Part 883

"If modern history must have a definite beginning, the most convenient beginning for it is the great Teutonic invasion of Gaul in the year 407. Yet the nations of modern Europe do not spring from the nations which then crossed the Rhine, or from any intermixture between them and the Romans into whose land they made their way. The nations which then crossed the Rhine were the Vandals, Suevians, and Alans. … None of these nations made any real settlements in Gaul; Gaul was to them simply the high road to Spain. There they did settle, though the Vandals soon forsook their settlement, and the Alans were soon rooted out of theirs. The Suevian kept his ground for a far longer time; we may, if we please, look on him as the Teutonic forefather of Leon, while we look on the Goth as the Teutonic forefather of Castile. Here we have touched one of the great national names of history; the Goth, like the Frank, plays quite another part in Western Europe from the Alan, the Suevian, and the Vandal. … Now both Franks and Goths had passed into the Empire long before the invasion of 407. One branch of the Franks … was actually settled on Roman lands, and, as Roman subjects, did their best to withstand the great invasion. {2732} What then makes that invasion so marked an epoch? … The answer is that the invasion of 407 not only brought in new elements, but put the existing elements into new relations to one another. Franks and Goths put on a new character and begin a new life. The Burgundians pass into Gaul, not as a road to Spain, but as a land in which to find many homes. They press down to the south-eastern corner of the land, while the Frank no longer keeps himself in his north-eastern corner, while in the south-west the Goth is settled as for a while the liegeman of Cæsar, and in the north-west a continental Britain springs into being. Here in truth are some of the chiefest elements of the modern world, and though none of them are among the nations that crossed the Rhine in 407, yet the new position taken by all of them is the direct consequence of that crossing. In this way, in Gaul and Spain at least, the joint Vandal, Alan, and Suevian invasion is the beginning of the formation of the modern nations, though the invading nations themselves form no element in the later life of Gaul and only a secondary element in the later life of Spain. The later life of these lands, and that of Italy also, has sprung of the settlement of Teutonic nations in a Roman land, and of the mutual influences which Roman and Teuton have had on one another. Roman and Teuton lived side by side, and out of their living side by side has gradually sprung up a third thing different from either, a thing which we cannot call either Roman or Teutonic, or more truly a thing which we may call Roman and Teutonic and some other things as well, according to the side of it which we look at. This third thing is the Romance element in modern Europe, the Romance nations and their Romance tongues."

_E. A. Freeman, The Chief Periods of European History, pages 87-90._

"The true Germanic people who occupied Gaul were the Burgundians, the Visigoths, and the Franks. Many other people, many other single bands of Vandals, Alani, Suevi, Saxons, &c., wandered over its territory; but of these, some only passed over it, and the others were rapidly absorbed by it; these are partial incursions which are without any historical importance. The Burgundians, the Visigoths, and the Franks, alone deserve to be counted among our ancestors. The Burgundians definitively established themselves in Gaul between the years 406 and 413; they occupied the country between the Jura, the Saone, and the Duranee; Lyons was the centre of their dominion. The Visigoths, between the years 412 and 450, spread themselves over the provinces bounded by the Rhone, and even over the left bank of the Rhone to the south of the Durance, the Loire, and the Pyrenees: their king resided at Toulouse. The Franks, between the years 481 and 500, advanced in the north of Gaul, and established themselves between the Rhine, the Scheldt, and the Loire, without including Brittany and the western portions of Normandy; Clovis had Soissons and Paris for his capitals. Thus, at the end of the fifth century, was accomplished the definitive occupation of the territory of Gaul by the three great German tribes. The condition of Gaul was not exactly the same in its various parts, and under the dominion of these three nations. There were remarkable differences between them. The Franks were far more foreign, German, and barbarous, than the Burgundians and the Goths. Before their entrance into Gaul, these last had had ancient relations with the Romans; they had lived in the eastern empire, in Italy; they were familiar with the Roman manners and population. We may say almost as much for the Burgundians. Moreover, the two nations had long been Christians. The Franks, on the contrary, arrived from Germany in the condition of pagans and enemies. Those portions of Gaul which they occupied became deeply sensible of this difference, which is described with truth and vivacity in the seventh of the 'Lectures upon the History of France,' of M. Augustin Thierry. I am inclined, however, to believe that it was less important than has been commonly supposed. If I do not err, the Roman provinces differed more among themselves than did the nations which had conquered them. You have already seen how much more civilized was southern than northern Gaul, how much more thickly covered with population, towns, monuments, and roads. Had the Visigoths arrived in as barbarous a condition as that of the Franks, their barbarism would yet have been far less visible and less powerful in Gallia Narbonensis and in Aquitania; Roman civilization would much sooner have absorbed and altered them. This, I believe, is what happened; and the different effects which accompanied the three conquests resulted rather from the differences of the conquered than from that of the conquerors."

_F. Guizot, History of Civilization, volume 2, lecture 8._

"The invasion of the barbarians was not like the torrent which overwhelms, but rather like a slow, persistent force which undermines, disintegrates, and crumbles. The Germans were not strangers to the Roman Empire when they began their conquests. … It is well known that many of the Roman Emperors were barbarians who had been successful soldiers in the Imperial army; that military colonies were established on the frontiers composed of men of various races under the control of Roman discipline; that the Goths, before they revolted against the authority of the Emperor, were his chosen troops; that the great Alaric was a Roman general; that the shores of the Danube and the Rhine, which marked the limits of the Empire, were lined with cities which were at the same time Roman colonies and peopled with men of the Teutonic races. When the barbarians did actually occupy the territory their movement seems at first to have been characterized by a strange mixture of force with a sentiment of awe and reverence for the Roman name. In Italy and in Gaul they appropriated to themselves two-thirds of the lands, but they sought to govern their conquests by means of the Roman law and administration, a machine which proved in their hands, by the way, a rather clumsy means of government. They robbed the provincials of all the movable property they possessed, but the suffering they inflicted is said not to have been as great as that caused by the exactions of the Roman taxgatherer. The number of armed invaders has doubtless been exaggerated. The whole force of the Burgundian tribe, whose territory, in the southeast of modern France, extended to the Rhone at Avignon, did not, it is said, exceed sixty thousand in all, while the armed bands of Clovis, who changed the destinies not only of Gaul but of Europe, were not greater than one-tenth of that number. {2733} The great change in their life was, as I have said, that they ceased to be wanderers; they became, in a measure at least, fixed to the soil; and in contrast with the Romans, they preferred to live in the country and not in the towns. In this they followed their Teutonic habits, little knowing what a mighty change this new distribution of population was to cause in the social condition of Europe. They retained, too, their old military organization, and, after attempts more or less successful to use the Roman administration for the ordinary purposes of government, they abandoned it, and ruled the countries they conquered by simple military force, under their Dukes and Counts, the Romans generally being allowed in their private relations to govern themselves by the forms of the Roman law."

_C. J. Stillé, Studies in Mediæval History, chapter 2._

"The coming in of the Germans brought face to face the four chief elements of our civilization: the Greek with its art and science, much of it for the time forgotten; the Roman with its political institutions and legal ideas, and furnishing the empire as the common ground upon which all stood; the Christian with its religious and moral ideas; and the German with other political and legal ideas, and with a reinforcement of fresh blood and life. By the end of the sixth century these all existed side by side in the nominal Roman empire. It was the work of the remaining centuries of the middle ages to unite them into a single organic whole—the groundwork of modern civilization. But the introduction of the last element, the Germans, was a conquest—a conquest rendered possible by the inability of the old civilization any longer to defend itself against their attack. It is one of the miracles of history that such a conquest should have occurred, the violent occupation of the empire by the invasion of an inferior race, with so little destruction of civilization, with so complete an absorption, in the end, of the conqueror by the conquered. It must be possible to point out some reasons why the conquest of the ancient world by the Germans was so little what was to be expected. In a single word, the reason is to be found in the impression which the world they had conquered made upon the Germans. They conquered it, and they treated it as a conquered world. They destroyed and plundered what they pleased, and it was not a little. They took possession of the land and they set up their own tribal governments in place of the Roman. And yet they recognized, in a way, even the worst of them, their inferiority to the people they had overcome. They found upon every side of them evidences of a command over nature such as they had never acquired: cities, buildings, roads, bridges, and ships; wealth and art, skill in mechanics and skill in government, the like of which they had never known; ideas firmly held that the Roman system of things was divinely ordained and eternal; a church strongly organized and with an imposing ceremonial, officered by venerable and saintly men, and speaking with an overpowering positiveness and an awful authority that did not yield before the strongest barbarian king. The impression which these things made upon the mind of the German must have been profound. In no other way can the result be accounted for. Their conquest was a physical conquest, and as a physical conquest it was complete, but it scarcely went farther. In government and law there was little change for the Roman; in religion and language, none at all. Other things, schools and commercial arrangements for instance, the Germans would have been glad to maintain at the Roman level if they had known how. Half unconsciously they adopted the belief in the divinely founded and eternal empire, and in a vague way recognized its continuance after they had overthrown it."

_G. B. Adams, Civilization During the Middle Ages, chapter 5._

See, also, GAUL: A. D. 406-409, 5-8TH CENTURIES, and 5-10TH CENTURIES.

ROME: A. D. 408-410. The three sieges and the sacking of the Imperial city by Alaric. Death of the Gothic chieftain.

Having rid himself of the great minister and general whose brain and arm were the only hope of his dissolving empire, Honorius proceeded to purge his army and the state of barbarians and heretics. He "removed all who professed religious opinions different from his own, from every public office; … and, to complete the purification of his army, ordered a general massacre of all the women and children of the barbarians, whom the soldiers in his service had delivered up as hostages. In one day and hour these innocent victims were given up to slaughter and their property to pillage. These hostages had been left in all the Italian cities by the barbarian confederates, as a guarantee for their fidelity to Rome; when they learned that the whole had perished, in the midst of peace, in contempt of all oaths, one furious and terrific cry of vengeance arose, and 30,000 soldiers, who had been the faithful servants of the empire, at once passed over to the camp of Alaric [then in Illyria], and urged him to lead them on to Rome. Alaric, in language the moderation of which Honorius and his ministers ascribed to fear, demanded reparation for the insults offered him, and strict observance of the treaties concluded with him. The only answer he obtained was couched in terms of fresh insult, and contained an order to evacuate all the provinces of the empire." On this provocation, Alaric crossed the Alps, in October, A. D. 408, meeting no resistance till he reached Ravenna. He threatened that city, at first, but the contemptible Emperor of the West was safe in his fen-fastness, and the Goth marched on to Rome. He "arrived before Rome [in the autumn of A. D. 408] 619 years after that city had been threatened by Hannibal. During that long interval her citizens had never looked down from her walls upon the banner of an enemy [a foreign invader] waving in their plains. … Alaric did not attempt to take Rome by assault: he blockaded the gates, stopped the navigation of the Tiber, and soon famine took possession of a city which was eighteen miles in circumference and contained above a million of inhabitants. … At length, the Romans had recourse to the clemency of Alaric; and, by means of a ransom of five thousand pounds of gold and a great quantity of precious effects, the army was induced to retire into Tuscany." The standard of Alaric was now joined by 40,000 barbarian slaves, who escaped from their Italian masters, and by a large reinforcement of Goths from the Danube, led by the brother-in-law of Alaric, Ataulphus, or Athaulphus (Adolphus, in its modern form) by name. The Visigothic king offered peace to the empire if it would relinquish to him a kingdom in Noricum, Dalmatia and Venetia, with a yearly payment of gold; in the end his demands fell until they extended to Noricum, only. {2734} But the fatuous court at Ravenna refused all terms, and Alaric marched back to Rome. Once more, however, he spared the venerable capital, and sought to attain his ends by requiring the senate to renounce allegiance to Honorius and to choose a new emperor. He was obeyed and Priscus Attalus, the præfect of the city, was formally invested with the purple. This new Augustus made Alaric and Ataulphus his chief military officers, and there was peace for a little time. But Attalus, unhappily, took his elevation with seriousness and did not recognize the commands that were hidden in the advice which he got from his Gothic patron. Alaric found him to be a fool and stripped his purple robe from his shoulders within less than a year. Then, failing once more to negotiate terms of peace with the worthless emperor shut up in Ravenna, he laid siege to Rome for the third time—and the last. "On the 24th of April, 410, the year 1163 from the foundation of the august city, the Salarian gate was opened to him in the night, and the capital of the world, the queen of nations, was abandoned to the fury of the Goths. Yet this fury was not without some tinge of pity; Alaric granted a peculiar protection to the churches, which were preserved from all insult, together with their sacred treasures, and all those who had sought refuge within their walls. While he abandoned the property of the Romans to pillage, he took their lives under his protection; and it is affirmed that only a single senator perished by the sword of the barbarians. The number of plebeians who were sacrificed appears not to have been thought a matter of sufficient importance even to be mentioned. At the entrance of the Goths, a small part of the city was given up to the flames; but Alaric soon took precautions for the preservation of the rest of the edifices. Above all, he had the generosity to withdraw his army from Rome on the sixth day, and to march it into Campania, loaded, however, with an immense booty. Eleven centuries later, the army of the Constable de Bourbon showed less veneration." Alaric survived the sack of Rome but a few months, dying suddenly in the midst of preparations that he made for invading Sicily. He was buried in the bed of the little river Bisentium, which flows past the town of Cozenza, the stream being diverted for the purpose and then turned back to its course.

_J. C. L. de Sismondi, Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter 6._

ALSO IN: _E. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter 31._

_T. Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, book 1, chapter 7._

ROME: A. D. 409-414. Invasion of Spain by the Vandals, Sueves and Alans.

See SPAIN: A. D. 409-414.

ROME: A. D. 410. Abandonment of Britain.

See BRITAIN: A. D. 410.

ROME: A. D. 410-419. Treaty with the Visigoths. Their settlement in Aquitaine. Founding of their kingdom of Toulouse.

See GOTHS (VISIGOTHS): A. D. 410-419.

ROME: A. D. 410-420. The barbarian attack on Gaul joined by the Franks.

See FRANKS: A. D. 410-420.

ROME: A. D. 412-453. Mixed Roman and barbarian administration in Gaul.

See GAUL: A. D. 412-453.

ROME: A. D. 423-450. Death of Honorius. Reign of Valentinian III. and his mother Placidia. Legal separation of the Eastern and Western Empires.

The disastrous reign of Honorius, emperor of the West, was ended by his death in 423. The nearest heir to the throne was his infant nephew, Valentinian, son of his sister Placidia. The latter, after being a captive in the hands of the Goths and after sharing the Visigothic throne for some months, as wife of king Ataulphus, had been restored to her brother on her Gothic husband's death. Honorius forced her, then, to marry his favorite, the successful general, Constantius, whom he raised to the rank of Augustus and associated with himself on the throne of the West. But Constantius soon died, leaving his widow with two children—a daughter and a son. Presently, on some quarrel with Honorius, Placidia withdrew from Ravenna and took refuge at Constantinople, where her nephew Theodosius occupied the Eastern throne. She and her children were there when Honorius died, and in their absence the Western throne was usurped by a rebel named John, or Joannes, the Notary, who reigned nearly two years. With the aid of forces from the Eastern Empire he was unseated and beheaded and the child Valentinian was invested with the imperial purple, A. D. 425. For the succeeding twenty-five years his mother, Placidia, reigned in his name. As compensation to the court at Constantinople for the material aid received from it, the rich province of Dalmatia and the troubled provinces of Pannonia and Noricum, were now severed from the West and ceded to the Empire of the East. At the same time, the unity of the Roman government was formally and finally dissolved. "By a positive declaration, the validity of all future laws was limited to the dominions of their peculiar author; unless he should think proper to communicate them, subscribed with his own hand, for the approbation of his independent colleague."

_E. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter 33._

ALSO IN: _J. B. Bury, History of the Later Roman Empire, chapters 6-8._

ROME: A. D. 428-439. Conquests of the Vandals in Spain and Africa.

See VANDALS: A. D. 428; and 429-439.

ROME: A. D. 441-446. Destructive invasion of the Eastern Empire by the Huns. Cession of territory and payment of tribute to Attila.

See HUNS: A. D. 441-446.

ROME: A. D. 446. The last appeal from Britain.

See BRITAIN: A. D. 446.

ROME: A. D. 451. Great invasion of Gaul by the Huns. Their defeat at Chalons.

See HUNS: A. D. 451.

ROME: A. D. 452. Attila's invasion of Italy. The frightful devastation of his hordes. Origin of Venice.

See HUNS: A. D. 452; and VENICE: A. D. 452.

ROME: A. D. 455. Pillage of the city by the Vandals.

"The sufferings and the ignominy of the Roman empire were increased by a new calamity which happened in the year of Valentinian's death [murdered by an usurper, Petronius Maximus A. D. 455]. Eudoxia, the widow of that emperor, who had afterwards become [through compulsion] the wife of Maximus, avenged the murder of her first husband by plotting against her second; reckless how far she involved her country in the ruin. She invited to Rome Genseric, king of the Vandals, who, not content with having conquered and devastated Africa, made every effort to give a new direction to the rapacity of his subjects, by accustoming them to maritime warfare, or, more properly speaking, piracy. {2735} His armed bands, who, issuing from the shores of the Baltic, had marched over the half of Europe, conquering wherever they went, embarked in vessels which they procured at Carthage, and spread desolation over the coasts of Sicily and Italy. On the 12th of June, 455, they landed at Ostia. Maximus was killed in a seditious tumult excited by his wife. Defence was impossible; and, from the 15th to the 29th of June, the ancient capital of the world was pillaged by the Vandals with a degree of rapacity and cruelty to which Alaric and the Goths had made no approach. The ships of the pirates were moored along the quays of the Tiber, and were loaded with a booty which it would have been impossible for the soldiers to carry off by land."

_J. C. L. de Sismondi, Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter 8 (volume 1)._