroic effort, which, for all its
courage, utterly failed, lies for us in the confirmation it gives to
our analysis of the causes of the Gothic failure to establish an
enduring government in the West.
That Amalasuntha wished to become a Catholic is probably true enough;
it is certain that she understood from the first that, in such an act,
she would not be able to carry her people with her. Therefore, she did
what she could short of this the only real remedy. She attempted to
educate her little son as a Roman, and hoped thus to insure his power
with the Latin population, trusting that the fact of his birth would
perhaps ensure the loyalty of the Gothic nation. In this she was
wholly to fail, because, as her attempt shows, she had not
fundamentally understood, any more than her father had been able to
do, the realities of the situation in which she found herself.
For all her genuine love for Roman things, her contempt of Gothic
rudeness and barbarism, she failed to see that the one living thing
that impressed the Roman mind, and really differentiated the Latin
from the Goth, was religion, was Catholicism. She remained, possibly
from necessity, but she remained, an Arian, and though she brought
Athalaric up "in all respects after the manner of the Romans," she did
not make him a Catholic, nor did she attempt the certainly hopeless
task of leading the Gothic nation towards the only means of
reconciliation that might have been successful.
The compromise she adopted was useless and futile, and only succeeded
in alienating the Goths, without winning her a single ally among the
Romans. Her own people utterly disapproved of her method of education
for her son, their king, "because they wished him to be trained in
more barbaric style so that they might the more readily oppress their
subjects." Presently they remonstrated with her: "O Lady, you are not
dealing justly with us, nor doing what is best for the nation when you
thus educate your son. Letters and book-learning are different from
courage and fortitude, and to permit a boy to be trained by old men is
the way to make him a coward and a fool. He who is to dare and to win
glory, and fame, must not be subjected to the fear of a pedagogue, but
must spend his time in martial exercise. Your father, Theodoric, would
never suffer his Goths to send their sons to the grammarians, for he
used to say: 'If they fear the teacher's strap they will never look on
sword or javelin without a shudder.' He himself, who won the lordship
of such wide lands and died king of so fair a kingdom, which he had
not inherited from his fathers, knew nothing, even by hearsay, of book
learning. Therefore, lady, you must say 'good-bye' to these
pedagogues, and give Athalaric companions of his own age, who may grow
up with him to manhood, and make him a valiant king after the manner
of the barbarians."[1]
[Footnote 1: Hodgkin, _Theodoric_ (Putnam, 1900), pp. 307-308.]
Amalasuntha was forced to bow to this, the public opinion of her own
people. The result was disastrous; for the young Athalaric, like a
true barbarian, was soon led away into a bestial sensuality which
presently destroyed his health and sent him to an early grave. Seeing
his instability both of body and mind, Amalasuntha entered into secret
communication with Constantinople, where Justinian was now emperor,
and even prepared for a possible flight to that city. Thus in 534,
when she received an ambassador in Ravenna from Justinian who demanded
of her the surrender of Lilybaeum, a barren rock in Sicily which
Theodoric had assigned to Thrasamund on his marriage with his sister
Amalafrida, in public she protested vigorously against the attempt of
the emperor to pick a quarrel with "an orphaned king" too young to
defend himself; but in private she assured the imperial ambassador of
her readiness "to transfer to the emperor the whole of Italy."
Italy was in this unstable state when, on the 2nd October 534,
Athalaric died in his eighteenth year. This apparently upset
Amalasuntha's plans. At any rate, we see her suddenly face quite about
and sending for Theodahad, the son of Amalafrida, upon whom she had
but lately pronounced a humiliating sentence, she offered to make him
her official colleague upon the Gothic throne. This man was an
ambitious villain. Of course he accepted Amalasuntha's foolish offer
and swore to observe the agreement made between them. But before many
weeks had passed he had made her a prisoner and had her securely
hidden upon an island in the Lake of Bolsena in Umbria. But Theodahad
appears to have been a fool as well as a villain. Having disposed of
Amalasuntha, he sent an embassy to Constantinople to explain his
conduct and to attempt to come to terms with Caesar. For his
ambassadors he chose not Gothic nobles, who might have found his
actions to their advantage, but Roman senators all but one of whom
told a plain tale. Justinian immediately despatched his ambassador
Peter to reassure Amalasuntha of his protection and to threaten
Theodahad that if she were hurt it would be at the price of his own
head. Peter however, had scarcely landed in Italy when he had news of
Amalasuntha's murder in her island prison. He continued at once on his
way to Ravenna, and there in the court before all the Gothic nobles
not only denounced the murderer, but declared "truceless war" upon the
Goths.[1]
[Footnote 1: Cf. Procopius, _De Bello Gotico_, 25. The murder of
Amalasuntha served the interests of the imperialists so well that
public opinion at Constantinople attributed it to Peter the ambassador
and to Theodora, the wife of Justinian. It remains, however, extremely
doubtful whether there is any truth in this accusation, although it is
certain that Theodora was in communication with Theodahad.]
The truth was that Justinian was ready, the hour had struck, and with
the hour had appeared the man who with his great master was ready to
attempt the reconquest of the West for civilisation.
We shall see the true state of affairs from the point of view of
Constantinople if we retrace our steps a little.
Justinian had succeeded Justin upon the imperial throne in 527. This
great man had early set before himself the real recovery of the West
for the empire. Circumstances, which he was not slow to use, caused
him to attempt first the reconquest of Africa from the Vandals, and
the true state of affairs is disclosed by the causes which brought
about this great campaign.
Hilderic, who had succeeded Thrasamund on the Vandal throne in Africa,
had put Amalafrida, the queen dowager, the sister of Theodoric, to
death. In June 531, he was deposed. Now Hilderic favoured the
Catholics, was the ally of the empire, and was descended on his
mother's side from the great Theodosius. Justinian determined to
avenge him, and in avenging him to reconquer Africa for the empire.
The hour had struck as I say, and the man had appeared with the hour.
That man was the great soldier Belisarius, the instrument of Justinian
in all his heroic design.
Belisarius was entirely successful in his African campaign. On 15th
September 533, he entered Carthage, and "was received by the majority
of the citizens who spoke the Latin tongue and professed the Catholic
Faith with unconcealed rejoicing." And as it happened he entered
Carthage only to hear of Hilderic's murder. Before the end of the year
the reconquest was complete. Africa was once more and in reality a
province of the empire, and offered an excellent base of operations
for the conquest of Italy, now to be undertaken.
In the summer of 535, eighteen months later, Justinian began the great
war against the Goths, the opportunity for which was offered him by
the murder of Amalasuntha, and the result of which was to be the
re-establishment of the empire in Italy. Rightly understood the true
service of Theodoric--and it was a real and a precious service--was
that the thirty years of settled government and peace which he had
given Italy had prepared the way for the reconquest.
That reconquest occupied five years. It was begun with an attack upon
Sicily and proceeded northward by way of Naples and Rome to Ravenna,
with the fall of which it was achieved. From a purely strategical
point of view Belisarius was wrong to attack Sicily first and to carry
the campaign from south to north; he should have attacked Ravenna
first, and from the sea, and thus possessed himself of the key of
Italy, and this especially as his base was Constantinople. But
politically he was absolutely right. Sicily was almost empty of Gothic
troops and the provincials were eagerly Catholic and only too willing
to make a real part of the Roman empire. Thus the campaign opened with
surrender after surrender, was indeed almost a procession; only
Palermo offered resistance, and this because it was held by a garrison
of Goths; but before the end of 535 the whole island was once more
subject to the empire.
Early in 536 a rebellion in Africa, which proved to be little more
than a mutiny in Carthage, took Belisarius away; but he was back in
Sicily before the end of the spring, and in the early summer was
marching through southern Italy almost unresisted, welcomed everywhere
with joy and thanksgiving till he came to the fortress of Naples,
which was held by a Gothic garrison. Here the people wished to welcome
him and surrender the city, but were prevented by the garrison, which,
however, was soon cleverly outwitted and taken prisoner, and by the
end of November all southern Italy was in Belisarius' hands.