Chapter 6

“The correspondence of nations was, in that age, so imperfect and precarious, that the revolutions of the North might escape the knowledge of the court of Ravenna, till the dark cloud, which was collected along the coast of the Baltic, burst in thunder upon the banks of the Upper Danube, &c. Many cities of Italy were pillaged or destroyed; and the siege of Florence by Radagaisus, is one of the earliest events in the history of that celebrated republic, whose firmness checked or delayed the unskilful fury of the barbarians.

“While the peace of Germany was secured by the attachment of the Franks, and the neutrality of the Alemanni, the subjects of Rome, unconscious of the approaching calamities, enjoyed a state of quiet and prosperity, which had seldom blessed the frontiers of Gaul. Their flocks and herds were permitted to graze in the pastures of the barbarians: their huntsmen penetrated, without fear or danger, into the darkest recesses of the Hercynian wood. The banks of the Rhine were crowded, like those of the Tiber, with elegant houses and well-cultivated farms; and if the poet descended the river, he might express his doubt on which side was situated the territory of the Romans. This scene of peace and plenty was suddenly changed into a desert; and the prospect of the smoking ruins, could alone distinguish the solitude of nature, from the desolation of man. The flourishing city of Mentz was surprised and destroyed; and many thousand Christians were inhumanly massacred in the church. Worms perished, after a long and obstinate siege; Strasburg, Spires, Rheims, Tournay, Arras, Amiens, experienced the cruel oppression of the German yoke; and the consuming flames of war spread from the banks of the Rhine over the greatest part of the seventeen provinces of Gaul. That rich and extensive country, as far as the ocean, the Alps, and the Pyrenees, was delivered to the barbarians, who drove before them, in a promiscuous crowd, the bishop, the senator, and the virgin, laden with the spoils of their houses and altars.”—_Ibid._, vol. v., p. 224.

After this invasion of the empire by Radagaisus, Alaric again returned, invaded Italy in 408, and in 410 he besieged, took, and sacked Rome, and died the same year. In 412 the Goths voluntarily retired from Italy.

In this last year, “a public conference was held in Carthage, by order of the magistrate;” and it was there agreed to inflict the most severe penalties on those who dissented from the Catholic doctrines, in the African part of the Roman empire. Says Gibbon:—“Three hundred bishops, with many thousands of the inferior clergy, were torn from their churches, stripped of their ecclesiastical possessions, banished to the islands, and proscribed by the laws, if they presumed to conceal themselves in the provinces of Africa. Their numerous congregations, both in the cities and country, were deprived of the rights of citizens, and of the exercise of religious worship.”

The Second Trumpet.

“And the second angel sounded, and it was as if a great mountain burning with fire were cast into the sea: and the third part of the sea became blood; and the third part of the creatures in the sea, and having life, died; and the third part of the ships was destroyed.”—Rev. 8:8, 9.

A mountain differs from a tornado, and must symbolize a compact, organized body of invaders. Its being of a volcanic nature, renders it so much the more terrible and destructive.

As waters symbolize “peoples, multitudes, nations, and tongues,” the sea into which the mountain is cast, is a people already agitated by previous commotions.

The ships and fish in the sea, must necessarily symbolize agents sustaining a relation to the Roman Sea, analogous to the relation of such to the literal sea. They are those who live upon, and are supported by, the people:—the rulers and the officers of state.

The symbol of a burning mountain fitly represents the armed invaders under Genseric. In the year 429, with fifty thousand effective men he landed on the shores of Africa, established an independent government in that part of the Roman empire, and from thence, harassed the southern shores of Europe and the intermediate islands, by perpetual incursions. Says Gibbon:—“The Vandals, who, in twenty years, had penetrated from the Elbe to Mount Atlas, were united under the command of their warlike king; and he reigned with equal authority over the Alarici, who had passed within the term of human life, from the cold of Scythia, to the excessive heat of an African climate.

“The Vandals and Alarici, who followed the successful standard of Genseric, had acquired a rich and fertile territory, which stretched along the coast from Tangiers to Tripoli; but their narrow limits were pressed and confined on either side by the sandy desert and the Mediterranean. The discovery and conquest of the black nations that might dwell beneath the torrid zone, could not tempt the rational ambition of Genseric; but he cast his eyes towards the sea; he resolved to create a new naval power, and his bold enterprise was executed with steady and active perseverance. The woods of Mount Atlas afforded an inexhaustible nursery of timber; his new subjects were skilled in the art of navigation and ship-building; he animated his daring Vandals to embrace a mode of warfare which would render every maritime country accessible to their arms; the Moors and Africans were allured by the hope of plunder; and, after an interval of six centuries, the fleet that issued from the port of Carthage again claimed the empire of the Mediterranean. The success of the Vandals, the conquest of Sicily, the sack of Palermo, and the frequent descents on the coast of Lucania, awakened and alarmed the mother of Valentinian, and the sister of Theodosius.”

“The naval power of Rome was unequal to the task of saving even the imperial city from the ravages of the Vandals. Sailing from Africa, they disembarked at the port of Ostia, and Rome and its inhabitants were delivered to the licentiousness of Vandals and Moors, whose blind passions revenged the injuries of Carthage. The pillage lasted fourteen days and nights; and all that yet remained of public and private wealth, of sacred or profane treasure, was diligently transported to the vessels of Genseric. In the forty-five years that had elapsed since the Gothic invasion, the pomp and luxury of Rome were in some measure restored; and it was difficult either to escape, or to satisfy the avarice of a conqueror, who possessed leisure to collect, and ships to transport, the wealth of the capital.”—_Gibbon._

The Third Trumpet.

“And the third angel sounded, and a great star fell from heaven, burning like a torch, and it fell on the third part of the rivers, and on the fountains of waters; and the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died by the waters, because they were made bitter.”—Rev. 8:10, 11.

The sounding of the third trumpet marks the advent of a third invader of the Roman empire. And such was Attila, the king of the Huns, who invaded Gaul A. D. 451. Gibbon says:—

“The kings and nations of Germany and Scythia, from the Volga perhaps to the Danube, obeyed the warlike summons of Attila. From the royal village in the plains of Hungary, his standard moved towards the west; and, after a march of seven or eight hundred miles, he reached the conflux of the Rhine and the Necker.” “The hostile myriads were poured with resistless violence into the Belgic provinces.” “The consternation of Gaul was universal.” “From the Rhine and the Moselle, Attila advanced into the heart of Gaul, crossed the Seine at Auxerre, and, after a long and laborious march, fixed his camp under the walls of Orleans.” “An alliance was formed between the Romans and Visigoths.” The hostile armies approached. “ ‘I myself,’ said Attila, ‘will throw the first javelin, and the wretch who refuses to imitate the example of his sovereign, is devoted to inevitable death.’ The spirit of the barbarians was rekindled by the presence, the voice, and the example, of their intrepid leader; and Attila, yielding to their impatience, immediately formed his order of battle. At the head of his brave and faithful Huns, Attila occupied, in person, the centre of the line.” The nations from the Volga to the Atlantic were assembled on the plains of Chalons; and there fought a battle, “fierce, various, obstinate, and bloody, such as could not be paralleled, either in the present, or in past ages! The number of the slain amounted to one hundred and sixty-two thousand, or according to another account, three hundred thousand persons; and these incredible exaggerations suppose a real or effective loss, sufficient to justify the historian’s remark, that whole generations may be swept away, by the madness of kings, in the space of a single hour.”

Attila was compelled to retreat; but neither his forces nor reputation suffered. He “passed the Alps, invaded Italy, and besieged Aquileia with an innumerable host of barbarians.” “The succeeding generation could scarcely discover the ruins of Aquileia. After this dreadful chastisement, Attila pursued his march; and, as he passed, the cities of Altinum, Concordia, and Padua were reduced into heaps of stones and ashes. The inland towns, Vicenza, Verona, and Bergamo, were exposed to the rapacious cruelty of the Huns. Milan and Pavia submitted, without resistance, to the loss of their wealth;” and “applauded the unusual clemency which preserved from the flames the public as well as private buildings, and spared the lives of the captive multitude.” “Attila spread his ravages over the rich plains of modern Lombardy; which are divided by the Po, and bounded by the Alps and Apennines.” He took possession of the royal palace of Milan. “It is a saying worthy of the ferocious pride of Attila, that the grass never grew on the spot where his horse had trod.”

He advanced into Italy, only as far as the plains of Lombardy and the banks of the Po, reducing the cities he passed to stones and ashes; but there his ravages ceased. He concluded a peace with the Romans in the year of his invasion of Italy (451), and the next year he died. Thus he appeared like a fiery meteor, exerted his appointed influence upon the tongues and people, who were tributary to the Romans,—as rivers and fountains of waters are to the sea; and like a burning star, he as suddenly expired. As a specimen of the bitterness which followed his course, it is recorded of the Thuringians who served in his army, and who traversed, both in their march and in their return, the territories of the Franks, “that they massacred their hostages as well as their captives. Two hundred young maidens were tortured with exquisite and unrelenting rage; their bodies were torn asunder by wild horses, or were crushed under the weight of rolling wagons; and their unburied limbs were abandoned on public roads, as a prey to dogs and vultures.”

The Fourth Trumpet.

“And the fourth angel sounded, and the third part of the sun was smitten, and the third part of the moon, and the third part of the stars; so that the third part of them was darkened, and the day shone not for a third part of it, and the night in like manner.”—Rev. 8:12.

The sun, moon, and stars cannot here, any more than under the sixth seal (6:12,13), symbolize agents of their own order, but must represent the rulers of the Roman empire. Says Dr. Keith:—

“At the voice of the first angel, and the blast of his trumpet, the whole Roman world was in agitation, and ‘the storms of war’ passed over it all. ‘The union of the empire was dissolved;’ a third part of it fell; and the ‘transalpine provinces were separated from the empire.’ Under the second trumpet, the provinces of Africa, another, or the maritime, part, was in like manner reft from Rome, and the Roman ships were destroyed in the sea, and even in their harbors. The empire of Rome, hemmed in on every side, was then limited to the kingdom of Italy. Within its bounds, and along the fountains and rivers of waters, the third trumpet reëchoed from the Alps to the Apennines. The last barrier of the empire of Rome was broken. The plains of Lombardy were ravaged by a foreign foe: and from thence new enemies arose to bring to an end the strife of the world with the imperial city.

“ ‘In the space of twenty years since the death of Valentinian’ (two years subsequent to the death of Attila), ‘nine emperors had successively disappeared; and the son of Orestes, a youth recommended only by his beauty, would be the least entitled to the notice of posterity, if his reign, which was marked by the extinction of the Roman empire in the west, did not leave a memorable era in the history of mankind.’ ”

The throne of the Cæsars had been for ages the sun of the world; while other kings were designated as stars. The imperial power had first been transferred to Constantinople by Constantine; and it was afterwards divided between the east and the west; but the eastern empire was not yet doomed to destruction. The precise year in which the western empire was extinguished, is not positively ascertained, but it is usually assigned to A. D. 476. Some place it in 479. The imperial Roman power, of which either Rome or Constantinople had been jointly or singly the seat, whether in the West or the East, ceased to be recognized in Italy; and the third part of the sun was smitten, till it emitted no longer the faintest rays. The power of the Cæsars became unknown in Italy; and a Gothic king reigned over Rome.

Dr. Keith considers that “the concluding words of the fourth trumpet imply the future restoration of the Western empire: ‘The day shone not for a third part of it, and the night likewise.’ In respect to civil authority, Rome became subject to Ravenna; and Italy was a conquered province of the Eastern empire. But, as more appropriately pertaining to other prophecies, the defence of the worship of images first brought the spiritual and temporal powers of the Pope and of the emperor into violent collision; and, by conferring on the Pope all authority over the churches, Justinian laid his helping hand to the promotion of the papal supremacy, which afterwards assumed the power of creating monarchs. In the year of our Lord 800, the Pope conferred on Charlemagne the title of Emperor of the Romans. The title was again transferred from the King of France to the Emperor of Germany. By the latter it was formally renounced, within the memory of the existing generation. In our own days the iron crown of Italy was on the head of another ‘emperor.’ ” Then the sun was suddenly darkened, as symbolized under the sixth seal, 6:12. p. 66.

The Woe-denouncing Angel.

“And I beheld, and heard an eagle flying in the midst of heaven, saying with a loud voice, Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabitants of the earth, from the remaining voices of the trumpet of the three angels, who are to sound.”—Rev. 8:13.

The word eagle, instead of angel, is in accordance with the more recent revised editions of the Greek. It must symbolize persons peculiarly apprehensive at this crisis, of disasters to follow the extinction of the Roman empire in the west. During the first half of the sixth century, the Sclavonians invaded the east, “spread from the suburbs of Constantinople to the Ionian Gulf, destroyed thirty-two cities or castles, razed Potidæa, which Athens had built, and Philip had besieged, and repassed the Danube, dragging at their horses’ heels one hundred and twenty thousand of the subjects of Justinian.”—_Gibbon._ And they continued their inroads, until the citizens became apprehensive that the Empire of the East would be extinguished like that of the West.

This symbol also indicates that the events under the trumpets which were to follow, would be far more dreadful and terrible than those of the preceding ones. For this reason, the last three are sometimes denominated THE WOE TRUMPETS.

The Fifth Trumpet.

“And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star, which had fallen from heaven to the earth: and to him was given the key of the pit of the abyss. And he opened the pit of the abyss: and a smoke arose out of the pit, like the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by the smoke of the pit. And locusts came out of the smoke into the earth: and power was given to them, as the scorpions of the earth have power. And it was said to them that they should not injure the herbage of the earth, nor any green thing, nor any tree; but only those men who have not the seal of God on their foreheads. And they were not allowed to kill them, but to torment them five months: and their torment was like the torment of a scorpion, when he striketh a man. And in those days men will seek death, and will not find it; and will desire to die, and death will flee from them. And the shapes of the locusts were like horses prepared for battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were like the faces of men. And they had hair like the hair of women, and their teeth were like those of lions. And they had breast-plates, like breast-plates of iron; and the sound of their wings was like the sound of chariots with many horses rushing into battle. And they had tails like scorpions, and there were stings in their tails: and their power was to injure men five months. They had a king over them, the messenger of the abyss, whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue he hath the name Apollyon. One woe is past away; and behold, there come yet two woes hereafter.”—Rev. 9:1-12.

The previous trumpets reveal the agencies which effected the dismemberment and overthrow of Western Rome. The fifth and sixth unfold those which terminated that empire in the east, embracing the territory between the Adriatic and Euphrates, the Lybian desert and the Danube.

A star (1:20) symbolizes a messenger, or head of a religious body, p. 31. Mohammed is generally regarded as represented by this symbol. He was, by birth, of the princely house of the Koreish, Governors of Mecca, a family of eminence.

The star had fallen to the earth before opening the pit of the abyss, which illustrates the flight of Mohammed from Mecca, and the seeming termination of all his hopes. To save his life, he took refuge, with one companion, in a cave near Medina, in A. D. 622, which forms the epoch of the Hegira, _i.e._, of his flight.

The bottomless pit, is where Satan is subsequently cast (20:3); and the key of it being given to this agent, symbolizes his power to open and to cause the smoke to issue from it; the Satanic origin of which is thus indicated:

Smoke is an appropriate representative of error, and symbolizes the Mohammedan doctrines; which, like the smoke of a great furnace, were disseminated far and wide, subverting the religion, and, in time, effecting the overthrow of the remaining portion of the Roman empire—the sun, one-third of which was smitten under the fourth trumpet.

The locusts were generated in the smoke from whence they issued. In a corresponding manner, the spread of Mohammedanism resulted in the organization of hordes of Saracens, who propagated the religion of the false prophet by the sword, and founded the famous Arabian empire, which extended from the Atlantic ocean to the river Euphrates.

The shapes of the locusts were like horses prepared for battle; and the Saracenic hordes, thus symbolized, were mounted horsemen, famous for the swiftness of their flight or pursuit, and ever ready for the contest.

Their crowns, faces, hair, teeth, breast-plates, &c., seem to be indicative of their personal appearance: on their heads they wore yellow turbans, like coronets; their demeanor was grave and firm; their hair, like that of women, was suffered to grow uncut; they were defended by the cuirass or breast-plate; and in rushing to battle, their onset was like that of chariots and many horses.

They had a king over them, named Abaddon in the Hebrew, and Apollyon in the Greek, both of which signified the Destroyer. The Saracens acknowledged the authority of Mohammed during the whole period of their conquests; not only recognizing him as their prophet and king during his lifetime, but his successors, after his death, considered and called themselves Mohammed’s _Caliphs_, or _Vicars_.

Their mission was not against the grass, green things, and trees, but had express reference to the men who had _not_ the seal of God in their foreheads. The antithesis here expressed, shows that by the former were symbolized the servants of God, and that these locust-warriors were particularly commissioned against infidels and apostates. Christians were not to be molested; and provision was made for their protection, in the circular letter which Abubekir sent to the Arabian tribes, A. D. 633. He said:

“ ‘Remember, that you are always in the presence of God, on the verge of death, in the assurance of judgment, and the hope of paradise: avoid injustice and oppression; consult with your brethren, and study to preserve the love and confidence of your troops. When you fight the battles of the Lord, acquit yourselves like men, without turning your backs; but let not your victory be stained with the blood of women and children. Destroy _no palm-trees, nor burn any fields of corn_. Cut down no fruit-trees, nor do any mischief to cattle, only such as you kill to eat. When you make any covenant, or article, stand to it, and be as good as your word. As you go on, you will find some _religious persons_ who live in retired monasteries, and propose to themselves to serve God that way; let them alone, and neither kill them nor destroy their monasteries; and you will find another sort of people that belong to the synagogue of Satan, who have _shaven crowns_; be sure you cleave their skulls, and give them no quarter _till they either turn Mohammedans or pay tribute_.’ ”

At this epoch, the Greek church at Constantinople had been preserved from the reproach of image worship, and still later it made strenuous efforts against it; but the churches of the north of Africa, and the Asiatic portion of the Eastern empire, had become greatly debased, and worshipped saints and images. And while the territories of these were speedily subverted to Mohammedanism, and became a part of the Arabian empire, the east of Europe was wonderfully preserved from their inroads.

Their power was not to kill, but to torment men five months. To kill, symbolically, according to the significance of the second seal, p. 60, is to compel men to apostasize; and they could not be in a condition to force their religion on the men of the eastern empire, without first subjecting it by force of arms.

The time of this torment was limited to five prophetic months. In one hundred and fifty years from the _Hegira_ the Saracen empire had ceased to be aggressive. In 762 Bagdad, the city of peace, was founded on the Tigris, by Al-Mansur, who died in 774. “From this time,” says ROTTICK, “the Arabian history assumes an entirely different character.” It was no longer progressive; the proud Saracen empire became dismembered, and three independent and hostile Caliphates, and several fragments of kingdoms, were formed from its ruins. In 841, the reigning Caliph at Bagdad, distrusting the spirit of his own troops, hired a body of fifty thousand Turkish soldiers, which he distributed in his dominions. These accelerated the ruin of the Caliphate, and, in time, the whole of the Saracen territory became subject to the Tartar rule, which had become Mohammedan, and also aimed to subject the eastern empire.