Part 78

The West seemed more fortunate than the East, in this division; yet the evil days now fast coming near fell crushingly on the older Rome, while the New Rome lived through them, and endured for a thousand years. No doubt the Empire had weakened more on its elder side; had suffered more exhaustion of vital powers. It had little organic vitality now left in it. If no swarms of barbaric invaders had been waiting and watching at its doors, and pressing upon it from every point with increasing fierceness, it seems probable that it would have gone to pieces ere long through mere decay. And if, on the other hand, it could have kept the vigorous life of its best republican days, it might have defied Teuton and Slav forever. But all the diseases, political and social, which the Republic engendered in itself, had been steadily consuming the state, with their virulence even increased, since it took on the imperial constitution. All that imperialism did was to gather waning energies in hand, and make the most of them for external use. It stopped no decay. The industrial palsy, induced by an ever-widening system of slave-labor, continued to spread. Production decreased; the sum of wealth shrunk in the hands of each succeeding generation; and yet the great fortunes and great estates grew bigger from age to age. The gulf between rich and poor opened deeper and wider, and the bridges once built across it by middle-class thrift were fallen down. The burden of imperial government had become an unendurable weight; the provincial municipalities, which had once been healthy centers of a local political life, were strangled by the nets of taxation flung over them. Men sought refuge even in death from the magistracies which made them responsible to the imperial treasury for revenues which they could not collect. Population dwindled, year by year. Recruiting from the body of citizens for the common needs of the army became more impossible. The state was fully dependent, at last, on barbaric mercenaries of one tribe for its defence against barbaric invaders of another; and it was no longer able, as of old, to impress its savage servitors with awe of its majesty and its name.

Stilicho and Alaric.

Stilicho, for a time, stoutly breasted the rising flood of disaster. He checked the Picts and Scots of Northern Britain, and the Alemanni and their allies on the frontiers of Gaul. But now there arose again the more dreadful barbarian host which had footing in the Empire itself, and which Theodosius had taken into pay. The Visigoths elected a king (A. D. 395), and were persuaded with ease to carve a kingdom for him out of the domain which seemed waiting to be snatched from one or both of the feeble monarchs, who sat in mockery of state at Constantinople and Milan. Alaric, the new Gothic king, moved first against the capital on the Bosphorus; but Rufinus persuaded him to pass on into Greece, where he went pillaging and destroying for a year. Stilicho, the one manly defender of the Empire, came over from Italy with an army to oppose him; but he was stopped on the eve of battle by orders from the Eastern Court, which sent him back, as an officious meddler. This act of mischief and malice was the last that Rufinus could do. He was murdered, soon afterwards, and Arcadius, being free from his influence, then called upon Stilicho for help. The latter came once more to deliver Greece, and did so with success. But Alaric, though expelled from the peninsula, was neither crushed nor disarmed, and the Eastern Court had still to make terms with him. It did so for the moment by conferring on him the government of that part of Illyricum which the Servia and Bosnia of the present day coincide with, very nearly. He rested there in peace for four years, and then (A. D. 400) he called his people to arms again, and led the whole nation, men, women and children, into Italy. The Emperor, Honorius, fled from Milan to Ravenna, which, being a safe shelter behind marshes and streams, became the seat of the court for years thereafter. Stilicho, stripping Britain and Gaul of troops, gathered forces with which, at Eastertide in the year 402, and again in the following year, he defeated the Goths, and forced them to retreat.

He had scarcely rested from these exertions, when the valiant Stilicho was called upon to confront a more savage leader, Radagaisus by name, who came from beyond the lines (A. D. 405), with a vast swarm of mixed warriors from many tribes pouring after him across the Alps. Again Stilicho, by superior skill, worsted the invaders, entrapping them in the mountains near Fiesole (modern Florence), and starving them there till they yielded themselves to slavery and their chieftain to death.

This was the last great service to the dying Roman state which Stilicho was permitted to do. Undermined by the jealousies of the cowardly court at Ravenna, he seems to have lost suddenly the power by which he held himself so high. He was accused of treasonable designs and was seized and instantly executed, by the Emperor's command.

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Alaric and his Goths in Rome.

Stilicho dead, there was no one in Italy for Alaric to fear, and he promptly returned across the Alps, with the nation of the Visigoths behind him. There was no resistance to his march, and he advanced straight upon Rome. He did not assail the walls, but sat down before the gates (A. D. 408), until the starving citizens paid him a great ransom in silver and gold and precious spices and silken robes. With this booty he retired for the winter into Tuscany, where his army was swelled by thousands of fugitive barbarian slaves, and by reinforcements of Goths and Huns. From his camp he opened negotiations with Honorius, demanding the government of Dalmatia, Venetia and Noricum, with certain subsidies of money and corn. The contemptible court, skulking at Ravenna, could neither make war nor make concessions, and it soon exhausted the patience of the barbarian by its puerilities. He marched again to Rome (A. D. 409), seized the port of Ostia, with its supplies of grain, and forced the helpless capital to join him in proclaiming a rival emperor. The prefect of the city, one Attalus, accepted the purple at his hands, and played the puppet for a few months in imperial robes. But the scheme proved unprofitable, Attalus was deposed, and negotiations were reopened with Honorius. Their only result was a fresh provocation which sent Alaric once more against Rome, and this time with wrath and vengeance in his heart. Then the great, august capital of the world was entered, through treachery or by surprise, on the night of the 24th of August, 410, and suffered all that the lust, the ferocity and the greed of a barbarous army let loose could inflict on an unresisting city. It was her first experience of that supreme catastrophe of war, since Brennus and the Gauls came in; but it was not to be the last.

From the sack of Rome, Alaric moved southward, intending to conquer Sicily; but a sudden illness brought his career to an end.

The Barbarians Swarming in.

The Empire was now like a dying quarry, pulled down by fierce hunting packs and torn on every side. The Goths were at its throat; the tribes of Germany--Sueves, Vandals, Burgundians, Alans--had leaped the Rhine (A. D. 406) and swarmed upon its flanks, throughout Gaul and Spain. The inrush began after Stilicho, to defend Italy against Alaric and Radagaisus, had stripped the frontiers of troops. Sueves, Vandals, and Alans passed slowly through the provinces, devouring their wealth and making havoc of their civilization as they went. After three years, they had reached and surmounted the Pyrenees, and were spreading the same destruction through Spain.

The confederated tribes of the Franks had already been admitted as allies into northwestern Gaul, and were settled there in peace. At first, they stood faithful to the Roman alliance, and valiantly resisted the new invasion; but its numbers overpowered them, and their fidelity gave way when they saw the pillage of the doomed provinces going on. They presently joined the barbarous mob, and with an energy which secured the lion's share of plunder and domain.

The Burgundians did not follow the Vandals and Sueves to the southwest, but took possession of the left bank of the middle Rhine, whence they gradually spread into western Switzerland and Savoy, and down the valleys of the Rhone and Saone, establishing in time an important kingdom, to which they gave their name.

No help from Ravenna or Rome came to the perishing provincials of Gaul in the extremity of their distress; but a pretender arose in Britain, who assumed the imperial title and promised deliverance. He crossed over to Gaul in 407 and was welcomed with eagerness, both there and in Spain, to which he advanced. He gained some success, partly by enlisting and partly by resisting the invaders; but his career was brief. Other pretenders appeared in various provinces, of the West; but the anarchy of the time was too great for any authority, legitimate or revolutionary, to establish itself.

The Visigoths in Gaul.

And, now, into the tempting country of the afflicted Gauls, already crowded with rapacious freebooters, the Visigoths made their way. Their new king, Ataulph, or Adolphus, who succeeded Alaric, passed into Gaul, but not commissioned, as sometimes stated, to restore the imperial sovereignty there. He moved with his nation, as Alaric had moved, and Italy, by his departure, was relieved; but Narbonne, Toulouse, Bordeaux, and the Aquitainian country at large, was soon subject to his command (A. D. 412-419). He passed the Pyrenees and entered Spain, where an assassin took his life. His successor, Wallia, drove the Sueves into the mountains and the Vandals into the South; but did not take possession of the country until a later time. The Visigoths, returning to Aquitaine, found there, at last, the kingdom which Alaric set out from the Danube to seek, and they were established in it with the Roman Emperor's consent. It was known as the kingdom of Gothia, or Septimania, but is more commonly called, from its capital, the kingdom of Toulouse.

The Eastern Empire.

Affairs in the Eastern Empire had never arrived at so desperate a state as in the West. With the departure of Alaric, it had been relieved from its most dangerous immediate foe. There had been tumults, disorders, assassinations, court conspiracies, fierce religious strifes, and every evidence of a government with no settled authority and no title to respect; but yet the Empire stood and was not yet seriously shaken. In 408 Arcadius died. His death was no loss, though he left an infant son to take his place; for he also left a daughter, Pulcheria, who proved to be a woman of rare virtue and talents, and who reigned in her brother's name.

Aetius and the Huns.

The imbecile Honorius, with whose name the failing sovereignty of Rome had been so disastrously linked for eight and twenty rears, died in 423. An infant nephew was his heir, and Placidia, the mother, ruled at Ravenna for a fourth of a century, in the name of her child. Her reign was far stronger than her wretched brother's had been, because she gave loyal support to a valiant and able man, who stood at her side. Aetius, her minister, did all, perhaps, that man could do to hold some parts of Gaul, and to play barbarian against barbarian--Hun against Goth and Frank--in skilful diplomacy and courageous war. But nothing that he won was any lasting gain. In his youth, Aetius had been a hostage in the camps of both the Goths and the Huns, and had made acquaintances among the chieftains of both which served his policy many times. {1011} He had employed the terrible Huns in the early years of his ministry, and perhaps they had learned too much of the weakness of the Roman State. These most fearful of all the barbarian peoples then surging in Europe had been settled, for some years, in the region since called Hungary, under Attila, their most formidable king. He terrorized all the surrounding lands and exercised a lordship from the Caspian to the Baltic and the Rhine. The imperial court at the East stooped to pay him annual tribute for abstaining from the invasion of its domain. But in 450, when the regent Pulcheria became Empress of the East, by her brother's death, and married a brave old soldier, Marcian, in order to give him the governing power, a new tone was heard in the voice from Constantinople which answered Attila's demands.

Defeat of Attila.

The Hun then appears to have seen that the sinking Empire of the West offered a more certain victim to his terrors and his arms, and he turned them to that side. First forming an alliance with the Vandals (who had crossed from Spain to Africa in 429, had ravaged and subdued the Roman provinces, and had established a kingdom on the Carthaginian ground, with a naval power in the Carthaginian Sea), Attila led his huge army into suffering Gaul. There were Ostrogoths, and warriors from many German tribes, as well as Huns, in the terrific host; for Attila's arm stretched far, and his subjects were forced to follow when he led. His coming into Gaul affrighted Romans and barbarians alike, and united them in a common defense. Aetius formed an alliance with Theodoric, the Visigothic king, and their forces were joined by Burgundians and Franks. They met Attila near Chalons, and there, on a day in June, A. D. 451, upon the Catalaunian fields, was fought a battle that is always counted among the few which gave shape to all subsequent history. The Huns were beaten back, and Europe was saved from the hopeless night that must have followed a Tartar conquest in that age.

Attila threatening Rome.

Attila retreated to Germany, foiled but not daunted. The next year (A. D. 452) he invaded Italy and laid siege to Aquileia, an important city which stood in his path. It resisted for three months and was then utterly destroyed. The few inhabitants who escaped, with fugitives from neighboring ports, found a refuge in some islands of the Adriatic coast, and formed there a sheltered settlement which grew into the great city and republican state of Venice. Aetius made strenuous exertions to gather forces for another battle with the Huns; but the resources of the Empire had sunk very low. While he labored to collect troops, the effect of a pacific embassy was despairingly tried, and it went forth to the camp of Attila, led by the venerable bishop of Rome--the first powerful Pope--Leo I., called the Great. The impression which Leo made on the Hunnish king, by his venerable presence, and by the persuasiveness of his words, appears to have been extraordinary. At all events, Attila consented to postpone his designs on Rome; though he demanded and received promise of an annual tribute. The next winter he died, and Rome was troubled by him no more.

Rome Sacked by the Vandals.

But another enemy came, who rivalled Attila in ruthlessness, and who gave a name to barbarity which it has kept to this day. The Vandal king, Genseric, who now swept the Mediterranean with a piratical fleet, made his appearance in the Tiber (A. D. 455) and found the Roman capital powerless to resist his attack. The venerable Pope Leo again interceded for the city, and obtained a promise that captives should not be tortured nor buildings burned,--which was the utmost stretch of mercy that the Vandal could afford. Once more, then, was Rome given up, for fourteen days and nights, to pillage and the horrors of barbaric debauch. "Whatever had survived the former sack,--whatever the luxury of the Roman Patriciate, during the intervening forty-five years, had accumulated in reparation of their loss,--the treasures of the imperial palace, the gold and silver vessels employed in the churches, the statues of pagan divinities and men of Roman renown, the gilded roof of the temple of Capitolian Jove, the plate and ornaments of private individuals, were leisurely conveyed to the Vandal fleet and shipped off to Africa" (Sheppard).

The Vandal invasion had been preceded, in the same year, by a palace revolution which brought the dynasty of Theodosius to an end. Placidia was dead, and her unworthy son, Valentinian III., provoked assassination by dishonoring the wife of a wealthy senator, Maximus, who mounted to his place. Maximus was slain by a mob at Rome, just before the Vandals entered the city. The Empire was now without a head, and the throne without an heir. In former times, the Senate or the army would have filled the vacant imperial seat; now, it was a barbarian monarch, Theodoric, the Visigothic king, who made choice of a successor to the Cæsars. He named a Gallic noble, Avitus by name, who had won his esteem, and the nomination was confirmed by Marcian, Emperor of the East.

Ricimer and Majorian.

But the influence of Theodoric in Roman affairs was soon rivalled by that of Count Ricimer, another Goth, or Sueve, who held high command in the imperial army, and who resented the elevation of Avitus. The latter was deposed, after reigning a single year; and Majorian, a soldier of really noble and heroic character, was promoted to the throne. He was too great and too sincere a man to be Ricimer's tool, and the same hand which raised him threw him down, after he had reigned four years (A. D. 457-461). He was in the midst of a powerful undertaking against the Vandals when he perished. Majorian was the last Emperor in the Western line who deserves to be named.

The last Emperors in the West.

Ricimer ruled Italy, with the rigor of a despot, under the modest title of Patrician, until 472. His death was soon followed by the rise of another general of the barbarian troops, Orestes, to like autocracy, and he, in turn, gave way to a third, Odoacer, who slew him and took his place. The creatures, half a dozen in number, who put on and put off the purple robe, at the command of these adventurers, who played with the majesty of Rome, need no further mention. {1012} The last of them was Romulus Augustulus, son of Orestes, who escaped his father's fate by formally resigning the throne. He was the last Roman Emperor in the West, until Charlemagne revived the title, three centuries and a quarter later. "The succession of the Western Emperors came to an end, and the way in which it came to an end marks the way in which the names and titles of Rome were kept on, while all power was passing into the hands of the barbarians. The Roman Senate voted that one Emperor was enough, and that the Eastern Emperor, Zeno, should reign over the whole Empire. But at the same time Zeno was made to entrust the government of Italy, with the title of Patrician, to Odoacer. ... Thus the Roman Empire went on at Constantinople, or New Rome, while Italy and the Old Rome itself passed into the power of the Barbarians. Still the Roman laws and names went on, and we may be sure that any man in Italy would have been much surprised if he had been told that the Roman Empire had come to an end" (Freeman).

Odoacer.

The government of Odoacer, who ruled with the authority of a king, though pretending to kingship only in his own nation, was firm and strong. Italy was better protected from its lawless neighbors than it had been for nearly a century before. But nothing could arrest the decay of its population--the blight that had fallen upon its prosperity. Nor could that turbulent age afford any term of peace that would be long enough for even the beginning of the cure of such maladies and such wounds as had brought Italy low. For fourteen years Odoacer ruled; and then he was overthrown by a new kingdom-seeking barbarian, who came, like Alaric, out of the Gothic swarm.

Theodoric the Ostrogoth.

The Ostrogoths had now escaped, since Attila died, from the yoke of the Huns, and were prepared, under an able and ambitious young king, Theodoric, who had been reared as a hostage at Constantinople, to imitate the career of their cousins, the Visigoths. Having troubled the Eastern Court until it stood in fear of him, Theodoric asked for a commission to overthrow Odoacer, in Italy, and received it from the Emperor's hand. Thus empowered by one still recognized as lawful lord on both sides of the Adriatic, Theodoric crossed the Julian Alps (A. D. 489) with the families of his nation and their household goods. Three battles made him master of the peninsula and decided the fate of his rival. Odoacer held out in Ravenna for two years and a half, and surrendered on a promise of equal sovereignty with the Ostrogothic king. But Theodoric did not scruple to kill him with his own sword, at the first opportunity which came. In that act, the native savagery in him broke loose; but through most of his life he kept his passions decently tamed, and acted the barbarian less frequently than the civilized statesman and king. He gave Italy peace, security, and substantial justice for thirty years. With little war, he extended his sovereignty over Illyrium, Pannonia, Noricum, Rhætia and Provence, in south-eastern Gaul. If the extensive kingdom which he formed--with more enlightenment than any other among those who divided the heritage of Rome--could have endured, the parts of Europe which it covered might have fared better in after times than they did. "Italy might have been spared six hundred years of gloom and degradation." But powerful influences were against it from the first, and they were influences which proceeded mischievously from the Christian Church. Had the Goths been pagans, the Church might have turned a kindly face to them, and wooed them to conversion as she wooed the Franks. But they were Christians, of a heretic stamp, and the orthodox Christianity of Rome held them in deadly loathing. While still beyond the Danube, they had received the faith from an Arian apostle, at the time of the great conflict of Athanasius against Arius, and were stubborn in the rejection of Trinitarian dogma. Hence the Church in the West was never reconciled to the monarchy of Theodoric in Italy, nor to that of the Visigoths at Toulouse; and its hostility was the ultimate cause of the failure of both.

The Empire in the East.