barbaric confederates, who had placed him where he was, to grant them a third of the lands, certainly, of the great Italian landowners; but he created nothing new; like all the barbarians he was sterile, his only service was a service of destruction. With him even this service was small.
His fall was curious and is exceedingly significant.
In 481, after the murder of the emperor Julius Nepos in Salona, Odoacer led an expedition into Dalmatia to chastise the murderers and seized the opportunity to make himself master of Dalmatia. This action at once renewed the suspicion of Constantinople; but when in 484 Odoacer entered into negotiations with Illus, the last of the insurgents who disturbed the reign of Zeno, Constantinople decided that he must be broken; therefore Feletheus, king of the Rugians upon the Danube, was stirred up against him, and when that failed, for Odoacer defeated him, Constantinople sent Theodoric and his Ostrogothic host into Italy to dispose of Odoacer the patrician[1].
[Footnote 1: Cf. Anon. Valesii, “Missus ab imperatore Zenone de partibus orientis ad defendendam sibi Italiam….”]
Theodoric, another unlettered barbarian and heretic, but a man of a great and noble character, set out for Italy from Nova on the southern bank of the Danube, where he had been a constant danger to the Eastern provinces, in the autumn of 488. His purpose, set forth in his own words to the Emperor Zeno, was as follows: “Although your servant is maintained in affluence by your liberality, graciously listen to the wishes of my heart. Italy, the inheritance of your predecessors, and Rome itself, the head and mistress of the world, now fluctuate under the violence and oppression of Odoacer the mercenary. Direct me with my national troops to march against this tyrant. If I fall, you will be delivered from an expensive and troublesome friend; if, with the Divine permission, I succeed, I shall govern, in your name and to your glory, the Roman senate and the part of the republic delivered from slavery by my victorious arms.”
That march was an exodus. Procopius tells us that, “with Theodoric went the people of the Goths, putting their wives and children and as much of their furniture as they could take with them into their waggons,” and as Ennodius, bishop of Ticinum, asserts, it was “a world that migrated” with Theodoric into Italy, “a world of which every member is nevertheless your kinsman.” “Waggons,” says he, “are made to do duty as houses, and into these wandering habitations all things that can minister to the needs of the occupants are poured. Then were the tools of Ceres, and the stones with which the corn is ground, dragged along by the labouring oxen. Pregnant mothers, forgetful of their sex and of the burden which they bore, undertook the toil of providing food for the families of thy people. Followed the reign of winter in thy camp. Over the hair of thy men the long frost threw a veil of snowy white; the icicles hung in a tangle from their beards. So hard was the frost that the garment which the matron’s persevering toil had woven had to be broken before a man might fit it to his body. Food for thy marching armies was forced from the grasp of the hostile nations around, or procured by the cunning of the hunter.”[1] It has been supposed by Mr. Hodgkin that not less than 40,000 fighting men and some 200,000 souls in all thus entered Italy. To us it might seem that no such number of people could have lived without commissariat during that tremendous march of seven hundred miles through some of the poorest land of Europe in the depth of winter. However that may be, Theodoric after many an encounter with barbarians wilder than his own descended from the Julian Alps into Venetia in August 489, after a march of not less than ten months.
[Footnote 1: Ennodius, _Panegyricus_, p. 173. Trs. by Hodgkin, _op. cit_. iii. 179-80.]
Odoacer was waiting for him. He met him near the site of the old fortress of Aquileia, which Attila had annihilated, that once held the passage of the Sontius (Isonzo). He was defeated and all Venetia fell into the hands of the Ostrogoth. Odoacer retreated to Verona, that red fortress on the Adige; once more and more certainly he was beaten. He retreated to Ravenna,[2] while Theodoric advanced to Milan, to Milan which now led nowhere.
[Footnote 2: “Et Ravennam cum exercitu fugiens pervenit.” Anon. Valesii, 50.]
After Verona, Theodoric had received the submission of a part of Odoacer’s army under Tufa. When he had possessed himself of Milan, he sent these renegades and certain nobles with their men from his own army, apparently under the leadership of Tufa, to besiege Ravenna. They came down the Aemilian Way as far as Faventia (Faenza). There no doubt a road left the great highway for the impregnable city of the marshes. At Faventia, then, Theodoric expected to begin to blockade Ravenna. In this he was mistaken. Suddenly Tufa deserted his new master, was joined by Odoacer, who came to Faventia, and certain of the Ostrogothic nobles, if not all of them, were slaughtered. The expedition was lost and not the expedition alone: Milan was no longer safe. Therefore Theodoric evacuated that city, always almost indefensible, and occupied Ticinum (Pavia), which was naturally defended by the Ticino and the Po. There he established himself in winter quarters.
A new diversion from the west, a frustrated attack of Gundobald and his Burgundians, kept Theodoric busy for a year. Meantime Odoacer appeared in the plain, retook and held all the country between Faventia and Cremona and even visited Milan, which he chastised. Then in August 490 Theodoric met him on the Adda, and again Odoacer was defeated, and again he fled back to Ravenna. All over Italy his cause tottered, was betrayed, or failed. A general massacre of the confederate troops throughout the peninsula seems to have occurred. And by the end of the year there remained to him but Ravenna, his fortress, and the two cities that it commanded, Cesena upon the Aemilian Way and Rimini in the midst of the narrow pass at the head of the Via Flaminia. Theodoric himself began the siege of Ravenna.
This siege, the first that Ravenna had ever experienced, endured for near three years, from the autumn of 490 to the spring of 493. “_Et mox_” says a chronicle of the time, “_subsecutus est eum patricius Theodoricus veniens in Pineta, et fixit fossatum, obsidiens Odoacrem clausum per trienum in Ravenna et factus est usque ad sex solidos modicus tritici_….”[1] Theodoric established himself in a fortified camp in the Pineta with a view to preventing food or reinforcements arriving to his enemy from the sea. Ravenna was closed upon all sides and before the end of the siege corn rose in the beleaguered city to famine price, some seventy-two shillings of our money per peck, and the inhabitants were forced to eat the skins of animals and all sorts of offal, and many died of hunger.
[Footnote 1: Anon. Valesii.]
In 491, according to the same chronicler,[1] a sortie was made by Odoacer and his barbarians, but after a desperate fight in the Pineta this was repelled by Theodoric. In 492, another chronicle tells us,[2] Theodoric took Rimini and from thence brought a fleet of ships to the Porto Leone, some six miles from Ravenna, thus cutting off the city from the sea. Till at last in the beginning of 493 Odoacer was compelled to open negotiations for surrender. He gave his son Thelane as a hostage, and on the 26th February Theodoric entered Classis, and on the following day the treaty of peace was signed. Upon the 5th March 493, according to Agnellus, “that most blessed man, the archbishop John, opened the gates of the city which Odoacer had closed, and went forth with crosses and thuribles and the Holy Gospels seeking peace, with the priests and clergy singing psalms, and prostrating himself upon the ground obtained what he sought. He welcomed the new king coming from the East and peace was granted to him, not only with the citizens of Ravenna, but with the other Romans for whom the blessed John asked it.”
[Footnote 1: Anon. Valesii.]
[Footnote 2: Agnellus, _Liber Pontificalis Rav_.]
The terms of that treaty are extraordinarily significant of the importance of Ravenna in the defence of Italy. It would seem that Theodoric had possessed himself of everything but Ravenna easily enough, yet without Ravenna everything else was nothing. The city was, in spite of blockade and famine, impregnable, and it commanded so much, was still indeed, as always, the key to Italy and the plain and the very gate of the West, that not to possess it was to lose everything. Its surrender was necessary and Theodoric offered extraordinary terms to obtain it. Odoacer was not only to keep his life but his power. He was to rule as the equal of Theodoric. This mighty concession shows us at once what Ravenna really was, what part she played in the government of Italy, and how unique was her position in the military scheme of that country.
Theodoric had certainly no intention of carrying out the terms of his treaty. In the very month in which he signed it, he invited Odoacer to a feast at the Palace “in Lauro” to the south-east of Ravenna. When the patrician arrived two petitioners knelt before him each clasping one of his hands, and two of Theodoric’s men stepped from hiding to kill him. Perhaps they were not barbarians: at any rate, they lacked the courage and the contempt alike of law and of honour necessary to commit so cold a murder. It was Theodoric himself who lifted his sword and hewed his enemy in twain from the shoulder to the loins. “Where is God?” Odoacer, expecting the stroke, had demanded. And Theodoric answered, “Thus didst thou to my friends.” And after he said, “I think the wretch had no bones in his body.”
The barbarian it might seem had certainly nothing to learn from the worst of the emperors in treachery and dishonour.
Theodoric set up his seat in the city he had so perfidiously won, and for the next thirty years appears as the governour of Italy. He had set out, it will be remembered, as the soldier of Constantinople, had asked for leave to make his expedition, and had protested his willingness to govern in the name of the emperor and for his glory. It is not perhaps surprising that a barbarian, and especially Theodoric who knew so well how to win by treachery what he could not otherwise obtain, should after his victory forget the promise he had made to his master. After the battle of the Adda he had the audacity to send an embassy to the emperor to request that he might be allowed to clothe himself in the royal mantle. This was of course refused. Nevertheless the Goths “confirmed Theodoric to themselves as king without waiting for the order of the new emperor Anastasius.”[1] This “confirmation,” whatever it may have meant to the Goths, meant nothing to the Romans or to the empire. For some years Constantinople refused all acknowledgment to Theodoric, till in 497 peace was made and Theodoric obtained recognition, much it may be thought as Odoacer had done, from Constantinople; but the ornaments of the palace at Ravenna, which Odoacer had sent to New Rome, were brought back, and therefore it would seem that the royalty of Theodoric was acknowledged by the empire; but we have no authority to see in this more than an acknowledgment of the king of the Goths, the vicegerent perhaps of the emperor in Italy. What Theodoric’s title may have been we have no means of knowing: _de jure_ he was the representative of the emperor in Italy: _de facto_ he was the absolute ruler, the _tyrannus_, as Odoacer had been, of the country; but he never ventured to coin money bearing his effigy and superscription and he invariably sent the names of the consuls, whom he appointed, to Constantinople for confirmation. He ruled too, as Odoacer had done, by Roman law, and the Arian heresy, which he and his barbarians professed as their religion, was not till the very end of his reign permitted precedence over the Catholic Faith. For the most part too he governed by means of Roman officials, and to this must be ascribed the enormous success of his long government.
[Footnote 1: Anon. Valesu, 57.]
[Illustration: CAPITAL FROM THE COLONNADE IN PIAZZA MAGGIORE]
For that he was successful, that he gave Italy peace during a whole generation, is undeniable. In all the chronicles there is little but praise of him. The chief of them[1] says of him: “He was an illustrious man and full of good-will towards all. He reigned thirty-three years[2] and during thirty of these years so great was the happiness of Italy that even the wayfarers were at peace. For he did nothing evil. He governed the two nations, the Goths and the Romans, as though they were one people. Belonging himself to the Arian sect, he yet ordained that the civil administration should remain for the Romans as it had been under the emperors. He gave presents and rations to the people, yet though he found the treasury ruined he brought it by hard work into a flourishing state. He attempted nothing against the Catholic Faith. He exhibited games in the circus and amphitheatre, and received from the Romans the names of Trajan and Valentinian, for the happy days of those most prosperous emperors he did in truth seek to restore, and at the same time the Goths rendered true obedience to their valiant king according to the edict which he had given them.
[Footnote 1: Anon. Valesii. This was probably Bishop Maximian, a Catholic bishop of Ravenna. I follow, with a few changes, Mr. Hodgkin’s translation.]
[Footnote 2: Thirty-two years and a half from the death of Odoacer; thirty-seven from his descent into Italy.]
“He gave one of his daughters in marriage to the king of the Visigoths in Gaul, another to the son of the Burgundian king; his sister to the king of the Vandals and his niece to the king of the Thuringians. Thus he pleased all the nations round him, for he was a lover of manufactures and a great restorer of cities. He restored the Aqueduct of Ravenna which Trajan had built, and again after a long interval brought water into the city. He completed but did not dedicate the Palace, and he finished the Porticoes about it. At Verona he erected Baths and a Palace, and constructed a Portico from the Gate to the Palace. The Aqueduct, which had been destroyed long since, he renewed, and brought in water through it. He also surrounded the city with new walls. At Ticinum (Pavia) too he built a Palace, Baths, and an Amphitheatre and erected walls round the city. On many other cities he bestowed similar benefits.
“Thus he so delighted the nations near him that they entered into a league with him hoping that he would be their king. The merchants, too, from many provinces flocked to his dominions, for so great was the order which he maintained, that, if any one wished to keep gold and silver in the country it was as safe as in a walled city. A proof of this was that he never made gates for any city of Italy, and the gates that already existed were never closed. Any one who had business to do, might go about it as safely by night as by day.”
But if such praise sound fulsome, let us hear what the sceptical and censorious Procopius has to say:
“Theodoric,” he tells us, “was an extraordinary lover of justice and adhered vigorously to the laws. He guarded the country from barbarian invasions, and displayed the greatest intelligence and prudence. There was in his government scarcely a trace of injustice towards his subjects, nor would he permit any of those under him to attempt anything of the kind except that the Goths divided among themselves the same proportion of the land of Italy as Odoacer had given to his confederates. Thus then Theodoric was in name a tyrant, in fact a true king, not inferior to the best of his predecessors, and his popularity increased greatly both with the Goths and the Italians, and this was contrary to the ordinary course of human affairs. For generally as different classes in the state want different things, the government which pleases one party incurs the hatred of the other. After a reign of thirty-seven years he died having been a terror to all his enemies, but leaving a deep regret for his loss in the hearts of his subjects.”
In these panegyrics, which we cannot but accept as sincere, mention is made of one of the greatest virtues of Theodoric, his reparation of and care for the great monuments of the empire. In Ravenna we read he repaired the Aqueduct which Trajan had built and which had long been out of repair, so that Ravenna always deficient in water had for many years suffered on this account. In the _Variae_ of Cassiodorus, his minister and a Roman, we read as follows:–
“_King Theodoric to all Cultivators_.
“The Aqueducts are an object of our special care. We desire you at once to root up the shrubs growing in the Signine channel, which will before long become big trees scarcely to be hewn down with an axe and which interfere with the purity of the water in the Aqueduct of Ravenna. Vegetation is the peaceable overturner of buildings, the battering-ram which brings them to the ground, though the trumpets never sound for siege. Now we shall have Baths again that we may look upon with pleasure; water which will cleanse not stain[1]; water after using which we shall not require to wash ourselves again; drinking water too, such as the mere sight of it will not take away all appetite for food[2].”
[Footnote 1: Cf. Sidonius Apollinaris above.]
[Footnote 2: Cassiodorus, _Variae_, v. 38. Trs. Hodgkin, _The Letters of Cassiodorus_ (Oxford, 1886).]
The general restoration of the great material works of the empire was 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.
The fall of Naples brought Theodahad to the ground. The Goths deposed him and raised upon their shields Vitiges the soldier. As for Theodahad he was overtaken on the road to Ravenna, whither he was flying, and his throat was cut as he lay on the pavement of the way, “as a priest cuts the throat of his victim.”
If Theodahad was a villain as well as a fool, perhaps Vitiges was only the latter. At any rate, he is generally considered to have acted with criminal folly, when, as the first act of his reign, he abandoned Rome and fell back upon Ravenna, determined to make his great defence in northern Italy. But I think, if we consider the position more closely, we shall see that Vitiges was not such a fool as he looks. He had seen the two great fortresses of Palermo and Naples fall, and mainly for the same reason, the fact that the whole of their populations except the Gothic garrisons were eagerly on the side of the enemy. The situation of Rome, its great size, made it difficult to defend except with a very great army, and this would become a hundred times more difficult, if not impossible, if the population were to side with the attack. Yet not only was that already certain, but the sympathies of the citizens there might be expected to be even more passionately Roman than others had been elsewhere; for Rome was the capital of Catholicism, the throne of the Church, the seat of Peter. The Goth had to face the fact that, while he was perhaps hardly holding his own in Rome, Belisarius might stealthily pass on to overthrow the Gothic citadel at Ravenna. He had to ask himself whether he could expect to defend both Rome and Ravenna, for if Ravenna were to fall the whole kingdom was lost, since now, not less but rather more than before, Ravenna was the key to Italy.
There is this also; Justinian had in the summer of 535 despatched two armies from Constantinople. One of these was that which Belisarius had disembarked in Sicily, and which till now had been so uniformly and so easily victorious. The other under Mundus had entered Dalmatia which it had completely wrested from the Goths by the middle of 536. It is probable that Vitiges expected to be attacked in the rear and from the north by this victorious army. If that should fall upon Ravenna while the Gothic strength was engaged in the defence of Rome, what would be the fate of that principal city, and with that lost, what would become of him in the Catholic capital?
Of course Vitiges ought to have met the imperial army in the field and given battle. That was the true solution. But no Gothic army ever dared to face Belisarius in the open, for though the Goths enormously outnumbered his small force of some 8000 men, they feared him as the possessor of a superior arm in the _Hippotoxotai_, mounted troops armed with the bow, and above all they feared his genius.
But Vitiges was no fool; his cause was hopeless from the first. He abandoned Rome and fell back upon Ravenna, because that was the best thing to be done in the circumstances in which he found himself. Among these must be reckoned the newness of his authority and the necessity of consolidating it by a marriage with a princess of the blood of Theodoric. As it happened, this retreat enabled him to prolong a war that at first looked like coming to an end in a few months for four more years.
Vitiges then abandoned Rome, but it seems not altogether. What he may be supposed to have imagined Belisarius doing to his disadvantage, that he himself did. He left in Rome a garrison of four thousand men under a veteran general Leudaris, while he himself with the Gothic army fell back upon Ravenna. No sooner was he gone than the surrender of the City was offered to Belisarius by pope Silverius who spoke for the citizens and the Roman people. This was the reality of the situation. Then indeed an almost incredible blunder was committed, but not by Vitiges. The four thousand Goths whom he had left to hold the City, and at least to delay and waste the imperialists, marched out of Rome along the Flaminian Way as Belisarius entered from the south by the Via Latina. Leudaris alone refused to quit this post. He was taken prisoner, and sent with the keys of the Eternal City to Justinian.
Belisarius established himself upon the Pincian Hill, and his first act after his occupation of the City is significant both of his profound knowledge of the barbarians and of the immutable characteristics of a Latin people.
It is possible that the Romans, seeing the fall of Palermo and Naples and the occupation of Rome itself obtained so easily, believed that the Goths were finally disposed of. But Belisarius’ vast experience of the character of the barbarians taught him otherwise. He immediately began to provision Rome from Sicily as fast as he could, and he at once undertook the fortification of the City, the repair of the Aurelian Wall. In these acts of Belisarius two things become evident. We see that he expected the return of the Goths, and we are made aware of the fact that they had neglected to fortify the City.
It must be well seized by the reader, that the Gothic armies very greatly outnumbered the imperial troops, who were but a small expedition of not more than eight thousand men face to face with an immense horde of barbarians. The great advantage of the imperialists was that they were fighting in a friendly country, and they had too certain superiorities of armament which civilisation may always depend upon having at its command as against barbarians. Nevertheless, Belisarius knew that his end would be more securely won if he could wear down the barbarians, always impatient of so slow a business as a siege, from behind fortifications. He expected the barbarians, unstable in judgment and impatient of any but the simplest strategy and tactics, to swarm again and again about the City, and he was right: what he expected came to pass.
On the other hand, we see in the neglect on the part of the Goths of all fortification of the City a neglect instantly repaired by Belisarius, a characteristic persistent and perhaps ineradicable in the Teutonic mind from the days of Tacitus to our own time. The Romans had always asserted, and those nations to-day who are of their tradition still assert, that the spade is the indispensable weapon of the soldier. But the barbarians and those nations to-day who are of their tradition, while they have not been so foolish as to refuse the spade altogether, have always fortified reluctantly. You see these two characteristics at work to-day in the opposite methods of the French and the Germans, just as you see them at work in the sixth century when Belisarius rebuilt the fortifications of the City which the Goths had neglected.
And if we have praised Vitiges for his retreat upon Ravenna, how much more must we praise Belisarius for the fortification of Rome. For if the one had for its result the prolongation of the war for some four years, the other determined what the end of that war should be.
Let us once more consider the military situation. It is evident that Vitiges evacuated Rome because he was afraid of losing Ravenna, his base, by an outflanking movement on the part of Belisarius and perhaps by a new attack from Dalmatia.[1]
[Footnote 1: My theory of the strategy of Vitiges and of his purpose is perhaps unorthodox; the orthodox theory being that he was a fool and the abandonment of Rome a mere blunder. But my theory would seem to be accurate enough, for Vitiges’s first act from Ravenna was to despatch an army into Dalmatia.]
In leaving a garrison within the City of some four thousand men–say half as many as the whole imperialist army–he at least hoped to delay the enemy till he had secured himself in the north and to waste him. I do not think he expected to hold the city for any length of time, for the whole country was spiritually with the enemy.
What he hoped to gain by his retreat was, however, not merely the security of the north. He hoped also to lure Belisarius thither after him where, in a country less wholly Latin and imperialist, he would have a better chance of annihilating him by mere numbers once and for all. To this supreme hope and expectation of the Goth’s, the refortification of Rome by Belisarius finally put an end. It was a countermove worthy of such a master and entirely in keeping with the Roman tradition.
At first it must have appeared to Vitiges that the course he had expected Belisarius to pursue was actually being followed; for presently the imperialists began to move up the Flaminian Way. But it was soon evident that this was no advance in force, but rather a part of the fortification of the City. All the places occupied were fortresses and all were with one exception upon the Via Flaminia which they commanded. The first of these strong places was Narni, which held the great bridge over the Nera at the southern exit of the passes between the valley of Spoleto and the lower Tiber valley, where the two roads over the mountains, one by Todi, the other by Spoleto, met. The second place occupied was Spoleto at the head, and the third was Perugia at the foot, of the great valley of Spoleto, from which the Via Flaminia rose to cross the central Apennines. The three places were occupied without much trouble, and it was thus attempted to make the great road from the north impassable.
If Vitiges, as I believe, thought the imperialists would immediately follow him northward he was no more deceived than the Romans themselves. They had surrendered the City to Belisarius to save it from attack and the last thing they desired was to suffer a siege. A feeling of resentment, the old jealousy of Constantinople, seems to have appeared, and in this Vitiges thought he saw his opportunity. With 150,000 men, according to Procopius, he issued from Ravenna and marched upon Rome, avoiding apparently the three forts held by the imperialists, for he came, again according to Procopius, through Sabine territory and therefore his advance was upon the eastern bank of the Tiber. However that may be, he got without being attacked as far as the bridge over the Anio on the Via Salaria, or as the Milvian Bridge over the Tiber where the Via Cassia and the Via Flaminia meet to enter the City.[1] This bridge, whichever it was, Belisarius had determined to hold, but without his knowledge it was deserted. The Goths were crossing unopposed when the general himself appeared with 1000 horse. A tremendous fight followed in which, such was his rage and astonishment, Belisarius bore himself rather like a brave soldier than a wise general. Unhurt in spite of the _melee_ he fell back either upon the Porta Salaria[2] or upon the Porta Flaminia (del Popolo), which he found closed against him, for the City believed him dead. Almost in despair he rallied his men and made a desperate charge, which, such was the number of the Goths in the road and the confusion of their advance, was successful. The barbarians fled and Belisarius and his gallant troopers entered the City at nightfall.
[Footnote 1: Procopius tells us both that Vitiges advanced through the Sabine country and that he crossed the Tiber–an impossible thing. Gibbon and Hodgkin refuse the former, Gregorovius the latter statement. I agree with Gregorovius, for Procopius confuses the Tiber and Anio elsewhere, notably iii. 10.]
[Footnote 2: Possibly the Porta Pinciana.]
[Illustration: Sketch Map of VITIGES, MARCH]
All through that night the walls of Rome were aflame with watchfires and disastrous tidings, happily false; and when the dawn rose out of the Campagna, Rome was still inviolate.
Thus began the first siege of Rome in the early days of March 537. It lasted for three hundred and seventy-four days and ended in the sullen retreat of the barbarians to save Ravenna, which as Vitiges had at first foreseen would happen was threatened with attack. But as so often in later times, those three hundred and seventy-four days had dealt incomparably more hardly with the besiegers than with the besieged. The Campagna had done its work, and it has been calculated that of the 150,000 men that are said to have marched with Vitiges to attack the city, not more than 10,000 returned to Ravenna.
Meanwhile during the great siege Belisarius, by means of his subordinate general, John, had carried on a campaign in Picenum and had been able to send assistance to the people of Milan, eagerly Roman as they were.
In Picenum, John had perhaps rashly pushed forward from Ancona to Rimini; which he held precariously and to the danger of Ancona. The first act of Belisarius after the raising of the siege of the City was to despatch troops post haste to Rimini. He sent Ildiger and Martin with a thousand horse to fight their way if necessary to Rimini to withdraw John and his two thousand horse. He purposed to hold Rimini only with the tips of his fingers, for his determination was to secure all he held before he entered upon a final and a real advance northward.
The position of Belisarius seemed more insecure than in fact it was. If we consider the great artery of his advance northward, the Via Flaminia, we shall find that he held everything to the east of the road between Rome and Ancona save one fortress, Osimo above Ancona, which was held by four thousand of the enemy. But all was or seemed to be insecure because he held nothing to the west of the great road save Perugia: Orvieto, Todi, Chiusi, Urbino were all in Gothic hands, while the Furlo Pass over the Apennines was also held by the enemy.
Well might Belisarius desire the cavalry of John, useless in Rimini, for the direct road to that city was still in the hands of the enemy. But when John got his orders he refused to obey them and Ildiger and Martin returned without him. What excuse is possible for this refusal of obedience on the part of a subordinate which might well have imperilled the whole campaign? This only: that he had orders from one superior even to Belisarius. It is probable that John in Rimini and Ancona was aware that he might expect reinforcement from Constantinople and that Belisarius knew nothing of them. These reinforcements arrived under Narses, the great and famous chamberlain of Justinian, not long after Rimini had begun to suffer the memorable siege that followed the departure of Ildiger and Martin, and Ancona had only just been saved. The presence of Narses in Italy changed the whole aspect of the campaign, and whatever motives Justinian may have had for sending him thither, the effect of his landing at Ancona with great reinforcements can have had only a good effect upon the war.
[Illustration: Sketch Map CITIES UNDERLINED WERE IN IMPERIAL HANDS]
Belisarius had now secured himself to this extent that Todi and Chiusi were in his hands, and he hastened to meet Narses at Fermo forty miles south of Ancona. There a council of war was held in which Belisarius maintained his plan, namely, that Rimini should be abandoned because Osimo, very strongly held over Ancona, was in the hands of the Goths. Narses, on the contrary, looked only to the spiritual side of war. He maintained that if a city once recovered for the empire was abandoned the moral result would be disastrous. At any cost he was for the relief of Rimini. Somewhat reluctantly, realising the danger, Belisarius consented to try. A screen of a thousand men was placed before Osimo, an army was embarked for Rimini and another was sent out by the coast road, while Belisarius himself and Narses with a column of cavalry set out from Fermo westward, crossed the Apennines above Spoleto, struck into the Flaminian Way, recrossed the Apennines by the Furlo, and had come within a day’s journey of Rimini when they came upon a party of Goths, who fled and gave the alarm to Vitiges. But before the Goth could decide what to do, Ildiger was upon him from the sea, Martin was upon him with a great army from the south, and Belisarius and Narses came down from the mountains in time to rejoice at the delivery of the city.
That deliverance but disclosed the two parties that divided the imperial army. When John refused obedience to Belisarius we may be sure he was not acting wholly without encouragement, and this at once became obvious after the deliverance of Rimini which Belisarius had carried out but which had been conceived by Narses. It will be remembered that Milan was by the act of Belisarius in the hands of the Romans; it was, however, now besieged even as Rimini had been by a very redoubtable Gothic leader, Uraius. Orvieto and Osimo also were still in barbarian hands. Belisarius now proposed to employ the army in the relief of the one and the capture of the others. Narses, on the other hand, proposed to take his part of the army and with it to reoccupy the province of Aemilia between the Apennines and the Po. These rivalries and differences were to cost the life of a great city, Milan. For since Narses would not consent to the plan of Belisarius, only what seemed most urgent was done; Orvieto was taken, Urbino too, and the energy of the imperial army and its purpose, also, was expended upon many unimportant things, an attempt upon Cesena, the reduction of Imola, which involved a hopeless dispersal of forces upon no great end. Belisarius, warned of the danger, ordered John to the relief of Milan; again that creature of Narses refused. And down came Milan before Uraius the Goth, who fell upon the helpless citizens and massacred three hundred thousand of them, being all the men of the city; and the women he gave as payment to his Burgundian ally; and of Milan he left not one stone upon another. But when Justinian read the despatch of Belisarius, he recalled Narses, for if the fall of Rimini would have injured so sorely the imperial cause, what of the fall of Milan, the massacre of its inhabitants, the utter destruction of the city? So great was its effect that we read even Justinian thought of treating with the Goths; for he was haunted by the weakness of his Persian frontier, and he had soon to look to the western Alps.
Not so Belisarius. He went on his way and first he reduced two fortresses that had long threatened him, Osimo and Fiesole, and then and at long last he began the great advance upon Ravenna.
In this he was attempting with a small and weary force what had never before been accomplished. Theodoric, it is true, had entered Ravenna as a conqueror, but only by stratagem and deceptive promises after a siege of three years. Belisarius, none knew it better than he, had neither the time nor the forces that were at the disposal of the great Gothic king. He must act quickly if at all, and nowhere and on no occasion does this great and resourceful man appear to better advantage than in his achievement at Ravenna, which should have been the last military action of the reconquest.
Procopius, who was perhaps an eye-witness of the whole business of the siege and certainly entered Ravenna in triumph with Belisarius, tells us that, after the fall of Osimo, Belisarius made haste to Ravenna with his whole army. He sent one of his generals, Magnus, before him with a sufficient force, to march along the Po and to prevent provisions being taken into the impregnable city from the Aemilian Way; while another general, Vitalius, he called out of Dalmatia with his forces to hold the northern bank of the river. When this was done a most extraordinary accident occurred which it seems impossible to explain. “An accident then befell,” says Procopius, “which clearly shows that Fortuna determines even yet every struggle. For the Goths had brought down the Po many barges from Liguria[1] laden with corn, bound for Ravenna; but the water suddenly grew so low in the river that they could not row on; and the Romans coming upon them took them and all their lading. Soon after the river had again its wonted stream and was navigable as before. This scarcity of water had never till then occurred so far as we could hear.”
[Footnote 1: Cf. Cassiodorus, _Variae_, II. 20, where we read of Theodoric in a time of scarcity supplying Liguria with food from Ravenna. “Let any provision ships which may be now lying at Ravenna be ordered round to Liguna, which in ordinary times supplies the needs of Ravenna herself.”]
Owing to this accident and the closeness of the investment the Goths began to be short of provisions, for they could import nothing from the sea, since the Romans were masters there. In their need, however, the King of the Franks, knowing how things were, sent ambassadors to Vitiges in Ravenna, and so did Belisarius. The Franks offered to lead an army of five hundred thousand men over the Alps and to bury the Romans in utter ruin if the Goths would consent to share Italy with them. But the Goths feared the Franks, and the ambassadors of Belisarius were able to persuade them to reject their offers. From this time forward negotiations went on without ceasing between Belisarius and the Goths, for the one was short of time, the other of food. Nevertheless, the Romans did not relax their investment of the city in any way. Indeed, Belisarius chose this moment for his shrewdest and cruellest blow. “For hearing how there was much corn in the public magazines of Ravenna, he won a citizen with money to set them afire; which loss, some say, happened by Matasuntha’s advice, the wife of Vitiges. It was so suddenly done that some thought it was by lightning, as others by design, and Vitiges and the Goths, taking it in either kind, fell into more irresolution, mistrusting one another, and thinking that God himself made war against them.”
At this misfortune Uraius, the destroyer of Milan, proposed to attempt to relieve Ravenna, but Belisarius easily outwitted him and his intervention came to nothing.
Nevertheless time, so scarce with the Romans, was running short. Justinian was impatient to have done with the Italian war, for the general situation was extremely grave; upon the Danube an invasion of Slavs was gathering; in Asia, Persia threatened the empire. It is not altogether surprising then that Justinian now made an attempt to come to terms with Vitiges behind the back of Belisarius. He sent two ambassadors to offer peace upon the following really amazing terms, namely, that the Goths were to have half the royal treasure and the dominion of the country beyond the Po, that is to say, to the north of the Po; the other half of the revenues and the rest of Italy with Sicily were to be the emperor’s. The ambassadors showed their instructions to Belisarius, who had them conducted into Ravenna, where Vitiges and the Goths gladly consented to make peace and to accept these conditions. But both sides had reckoned without Belisarius, who doubtless saw that such a peace could not endure and that all his labour, if such terms were to be made, had gone for nothing. Nothing would satisfy his ideas of security save the absolute defeat of the Goths with its natural sequel, the bringing of Vitiges to Constantinople as a prisoner. He, therefore, refused to sign the treaty, leaving it to be established by the ambassadors alone. But when the Goths saw this they thought that the Romans cozened them, and refused to conclude anything without the signature and oath of Belisarius.
That Belisarius was right we cannot doubt; but his action naturally laid him open to be accused of a design, against the emperor’s intentions, to prolong the war for his own glory. Nor were certain of his generals slow to make such an accusation. When he heard of it, he (who had suffered more than enough from the disloyalty of subordinates) called them all together, and in the presence of the ambassadors confessed that Fortune was the great decider of war, and that a good opportunity for peace should ever be seized. Then he bade them speak their minds in the present case. They declared then, one and all, that it were best to follow the instructions of the emperor. When Belisarius heard them speak thus he was glad and bade them put their opinions in writing, that neither he nor they might afterwards deny their confession that they were not able to subdue the enemy by war.
But Belisarius was sure of his ground. The Goths pressed by famine could hold out no longer, and weary of Vitiges, who had given them no success, yet afraid of yielding to the emperor lest he should remove them out of Italy to Constantinople and thereabout, they resolved, of all things, to declare Belisarius emperor in the West. Secretly they sent to entreat him to accept the empire, professing to be most willing to obey him. Such an astonishing proposal must have filled Belisarius with delight. He, indeed, had no intention of receiving from such hands a gift so fantastic, for he hated the name of usurper; but he saw at once how this proposal might help his ends. He immediately called his generals and the ambassadors together and asked them if they did not think it a matter of importance to make all the Goths and Vitiges the emperor’s captives, to capture their wealth, and to recover all Italy to the Romans. They answered it would be an extreme high fortune and bade him effect it if he could. Then Belisarius sent to the Goths and bade them perform what they had offered. And they, for the famine was too hard to bear, agreed and sent ambassadors to take the oath of the great Roman for their indemnity and that he would be King of Italy, and when they had it, to return into Ravenna with the Roman army. Now as to their indemnity Belisarius bound himself, but touching the kingdom he said he would swear it to Vitiges himself and the Gothic commanders. And the ambassadors, not thinking he would forego the kingdom, but that he desired it above all things, prayed him forthwith to march into Ravenna. And he himself with his army and the Gothic ambassadors entered Ravenna; and he commanded also ships to be laden with corn and to come into Classis.
“When I saw,” says Procopius, whose account of the siege and fall of Ravenna I have followed so far, “when I saw the entrance of their army into Ravenna, I considered how actions are not concluded by valour, multitudes, or human virtue, but by some Divinity that steers the acts and judgements of men. The Goths had much the advantage in numbers and power, and since they came to Ravenna no defeat there had overthrown them, yet they became prisoners and thought it no shame to be slaves to fewer in number. The women (who had heard from their husbands that the enemy were tall and gallant men and not to be numbered) looked with contempt upon the Roman soldiers when they saw them in the city, and spat in the faces of their husbands, reviling them with cowardice, pointing at their conquerors.”
Thus Ravenna, the impregnable city, was taken by stratagem and willingly; never again to pass out of Roman hands till Aistulf the Lombard in 752 seized it for a few years and thus caused Pepin to cross the Alps to vindicate the Roman name.
* * * * *
The first Gothic war, against Vitiges, (536-540) had thus for its crown and end, the capture of Ravenna; the second, against Totila (541-553), proceeded from Ravenna for the reconquest, yet once again, of Italy.
In 540, after Ravenna had been occupied, Belisarius recalled, and Vitiges taken as a captive to Constantinople, the Romans held all Italy except the city of Pavia. In 544, when Belisarius returned, they held only Ravenna, Rome, Spoleto, and a few other strongholds such as Perugia and Piacenza. Nor was this all. In this second war all Italy was laid waste and ruined, Rome was twice besieged and occupied by the Goths, and in 546, when Totila had done with her, during a space of forty days the City remained utterly desolate, without a single inhabitant. How had such a miserable and unexpected catastrophe befallen the Catholic cause?
In the first place it must be admitted that the capture of Ravenna by stratagem was not the final catastrophe it appeared for the Goths. It is true that that triumph seemed to give, and indeed did give, all Italy into the hands of the Romans, but that gift was never secured. Belisarius, partly from necessity, partly on account of the suspicious jealousy of the emperor, was withdrawn from Italy too soon. He was victorious, but he was not given time to secure his victories. The extraordinary incompetence and rivalries of the committee of generals which succeeded him let the opportunity for securing and establishing an enduring peace slip through its fingers; the inevitable reaction that followed the departure of Belisarius was not met at all, the whole situation that then developed was misunderstood, with the result that the Goths were soon able to find a leader, perhaps the most formidable, and certainly the most destructive, that they had ever produced.
The cause of the imperial incompetence and failure would appear to have been financial. The empire had been perhaps always, certainly for two hundred years, bankrupt. Its administration and above all its defence were beyond its means. The Gothic war had been a tremendous strain upon the imperial finances already incredibly involved in the defence of the East. It was necessary to find in Italy the money for that war and for the future defence of that country; but Italy had been ruined by the Gothic war and above all things needed capital and a period of reproductive repose. These Justinian was unable to give her. His necessities forced him to cover the peninsula with tax gatherers, to bleed an already ruined country of the little that remained to her. If the result was a reaction, in the north actively Gothic, in the centre and south certainly indifferent to the imperial cause, we cannot wonder at it. The spiritual situation and the economic or material would not chime. The result was the appalling confusion we know as the second Gothic war.
[Illustration: Colour Plate S. VITALE: THE GALLERY]
I say it was a confusion. No clear issue seems to present itself from beginning to end; the old democratic cause, the Catholicism of the people rising in rage and fury against the Arianism of the courts, burnt low for a moment, and was indeed in part extinguished by the appalling misery of the material situation of Italy. Upon this materialism, the material benefits that Theodoric had undoubtedly conferred upon the Italian people, Totila, that formidable chieftain who now came to the front as the Gothic leader, based his appeal and his hope of victory. “Surely,” he says to the Roman senate, “you must remember sometimes in these evil days the benefits which you received not so very long ago at the hands of Theodoric and Amalasuntha.” And again: “What harm did the Goths ever do you? And tell me then what good you received from Justinian the emperor?… Has he not compelled you to give an account of every _solidus_ which you received from the public funds even under the Gothic kings? All harassed and impoverished as you are by the war, has he not compelled you to pay to the Greeks the full taxes which could be levied in a time of profoundest peace?” Totila based his appeal upon the material well-being of the people. It was a formidable appeal; it nearly succeeded. That it did not succeed, though it had so much in its favour, is the best testimony we could have to the real nature of the war, which was not a struggle between two races or even primarily, at any rate, between barbarism and civilisation, but something greater and more fundamental, a fight to the death between two religions Arianism and Catholicism, upon the result of which the whole future of Europe depended.
The confusion of the second Gothic war, in which the future of the world and the major interests of man were in jeopardy, may be divided into three parts. The first of these is that in which the whole administration precariously established by Belisarius fell to pieces before the earthquake that was Totila, who, never systematically met and opposed, by the year 544 held all Italy with the exception, as I have said, of Ravenna, Rome, Spoleto, Perugia, Piacenza, and a few other strongholds. The second is that in which Belisarius again appears, and from the citadel of Ravenna, without ceasing or rest, but without much success, opposes him everywhere. In this period Rome was occupied and reoccupied no less than four times, and, as I have said, in 546 was left utterly desolate. Nevertheless, when for the second time Belisarius was recalled, in 548, he left things much as he had found them. He had at least–and with what scarcity of men and money we may see in his letters to the emperor–opposed and perhaps stemmed the overwhelming Gothic advance. At his departure the imperialists held Ravenna, Rome (but after the sack of 546), Rimini, Spoleto, Ancona, and Perugia. But before he arrived in Constantinople, Perugia had fallen; in the same year, 549, a mutiny in Rome gave the City to the Goths and Rimini was betrayed. In the year 551, the year of Narses’ appointment as general-in-chief in Italy and the opening of the third period, only Ravenna and Ancona, with Hydruntum (Otranto) and Crotona in southern Italy, remained to the empire.
In that year, 551, however, everywhere the Gothic cause began to fail. In a sea-fight off Sinigaglia the imperial forces disposed of the Gothic sea power and relieved Ancona, which was in grave danger. About the same time Sicily was delivered from the Gothic yoke, and in the spring of 552 Crotona was relieved. Meanwhile, in Illyricum, Narses gathered his army, in which Ardoin, King of the Lombards, rode at the head of two thousand of his people, and prepared for the great march into Italy.
He came through Venetia round the head of the Adriatic, close to the sea (for a formidable Frankish host held the great roads), crossing with what anxiety we may guess, the mouths of the Piave, the Brenta, the Adige, and the Po by means of his ships, and having thus turned the flank of the Frankish armies he triumphantly marched into Ravenna. There he remained for nine days, as it were another Caesar about to cross the Rubicon.
While he waited in Ravenna an insulting challenge reached him from the barbarian Usdrilas who held Rimini. “After your boasted preparations, which have kept all Italy in a ferment, and after striking terror into our hearts by knitting your brows and looking more awful than mortal men, you have crept into Ravenna and are skulking there afraid of the very name of the Goths. Come out with all that mongrel host of barbarians to whom you want to deliver Italy and let us behold you, for the eyes of the Goths hunger for the sight of you.”[1] And Narses laughed at the insolence of the barbarian, and presently he set forward with the army he had made, upon the great road through Classis for Rimini, till he came to the bridge over the Marecchia, there which Augustus had built and which was held by the enemy. There in the fight which followed–little more than a skirmish–the barbarian Usdrilas came by his end, and Narses ignoring Rimini marched on, his great object before him, Totila and his army, which he meant, before all things else, to seek out and to destroy. So he went down the Flaminian Way to Fano and there presently left it for a by-way upon the left, rejoining the great highway some miles beyond the fortress of Petra Pertusa, which he disregarded as he had done that of Rimini. He marched on till he came to the very crest of the Apennines, over which he passed and camped upon the west under the great heights, at a place then called Ad Ensem and to-day Scheggia.
[Footnote 1: Hodgkin’s free translation of Procopius, _op. cit_. iv. 28.]
[Illustration: Sketch Map NARSES’ MARCH FROM RAVENNA _To Meet_ TOTILA]
Meanwhile Totila had come to meet him from Rome, and had managed to reach Tadinum, the modern Gualdo Tadino, when he found Narses, unexpectedly, for he must have thought the way over the mountains securely barred by the fortress of Petra Pertusa, upon the great road before him.
Narses sent an embassy to Totila to offer, “not peace, but pardon;” this the barbarian refused. Asked when he would fight Totila answered, “In eight days from this day.” But Narses, knowing what manner of man his enemy was, made all ready for the morrow, and at once occupied the great hill upon his left which overlooked both camps. In this he was right, for no sooner had he seized this advantage than Totila attempted to do the same, but without any success.
Then on the morrow Totila, having meanwhile been reinforced with two thousand men, rode forth before the two armies and “exhibited in a narrow space the strength and agility of a warrior. His armour was enchased with gold; his purple banner floated with the wind; he cast his lance into the air; caught himself backwards; recovered his seat and managed a fiery steed in all the paces and evolutions of the equestrian school.”[1] No doubt Narses the eunuch smiled. The barbarians were all the same, and they remain unaltered. Totila’s theatrical antics are but the prototype to those amazing cavalry charges, excellently stage-managed, that may be seen almost any autumn during the German manoeuvres, a new Totila at their head.
[Footnote 1: Gibbon’s free translation of Procopius, iv. 31.]
When Totila had finished his display the two armies faced one another, the imperialists with Narses and John upon the left, the Lombards in the centre, and Valerian upon the right with John the Glutton; the Goths in what order of battle we do not know. At length at noon the battle was joined. The Gothic charge failed, Narses drew his straight line of troops into a crescent, and the short battle ended in the utter rout of the Goths, Totila flying from the field. In that flight one Asbad a Gepid struck at him and fatally wounded him. He was borne by his companions to the village of Caprae, more than twelve miles away, and there he died.
Thus ended Totila the Goth and with him the Gothic cause in Italy. A remnant of his army made its way to Pavia, where it was contained by Valerian; and all over Italy the Gothic fortresses hastened to surrender, Perugia, Spoleto, Narni, all opened their gates, and Narses marched on to occupy Rome which he did without much difficulty. All Italy lay open to the imperialists, and when Totila’s successor Teias was slain all hope of recovery was gone. The Goths offered to leave Italy, and their offer was accepted. For a year longer a desultory war, the reduction of Cumae and Lucca, occupied Narses; but by 554 this too was brought to an end, and unhappy Italy was once more gathered into the government of the empire.
VIII
MODICA QUIES
THE PRAGMATIC SANCTION AND THE SETTLEMENT OF ITALY
Such was the inevitable end of the Gothic war in Italy. The issue thus decided was, as I have tried to show, something much more tremendous than the mere supremacy of a race. Nothing less than the future of the world was assured upon those stricken fields and about those ruined fortresses, the supremacy of the Catholic religion in which was involved the whole destiny of Europe, the continuance of our civilisation and culture. For let it be said again: these wars of the sixth century were not a struggle to the death between two races, but between two religions; the opponents were not really Roman and Goth, but Catholic and Arian, and in the victory of the former was involved the major interest of mankind. The whole energy of that age was devoted to the final establishment of what for a thousand years was to be the universal religion of Europe, the source of all her greatness and the reason of her being. What was saved in those unhappy campaigns was not Italy, but the soul of Europe.
Certainly it was not Italy. Materially the result of those eighteen years of war, which began with the invasion of Italy by Belisarius in 536, reached their crisis in 540 with the capture of Ravenna, and were finally decided by Narses in 552-554, was the ruin of Italy. Exhausted, devastated, and unfilled, the prey, for half a generation, of a fundamental war, Italy was materially ruined by Justinian’s Gothic campaigns, and so hopelessly that, when in 568 the Lombards fell upon her, she was almost unable to defend herself, to offer any resistance to what proved–and in part for this reason–the only barbaric invasion which had upon her any enduring consequences. Visigoths, Huns, Vandals, Ostrogoths, all poured over her, and presently, like winter floods, retreated and subsided, leaving nothing to remind us of their fear and devastation; the Lombards remained.
I say this was largely due to the appalling exhaustion and ruin of Italy in the Gothic war; but there was something else which we must not forget. The Gothic war was a religious war. The Arianism of the Goths had really threatened our civilisation. But the Lombards were largely mere heathens. Their heathenism was not at all dangerous to us as a heresy must always be.[1] Therefore Italy never roused herself from her exhaustion, one might almost say her indifference. It was only her material well-being that was at stake, her future was safe. Her great attempt against the Lombards was a spiritual effort, was an effort for their conversion, and their final discomfiture, wrought not from within the peninsula, but from over the Alps, did not involve their expulsion from Italy, but was seized upon as the opportunity for the re-establishment in name and in fact of the Western Empire, and for the great crowning of Charlemagne by the pope in S. Peter’s church.
[Footnote 1: It was not the paganism of the Italian Renaissance but the heresy of the Teutons which destroyed the unity of Europe in the sixteenth century.]
Italy, and with Italy Europe, were, then, saved from nothing less than death when Narses finally disposed of Totila in the Apennines in 552; but that war which had a result so very glorious had materially ruined the country.
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.
It has been maintained by many historians that the great reform of which the establishment of the exarch and the exarchate is the result was the work of that very great reformer Justinian. It was worthy of him; but the Italy he knew and saved was not in need of any change in her administrative divisions which, as I have said, remained under Narses almost the same as they had been in the last days of the Western empire.[1]
[Footnote 1: For what follows cf. Diehl, _Etudes sur l’administration Byzantine dans l’Exarchat de Ravenne_ (1888).]
The transformation out of which the exarchate arose was slow and obscure, not the work of a great creative mind, but of necessity. It was the result of many causes which it is not difficult to name; they were the progress of the Lombard conquest, the condition imposed upon the unconquered parts of Italy by that conquest, and especially the new necessity for defence imposed on the imperial power.
It is obvious that the result of the first ten years of that conquest was a complete destruction of the limits of the old Roman provinces of Italy. A new grouping of territories was not only necessary but was already forming itself under the pressure of the conquest and its terror. The regions which had escaped the barbarians were drawing together without any regard for the ancient provincial divisions and were grouping themselves about the cities, where the resistance, such as it was, was concentrating itself, and where the imperial administration had taken refuge.
If we confine ourselves for the moment to Italy north of the Apennines, we shall find that in the old province of Liguria the vicar of the prefect of the praetorium had fled from Milan to Genoa, and that about that city the debris of the old province was slowly re-assembling itself. In Venetia we shall find that the governor had departed to Grado, and about this town as a centre the eastern part of the old province was gathered. The western part of that province, cut off from its capital, attached itself by force of circumstances to what remained of Aemilia and of Flaminia, whose neighbour she was, and these fragments of the ancient provinces all together grouped themselves about, or found their centre in, Ravenna, the capital of Flaminia and the residence of the prefect of Italy.
In these new groupings the great pre-occupation and the supreme interest are defence–the defence of civilisation against the barbarian.
Now, it was to regulate this new state of affairs that the exarchate was created; or rather the exarchate was the official acknowledgment of a state of affairs that the disastrous invasion of the Lombards had brought about. The new order was established at the end of the reign of Justin II. (565-578) under a new and supreme official. Without doing away with the prefect of Italy the emperor placed over him as supreme head of the new administration the exarch[1] who was both the military commander-in-chief and the governor-general of Italy; and, since the chief need of Italy was defence, without entirely suppressing the civil administration, he placed at the head of each of the re-organised provinces a certain military officer–the duke.
[Footnote 1: For the discussion of the derivation of the title “Exarch,” _see_ Diehl, _op. cit_. pp. 15-16.]
The earliest document that remains to us in which we find definite mention of the exarch is the famous letter, dated October 4, 584, of pope Pelagius II. to the deacon Gregory, his nuncio in Constantinople. It is probable that the exarch at this time was Smaragdus, but it is extremely improbable that he was the first to bear the new title. This it would seem was a much nobler and more notable person.
It will be remembered that in the year 575 Baduarius, the son-in-law of the emperor, had appeared in Italy at the head of an army, had been beaten by the Lombards, and a little later had died, probably in 575.[1] This man was not only a great Byzantine official, but the destined successor of Justin and one of the first personages of the empire. It is obvious, if at such a moment he commanded the imperial armies in Italy, he was supreme governor of the province And it seems certain that it was to mark the amalgamation in him of the two offices, military and civil, that the new title of exarch was created.[2]
[Footnote 1: Migne, lxxii. 865; Joannes Biclarensis, _s.a_. 575; cf. Hodgkin, _op. cit_. v. p. 195, and Diehl, _u.s_.]
[Footnote 2: “It is only an hypothesis,” says M. Charles Diehl, the originator of this theory, “but it explains how, between the prefect Longinus (569-572) and the exarch Smaragdus (584) was produced in the years 572-576 the administrative transformation out of which rose the exarchate.”]
At the same time as the central government took on a new form the provincial administration was re-organised. Before the year 590, this had been certainly achieved. Istria, as we have seen, was divided from Venetia and formed a new and a special government. In Flaminia Rimini, which till now had been a part of the same province as Ravenna, was detached and became the capital of a new government in which a part of the Picenum, Ancona, and Osimo were involved. While the exarchate properly so called, that is the region of Ravenna from which Rimini and Picenum were now separate, formed a new province under the direct authority of the governors-general of Italy, that is to say, of the exarch of Ravenna. By the year 590, then, we see Italy thus divided into seven districts or governments: (1) the Duchy of Istria, (2) the Duchy of Venetia, (3) the Exarchate to which Calabria is attached, (4) the Duchy of Pentapolis, (5) the Duchy of Rome, (6) the Duchy of Naples, (7) Liguria.
Geographically the exarchate of Ravenna was bounded on the north by the Adige, the Tartaro, and the principal branch of the Po as far as its confluence with the Panaro. Hadria and Gabellum were its most northern towns in the hands of the imperialists. The western frontier is more difficult to determine with exactitude; it may be said to have run between Modena and Bologna. On the south the Marecchia divided the exarchate from the duchy of Pentapolis whose capital was Rimini. The Pentapolis consisted of Rimini, Pesaro, Fano, Sinigaglia, and Ancona upon the sea and of the five inland cities of Urbino, Fossombrone, Jesi, Cagli, and Gubbio; while the great towns of the exarchate were set along the Via Aemilia and were Bologna, Imola (Forum Cornelii), Faenza, Forli, Forlimpopoli, and Cesena.
Such then, before the year 590, was the new imperial administration in the Italy formed by the Lombard invasion.
[Illustration: SKETCH MAP]
In the year after the recapture of Classis from the Lombards, that is to say, in 589, the exarch Smaragdus was recalled. He had apparently become insane and had been guilty of extraordinary violence towards the patriarch of Aquileia and three other bishops whom he dragged to Ravenna. His successor was Romanus who held office till 597. In the same year, 589, Authari was married at Pavia to Theodelinda, who was to be so potent an instrument in the conversion of the Lombards and therefore in the salvation of Italy. And in the following year, 590, pope Pelagius II. died, and Gregory the Great was chosen to succeed him.
With the advent of the new exarch a brighter prospect seemed for a moment to open for Italy. In the first year of Romanus’s appointment the imperialists regained the greater part of the cities of the plain; they re-occupied Modena, Reggio, Parma, Piacenza, Altinum, and Mantua. But the strength of the Latin position in Italy lay, and continued to lie, in the two great imperial cities, Ravenna and Rome. Little by little this position had crystallised and now a new state appeared, a state which in one way or another was to endure till our day and which our fathers knew as the States of the Church. With the two cities of Ravenna and Rome as _nuclei_, this state formed itself in the very