Chapter 9
From this general bankruptcy one city certainly escaped; that city was Ravenna, which since the year 540, when she had opened her gates to Belisarius, had been free from attack, and had more than ever been established as the capital of the West. That position was secured to her, as I have already said, by her geographical position, which now that Constantinople had reasserted the claim of the empire to Italy established her more than at any time in her history as the necessary seat of military and administrative power; and from Ravenna as from the citadel the whole of the second part of the Gothic war was waged by the imperialists. As we might expect the true nature of that war is immediately manifested in her history at this time.
It would seem that very shortly after the occupation of Ravenna by the imperialists in 540, the re-edification of the city and its splendid embellishment was begun. The church of S. Vitalis begun by S. Ecclesius (_c_. 521-532) was finished and gloriously adorned with mosaics by S. Maximianus (_c_ 546-556), and not long after S. Apollonaris in Classe begun by S. Ursicinus (532-536) was completed and adorned by the same great bishop.
But this eagerness to mark and to express in such glorious monuments as these the great victory for Catholicism and civilisation that was then in the winning becomes even more manifest after the death of Totila and the end of the war. To the S. Agnellus and to the Church of Ravenna Justinian "_rectae fidei Augustus_" gave all the substance of the Goths, according to the _Liber Pontificalis_,[1] "not only in Ravenna itself, but in the suburban towns and in the villages, both sanctuaries and altars, slaves and maidens, whatever was theirs. _S. Mater Ecclesia Ravennas, vera mater, vera orthodoxa nam ceterae multae Ecclesiae falsam propter metum et terrores Principum superinduxere doctrinam; haec vero et veram et unicam Sanctam Catholicam tenuit Fidem, nunquam mutavit fluctuationem sustinuit, a tempestate quassata immobilis permansit_. Therefore S. Agnellus the archbishop reconciled all the churches of the Goths, which in their time or in that of King Theodoric had been built or had been occupied by the false doctrines of the Arians.... He thus reconciled the church of S. Eusebius which Unimundus the (Arian) bishop had built in the twenty-third year of King Theodoric. In the same year he reconciled the church of S. Georgius (S. Giorgio ad Tabulam fuori delle Mura) ... the church of S. Sergius which is in Classis and of S. Zenone which is in Caesarea." In Ravenna itself he reconciled the churches of S. Theodorus (S. Spirito), S. Maria in Cosmedin (the Arian Baptistery), the church of S. Martin (S. Apollinare Nuovo) which Theodoric had built, which was called _Caelum Aureum_ and which Agnellus re-decorated with the mosaics of the Martyrs and Virgins we see and the effigies of Justinian and himself.
[Footnote 1: Agnellus, _Liber Pontificalis_ (ed. Holder-Egger. P. 334) _ad vitam Sancti Agnelli_.]
Such was the work achieved in the fortunate capital. But ruined Italy awaited a more necessary, if less splendid, labour. This can have been nothing less than the resurrection of the country, which, in those eighteen years of war, can have become little less than a desert; and, as we might expect, all Italy desolate and depopulated looked to Justinian to succour her in her misery if she was not to perish under her ruins and her debts. The first step in that work was undertaken in the very year of the peace, in the August of the year 554, and it took the form of a solemn "Pragmatic Sanction" addressed to Narses and to Antiochus, the Prefect of Italy,[1] in Ravenna. It had for its object the social peace of Italy, the re-establishment of order out of the chaos of the Ostrogothic war; and it is significant of the true position of affairs that this decree asserts that it is issued by the emperor in reply to the petition of the pope.
[Footnote 1: The fact that it was addressed to both surely seems to show that Narses at this time only held a military power in Italy. This is interesting as touching the discussion later on of the genesis of the exarchate.]
It consists of twenty-seven articles, and first establishes what is to be considered as still having authority in that tempestuous past; what part of it is to remain and to be confirmed and what is to be utterly swept away. Thus the emperor confirms all dispositions made by Amalasuntha, Athalaric, and Theodahad, as well as all his own acts--and these would include Theodoric's--and those of Theodora. But everything done by "the most wicked tyrant Totila" is null and void, "for we will not allow these law-abiding days of ours to take any account of what was done by him in the time of his tyranny."[1] Totila had indeed most cruelly attacked the great landed proprietors whom he suspected of too great an attachment for Constantinople; he had attacked them in their persons and in their wealth. With a single stroke of the pen Justinian, as it were, effaced all the ordinances of the tyrant and rendered again to their legitimate masters, as far as it could be done, their lands, their flocks, their peasants, and their slaves which had been taken from them, or which fear had caused them to alienate.
[Footnote 1: Cf. Hodgkin, _op. cit_. vi. pp. 519-520.]
Such were the political achievements of the decree. Nor were its financial provisions less far-reaching. Something had to be done to meet the crisis resulting from the enormous quantity of debt. Everywhere Justinian undertook great public works, and tried to repair the destruction caused by the war; but it is probable that in reality he achieved very little. He had enriched the Church; he had re-established the great proprietors in their lands and their rights, but the industry and commerce of Italy, save perhaps at Ravenna and at Naples, he could not restore. And we seem to understand that the mere lack of men left whole districts of Italy uncultivated and desert.
As for the administrative and legal clauses of the decree, they gave the Italian--the Roman as he is called--the right to have his suit heard by a civil judge instead of a military official. This established the security of the Italian against the barbaric hosts the imperial armies had brought into the country. But perhaps more important, and certainly more significant, is the twelfth clause of the decree which relates to the way in which the _Judices Provinciarum_ are to be appointed. "We order," says Justinian, "that only fit and proper persons able to administer the local government shall be chosen, and this by the bishops and chief persons of each province from the inhabitants of that province." This clause was soon proved to contain so much wisdom that in 569 by Justinian's successor it was extended to the provinces of the Eastern empire.
In all this we recognise the work of the great reformer who had already produced the _Corpus Juris Civilis_, consisting of the Institutes, Digest, Code, and Novellae, which more than anything else he did--and he did everything--determined that Europe, which he had secured for ever, should be a Roman thing established upon Roman Law. But are we also to see in this great man the creator of the exarchate, that citadel of the empire in Italy which was to endure, though almost all else perished, till Charlemagne appeared and the empire itself suddenly re-arose, armed at all points and ready for battle? It might seem that we are not to attribute that great scheme to Justinian, but rather to a later recognition of the force and reality of the disasters that so few years after his death descended once more upon Italy.
When Narses at the head of the armies of Justinian had in 554 conquered the Goths and possessed Italy, the administrative divisions of the peninsula would seem to have remained almost the same as they had been in the time of Honorius. Indeed the re-entry of Italy within the empire was accompanied by no important change in the provincial divisions of the peninsular because there was no necessity for it. Narses, who ruled just eleven years in Ravenna, was never known by the title of exarch. On the contrary, Procopius and Agathias call him simply the general-in-chief of the Roman army [Greek: o Romaion strataegos], and pope Pelagius calls him _Patricius et Dux in Italia_, and others, among them Gregory the Great and Agnellus, simply _Patricius_. But it is obvious that there was something new in the official situation and that certain extraordinary powers were conferred upon Narses. And it is the same with his successor Longinus. All the texts that mention him, including the _Liber Pontificalis_, call him _Praefectus_. But the transformation from which the exarchate arose was more obscure and far more slow than any official reform of Justinian's could have been. It is in part the result of the new condition of the country, which Justinian had had to take into account, but it is much more the result of the progress of the Lombard conquest and the new necessities of defence, which not one of the three great men who had restored Italy to the empire lived to see.
For Belisarius and Justinian both died in 565, and Narses, who was recalled in that year by the foolish and insolent Sophia, the wife of the new emperor Justin II., seems to have died about 572.
It is difficult to determine to which of these three great and heroic figures Italy, and through Italy, Europe, owes most, but since it was Justinian who chose and employed them we must, I think, accord him, here too, the first place in our remembrance.
Belisarius, who had fought the first great war so gloriously against Vitiges, and for so long and with so little encouragement had opposed Totila in the second, is of course one of the great soldiers of the world and perhaps the greatest the empire ever employed. His capture of Ravenna, by stratagem it is true, but against time and, as it were, in spite of the emperor, brought the first Gothic war to an end, and would, had he been left in Italy a few months longer, have prevented all the long drawn out agony of the second. As it was his achievement, and his achievement alone, made that second war something better than the hopeless affair it seemed for so long, and though he himself to all appearances made little headway against Totila, it was his series of heroic campaigns, in which he refused despair, that made the ever glorious march of Narses possible, and the final crushing of the barbarian in the Apennines after all but the crown of his endeavour.
Of his master, the great emperor, it is not for me to speak since to this day his works speak for him. The thirty-eight years of his reign are the most brilliant period of the later Roman empire, and if the military triumphs he conceived were the work of Belisarius and Narses we must attribute to him alone the magnificent conception, the tireless energy, and the heroic purpose which established the great pillars of the _Corpus Juris Civilis_ which is the legal foundation of mediaeval and of modern Europe, the basis of all Canon Law and of all Civil Law in every civilised country. Of his great ecclesiastical polity perhaps we must speak with less enthusiasm, though not with less wonder; while his glorious buildings remain only less enduring than his codification of the laws. If in Ravenna we are most nearly and splendidly reminded of him in S. Vitale, we do not forget that he was the creator of perhaps the greatest ecclesiastical building left to us, the mighty church--lost to us now for near five hundred years--of S. Sophia in Constantinople. On the whole we see in Justinian the greatest of all the emperors save Augustus, and perhaps Constantine. Nor can any later state show us so great a ruler.
Justinian in his Italian designs had been very well served by Belisarius, nor were his ideas less splendidly carried out by Narses. Indeed, in many ways the eunuch was the better instrument and especially in administration. He ruled in peace in Ravenna as I have said for eleven years, devoting himself to the resurrection of unhappy Italy. In this we may think he was as successful as the shortness of the time of his rule would allow. The catastrophe that put an end alike to his work and to the regeneration of Italy was the death of Justinian. In that very year, 565, the great eunuch was deposed, an insulting recall reached him from the empress Sophia, and he retired to Rome, where he passed the few years that remained to him in retirement, and died there, it is thought, in 572.
A curious and certainly an unproved accusation hangs over his name. It seems that his government of Italy was not wholly grateful to the Italians, who it must be remembered were ruined and whom many years of eager self-denial would hardly render solvent again. Now the business of Narses was to achieve this solvency and to pay out of Italy some sort of interest upon the enormous sums Justinian had disbursed for the great war. If he incurred the hatred of the Italians it would not be surprising, nor would it lead us to accuse him of tyranny. "Where Narses the eunuch rules," they said, "he makes us slaves." This cry came to the ears of the emperor for whom it was meant. No doubt, being a fool, he was anxious to be rid of Justinian's pro-consul. However that may be, Narses was recalled, the empress, it is said, sending him a message to the effect that as he was a eunuch she would appoint him to apportion the spinning to the women of her household. To this Narses is reported to have replied, doubtless with much the same smile as that with which he had greeted the equestrian display of Totila, that he would spin her a thread of which neither she nor the emperor Justin would be able to find the end. In the course of time this mysterious threat, which was probably never uttered, was said to refer to the enormous catastrophe which within three years of Narses' recall fell upon Italy--the Lombard invasion. And Narses, who had employed the Lombards in the last campaign against Totila, was said to have revenged himself by inviting them into Italy to possess it.
The accusation rests upon no good authority, and is altogether unlikely when we remember how great a part of his life had been devoted to the incorportion of Italy within the empire. But there is this much truth in it we may perhaps think; that had the great eunuch been left in command, Alboin would not have dared to come on, and if he had dared, would have found an army and an Italy ready to fling him back into his darkness.
IX
THE CITADEL OF THE EMPIRE IN ITALY
THE LOMBARD INVASION
It was upon the second day of April 568, upon the Monday within the octave of Easter, that Alboin set out to cross the Julian Alps, to descend upon an Italy which even the great Narses had not been able, in the short sixteen years of peace he had secured her, to recover from the utter exhaustion of a generation of war. No army awaited him, no attempt was made to crush his rude and barbarous army in the marches, he was unopposed, save that the bishop of Treviso begged him to spare the property of his church, and presently the whole province of Venetia, with the exception of Padua, Mantua, and Monselice, was in his hands. Those who could, doubtless fled away, for the most part to that new settlement in the Venetian lagoons which was presently to give birth to Venice and which had been founded by those who had fled from Attila; but there were many who could not flee. These came under the cruel yoke of the invader. Perhaps Alboin spent the winter in Verona, perhaps in Friuli; wherever it was, he but prepared his advance and still no one appeared to say him nay. By the end of 569 all Cisalpine Gaul with Liguria and Milan, except Pavia, the coast, Cremona, Piacenza, and a few smaller places, were in his hands. Indeed, in all that terrible flood of disasters we hear of but one great city which offered even for a time a successful resistance. This was Pavia, naturally so strongly defended by the Po and the Ticino. Alboin established an army about it, and swore to massacre all its inhabitants since it alone had dared to resist him. Pavia fell to the Lombard, after a three years' siege, in 572; but Alboin was prevented from carrying out his vow, and not long after Pavia became the capital of the Lombard power in Italy.
Meantime, those three years, during which Pavia held her own, had not been wasted by the barbarian. He crossed the Apennines, we may believe as Totila had done, by the old deserted way to Fiesole, brought all Tuscany under his yoke and a great part both of central and of southern Italy, establishing there two "duchies" as the centres of his power at Spoleto and Benevento. Then he returned to take Pavia, all this time besieged, and in the same year, 572, it is probable that Piacenza fell also, and Mantua. All Italy was in confusion, the system of government re-established by Narses broken; the work of Justinian's reconquest seemed all undone. That it was not wholly undone, that it lived on and was at last re-established, we owe to two great facts: the conversion of the Lombards to Catholicism by Gregory the Great and the establishment of the exarchate, the entrenchment of Roman power and civilisation in Ravenna. Let us consider these things.
The Lombards were barbarians and therefore pagans or Arians, but their Arianism was of a different kind from that of the Huns, different even from that of the Ostrogoths. Indeed, though the Lombards may be called Arian, for indeed such Christianity as they possessed was wholly Arian, they were but little removed from mere heathenism. It is true that they sacked churches, slaughtered priests, and carried off the holy vessels everywhere as they came into Italy; but they did this, it would seem, not from a sectarian hatred of the Catholic Faith, but from mere heathenism. As pagans, heathen or semi-heathen, they might be converted, and thus their advent was ultimately less dangerous to our civilisation than the conquest of the Ostrogoths threatened to be. I do not mean to suggest that that advent was without danger. It was of course full of dreadful peril, but that peril was chiefly material and not spiritual; it could destroy, but not create; moreover, since in the main it was pagan, it could only destroy material things.
It is unthinkable that the Italy of the sixth century was for a moment in danger of losing its Faith, of being dechristianised. That, all things considered, in the third fourth and fifth centuries there had more than once been a real danger of the victory of some heresy, and especially of that subtle Arianism, the forerunner of Mahometanism, which all the invaders professed, and most of them so bitterly, we know; as we know that with the hard won victory of the Catholic Faith the whole of the future was safe; but that in the Italy of the sixth century the Faith was in danger from a horde of semi-pagan barbarians is not to be thought of. To this extent, and it is three parts at least of the whole, the Lombard invasion was less perilous than those which had come and passed away before it. Once more, the Catholic church was to be victorious, but in a different fashion. It cast out the Visigoths, the Huns, the Vandals, and the Ostrogoths from Italy, for it could not convert them; the Lombards it converted and they remained. It converted them because they were rather heathen than Arian, and the victory was won by that great Gregory who, seeing our forefathers in the Forum of Rome, and loving them for their bright hair and open faces--_non Angli sed Angeli si Christiani_--sent S. Austin to turn them too from their pagan rites and gather them into the fold of Christ.
But there was something else beside the fact that the Lombards were pagan, and therefore to be converted, which was a part of the salvation of Italy.
It is possible that the Lombards might have been as Catholic as the Franks and yet, barbarians as they were, have destroyed civilisation in Italy, have broken the continuity of Europe, have obliterated all our traditions, and altogether undone the great work of Justinian. It is possible, but it is highly improbable; that it was impossible we owe to Ravenna.
Ravenna was impregnable and her seaward gate was always open. During all the years of the Lombard domination she was the citadel of the empire in Italy, the seat of the prefect and the exarch, the imperial representatives.
It must be grasped that even after the fall of Ticinum in 572, as the Byzantine historian tells us, perhaps no one, and certainly no one in Ravenna, regarded the invasion as anything but a passing evil like all the other barbarian incursions. No one believed Italy to be irrevocably lost; on the contrary, everyone was assured that the lost provinces could soon be delivered again.
This may explain, though perhaps it cannot excuse, the passive attitude of Longinus, the successor of Narses, who in Ravenna represented the emperor in Italy, perhaps till the year 584. We know nothing of any attempts he may have made to stem the barbarian flood, and indeed the only incident in his career with which we are acquainted is romantic rather than military or political. For when Rosamond, the queen of the Lombards, murdered her husband Alboin in his palace at Verona, because he had forced her to pledge him in a goblet fashioned from the skull of her father, she fled away with her stepdaughter Albswinda, the great Lombard spoil, and her two accomplices, Helmichis her lover and Peredeus the chamberlain, and came to seek shelter in Ravenna. It seems she had written to Longinus and he, perhaps, hoping for some political advantage, and certainly full of the tales of her beauty, sent a ship up the Po to bring her to him with her two companions. When he saw her he found that rumour had not lied, and longing for her, suggested that she should kill Helmichis and marry himself. Whether from fear or ambition she did this thing, and slew her lover with a cup of poison as he came from the bath. But he, even as he drank understanding all, suddenly forced the same cup upon her, and standing over her with a naked sword forced her to drink; so that they both lay dead upon the pavement.
Albswinda and the Lombard treasure, the spoil of the cities of Italy, were sent with Peredeus to Constantinople. And it may be that it was in them Longinus hoped to find his political advantage; in this, however, he was deceived. It is true that a pause in the Lombard advance followed the death of Alboin, and that Cleph, his successor, was soon murdered. But the pause in the advance, though, through it all, Rome was blockaded, was due to the fact that Authari, the heir to the Lombard throne, was but a boy. Nevertheless, this interval was used by Constantinople to despatch Baduarius, the son-in-law of the emperor Justin, to Italy with an army, but without success; and in 578, the year in which Justin died, the Lombards were bought off from Rome with imperial gold, only to turn upon the very citadel of the empire in Italy, Ravenna itself. In the year 579 Faroald, duke of Spoleto, fell upon Classis, and took it and spoiled it.
This, however, was but an isolated effort, and though the Lombards held Classis, they achieved little else in Italy till after Authari was chosen king in 584.
In the following year Smaragdus, as we may think, was appointed to succeed Longinus and apparently with new powers, and three years later, in the very year that the heroic Insula Comacina was taken by the Lombards, Classis was recovered for the empire.
The Lombards had then been ravaging Italy for twenty years, an extraordinary change had come over the provinces that Justinian had so hardly recovered, and this change is at once visible in the imperial administration in Italy. The exarchate appears.