ITHE EMPIRE AND THE BARBARIANS
At the opening of the fifth century of our era the Roman Empire had long been not only the civilised world but Christendom. The four centuries which had passed since the birth of Our Lord had seen in fact the foundation of Europe, not as we know it to-day a mosaic of hostile nationalities, but as one perfect whole in which all that is worth having in the world lay like a treasure. There were born and founded that they might always endure, the culture, the civilisation and the Faith which we enjoy and by which we live. There were established for ever the great lines upon which our art was to develop, to change and yet not to die. There was erected the supremacy of the idea that it might always renew our lives, our culture, and our polity, that we might always judge everything by it and fear neither revolution, nor defeat nor decay. There we Europeans were established in the secure possession of our own souls; sothat we alone in the world develop from within to change but never to die, and to be, alone in the world, Christians.
The outward and visible sign of the Empire, which above everything else distinguished it from the world which surrounded it, as an island is surrounded by an unmapped sea, was the Pax Romana. This was domestic as well as political. It ensured a complete and absolute order, the condition of civilisation, and, established through many generations, it seemed immutable and unbreakable. Along with it went a conception of law and of property more fundamental than anything we are now able to appreciate, while free exchange was assured by a complete system of communication and admirable roads. There is indeed scarcely anything that is really fundamental in our lives and in our politics that was not there created. It was there our religion, the soul of Europe, was born and little by little became the energy and the cause of all that undying but changeful principle of life and freedom which rightly understood is Europe. Our ideas of justice, our ideas of law, our conception of human dignity and the structure of our society were there conceived, and with such force that while we endure theycan never die. In truth, the Empire which it had taken more than a millennium to build was the most successful and perhaps the most beneficent experiment in universal government that has ever been made.
The Empire fell. Why?
We cannot answer that question. The causes of such a catastrophe, spiritual and material, are for the most part hidden from us in the darkness that followed the catastrophe, in which civilisation in the West all but perished. All we can do is to note that the administration of this great State became so expensive that when Alaric came over the Alps in 401 it was probably already bankrupt and in consequence the population was declining; and that the military problem before the Empire, the defence of its frontiers against the outer welter of barbarism, was so expensive and so naturally insecure that it was difficult to ensure and impossible with due economy. Finally we ought to be sure that though the Empire decayed and fell, it was not overthrown by the Barbarians. As in this book we are concerned not indeed with the Barbarian invasions as a whole but nevertheless with the most frightful and perhaps the most destructive among them, we shall do well to consider moreparticularly here for a moment one of the causes of that fall, though not the chief one as we have said; the insecurity of the frontiers, namely, and the problem this proposed which the Empire was, alas, unable to solve.
The Empire was confined on the west by the ocean, on the south by the desert of Africa, on the east by the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf, on the north by the Rhine and the Danube, the Black Sea and the Caucasus.
It was that northern frontier which was a fundamental weakness and which at least from the middle of the third century continually occupied the mind of the Roman administration. How to hold it?
Beyond that frontier lay a world largely unknown,a mere wilderness of barbarians, tribesalways restless, always at war, always pressing upon the confines of civilisation. Within lay all that is worth having in our lives, the hope of the world. It was this which, then as now, had to be defended and against the same enemy—barbarism. For barbarism does not become less barbarous when it becomes learned, a savage is a savage even in professorial dress. For this cause it is written: change your hearts and not your garments.
The defence, then, of the frontier had beenthe chief problem of the Empire perhaps from its foundation by Augustus and certainly for two hundred years before Alaric crossed the Alps. Its solution was attempted in various ways, before, in the year 292, Diocletian attempted to deal with it by the revolutionary scheme of dividing the Empire. But the division he made was, and perhaps unavoidably, rather racial than strategic, the two parts of the Empire met at a critical point on the Danube and by force of geography the eastern part was inclined to an Asiatic outlook and to the neglect of the Danube, while the western was by no means strong enough to hold the tremendous line of the two rivers. Nevertheless the West made an heroic attempt to fulfil its too onerous duty. The capital of the vicariate of Italy was removed from Rome to Milan. This tremendous act was purely strategical. It was thought, and rightly, that the frontier would be more readily secured from Milan, which held, as it were, all the passes of the Alps in its hands, than from Rome in the midst of the long peninsula of Italy. It was a change more amazing than the removal of the capital of the British Empire from London to Edinburgh would be; but it was not enough. In 330, seventeen years after Christianityhad become the official religion of the Empire, Constantine the Great for the same reasons of defence removed the seat of the Empire to Byzantium, the new Rome on the Bosphorus, which he renamed Constantinople.
That move, which has been so strongly condemned, would seem in any right apprehension of what followed to have saved what could be saved out of the foreseen and perhaps inevitabledébâcle. Constantinople remained till 1453 the secure capital of the Eastern Government and of a Roman civilisation; it endured, and in more than one critical period held up the citadel of the West—Italy—in its hands.
It may be that nothing could have secured the West; that the foundation of Constantinople saved the East is certain. Because the West was the weaker and the richer, because the name of Rome was so tremendous, the West, as we know, bore the full brunt of the Barbarian assault. That assault was a much looser and more haphazard affair than we have been wont to believe. The West was rather engulfed than defeated. For a time it was lost in a sea of barbarism; that it emerged, that it rearose, and that we are what we are, we owe to the foundation of Constantinople and to the Catholic Church.
I say that the Empire was rather engulfed than defeated. Let us consider this.
In the year 375 the frontiers were secure; nevertheless before then the defence had failed. Long before then it had become obvious that the vast hordes of Barbarians beyond the Rhine and the Danube could not be held back if anything should occur to drive them on. If they came on they would have to be met, not beyond, or even upon the rivers, but within the Empire itself.
If anything should occur to drive them on.... In the year 375 this befell. Ammianus Marcellinus, the contemporary Roman historian, writing of the incursions of the Barbarians, asserts that all the evils which befell the Empire at that time were due to one people—the Huns. In the year 375 the Huns were finally victorious over the Goths who in 376 in utter despair appealed to the Eastern Emperor Valens for protection. “Suppliant multitudes of that warlike nation,” we read of the Goths, “whose pride was now humbled in the dust, covered a space of many miles along the banks of the Danube. With outstretched arms and pathetic lamentations they loudly deplored their past misfortunes and their present danger; acknowledged that their only hope of safetywas in the clemency of the Roman Government; and most solemnly protested that if the gracious liberality of the Emperor would permit them to cultivate the waste lands of Thrace they would ever hold themselves bound by the strongest obligations of duty and gratitude to obey the laws and guard the tenets of the republic.” Their prayers were granted and their service was accepted by the Imperial Government. They were transported over the Danube into the Roman Empire. In some ways this act and its date 376 are among the most momentous in the history of Europe.
Undisciplined and restless this nation of near a million Barbarians suddenly introduced into civilisation was a constant anxiety and danger. Ignorant of the laws they had sworn to keep, as well as of the obligations and privileges of civilisation, the Goths were at the mercy of their masters, who exploited them without scruple, till driven to madness they revolted and began the fatal march through Moesia, entering Thrace at last not as the guests of the Empire but as its victorious enemy. They encamped under the walls of Hadrianople which presently they besieged, laying waste the provinces; and it was not till Theodosius had ascended the Imperial thronethat they were successfully dealt with, forced to submit, and settled in Thrace and Asia Minor.
But such a result could not endure. The Barbarians but awaited a leader, and when he appeared, as he did in the person of Alaric, after the death of Theodosius, they turned on Constantinople itself, which they were able to approach but not to blockade. In 396 Alaric marched southward into Greece; from Thermopylae to Sparta he pursued his victorious way, avoiding Athens rather from superstition than from fear of any mortal foe. Early in 396, however, Stilicho, who was later to win such fame in the Italian campaign, set sail from Italy, met Alaric in Arcadia, turned him back and seemed about to compel his surrender in the prison of the Peloponnesus. In this, however, he was not successful. Alaric was able to cut his way out and by rapid marches to reach the Gulf of Corinth and to transport his troops, his captives and his spoil to the opposite shore. There he succeeded in negotiating a treaty with Constantinople whereby he entered its pay and was declared Master General of Eastern Illyricum. This befell in 399.
The intervention of Stilicho, successfulthough it had been, had proved one thing before all others; the political separation of the East and the West. The sailing of Stilicho and his army was the intervention of the West to save the East, for it was the East that was then in danger. The West was betrayed. The East made terms with the Barbarian and employed him. It behoved the West to look to itself, for it was obvious that the East would save itself at last by sacrificing the West.
The West was ready. A scheme of defence had been prepared which, as we shall see, was the best that could in the circumstances have been devised. With a directness and a clarity worthy of Rome the advisers of Honorius, then in Milan, determined to sacrifice everything if need be to the defence of the European citadel, of Italy that is; and, after all, considering the position of Alaric in Illyricum, it was that which was chiefly threatened. If it fell it was certain that the whole of the West must collapse.
The problem before the advisers of Honorius was not an easy one. To solve it with certainty enormous sacrifices were necessary, but to solve it meant the salvation of the world. It was therefore determined to abandon theRhine and the Danube, for already Alaric was within those lines. It was determined—and this was the decisive thing—to abandon the Alps, to make, that is to say, Cisalpine Gaul, or as we say the Lombard Plain, the battlefield, and to hold Italy proper along the line of the Apennines. I have examined and explained this strategy at length elsewhere;[2]here it is only necessary to say that its amazing success justified a policy so realistic.
The theory of the commanders of Honorius was that the Apennines were by nature impregnable save at one place, the narrow pass between them and the Adriatic, which they had long designed Ravenna to hold. Their intention to hold this line was determined not only by this theory, but by this, too, that they were something more than uncertain of the attitude of the Eastern Empire. Their strategy meant the abandonment of the richest province south of the Alps, the richest and the most ancient; but if the military theory which regarded the Apennines as impassable were right it meant the certain and immediate salvation of the soul of the West and the eventual salvation of the whole.
Honorius and his ministers had not long towait. Having looted the provinces of Europe within the dominion of the Eastern Emperor, Alaric “tempted by the power, the beauty and the wealth of Italy ... secretly aspired to plant the Gothic standard on the walls of Rome, and to enrich his army with the accumulated spoils of an hundred triumphs.”
In November, 401, Alaric entered Venetia by the Julian Alps and passed by Aquileia without taking it, intent on the spoil of the South. As he came on Honorius retired from Milan to Ravenna; the gates of Italy were barred. Then came Stilicho over the Cisalpine Plain, met Alaric, who had crossed the Po, at Pollentia, and defeated him and, following his retreat, broke him at Asta so that he compelled him to recross the Alps. In 403 Alaric again entered Venetia. Stilicho met him at Verona and once more hurled him back. The barred gates of Italy had scarce been questioned.
It was not Alaric, after all, but another Barbarian, Radagaisus, who was first to demand an entrance. In 405 he traversed the same Alpine passes as Alaric had used, passed Aquileia, crossed the Po and shunning the Via Emilia, which led through the pass Ravenna barred, adventured over the Apennineswhich the Roman generals had conceived as impassable by a Barbarian army. They were right. When Radagaisus saw the South he was starving. Stilicho found him at Fiesole and cut him to pieces. But the remnant of his army escaped as Alaric had done, it was not annihilated; it returned through Cisalpine Gaul and fell upon Gaul proper. Then in 408 Stilicho was murdered in Ravenna by order of the Emperor.
This last disaster was the cause of what immediately followed. When in 408 Alaric invaded Venetia he looted and destroyed as he wished, for there was no one to meet him. He took the great road southward and found the gate open; passed Ravenna without opposition, marched to Rome and after three sieges entered and pillaged it and was on his way southward to enjoy and to loot the South and Sicily, Placidia, the Emperor’s sister, a captive in his train, when he died at Cosenza in 410. His brother-in-law Adolphus, erected as king upon the shields of the Goths—there by the monstrous grave of his predecessor—concluded a peace with Honorius similar to that which years before Alaric had made with Constantinople. He was received into the Imperial service, consented to cross the Alps,and, what was to become a precedent for a yet more outrageous demand, received the hand of Placidia, the Emperor’s sister, in marriage. Thus the retreat of the Barbarian was secured, the peace of Italy restored and a repose obtained which endured for some forty-two years.
It is interesting to observe the extraordinary likeness between Alaric’s attack upon the East and his invasion of the West. Indeed, the only difference between them is the fact that Constantinople was never really in danger, whereas Rome was entered and looted. The intention of both invasions was the same—loot; the result of both was the same—tribute and service in return for the evacuation of the immediate provinces by the Barbarian.
The Imperial failure East and West was a failure in morale and in politics; it was not rightly understood a military failure: Alaric had always been defeated when he was attacked. It was the failure of the West to attack him that gave him Rome at last. The Imperial advisers perhaps thought they had solved the question he had propounded to them, when, after Alaric’s death, they had obtained the retreat of the Barbarian across the Alps—a retreat he was as glad to carry out as they to order,for he was in a sort of trap—and had secured at least his neutrality by admitting him into the service of the Empire. But the peace of more than a generation which followed their act was as illusory as it was contemptible.
The whole Empire had received from Alaric a moral blow from which it was never really to recover. It is true that much which happened in the years that immediately followed the retreat of Adolphus was fortunate. Placidia the spoil and the bride and later the fugitive widow of Alaric’s successor returned in triumph to Ravenna to be the unwilling bride of her deliverer Constantius. Largely through her influence, after the death of Honorius, when she ruled in Ravenna with the title of Augusta as the guardian of her son, the young Cæsar Valentinian, between East and West, a new, if unsubstantial, cordiality appeared. Italy at least was restored to prosperity, while in Aetius she possessed a general as great as the great Stilicho. But if Italy was safe the provinces were in peril and she herself saw Africa betrayed by Boniface and ravaged by and lost to the Vandals under Genseric. Nor was the domestic state of her household and court such as to inspire her with confidence in the future. If her sonValentinian was a foolish and sensual boy, her daughter Honoria was discovered in a low intrigue with a chamberlain of the palace, and when in exile at Constantinople sent, perhaps longing for the romantic fate of her mother, her ring to the new and youthful King of the Huns, soon to be famous as Attila, inviting him to carry her off as Adolphus, the Goth, had carried off Placidia.
Such was the condition of things in the royal household of the West. In Constantinople things were not more promising. Theodosius, the young Emperor, called the Calligrapher, was a dilettante of the fine arts, not a statesman. Those who surrounded him were mediocrities intent rather on theological controversies than on the safety of the State, or sunk in a cynical corruption in which everything noble was lost. No one East or West seemed able to grasp or to realise that there was any danger. Had the Imperial Governments failed altogether to understand the fundamental cause of the Gothic advance, the Vandal attack, indeed of all their embarrassments? Had they failed to remember what was there beyond the Rhine and the Danube? Had they forgotten the Huns?
FOOTNOTES:[2]See my “Ravenna” (Dent, 1913), pp. 1-10.
[2]See my “Ravenna” (Dent, 1913), pp. 1-10.
[2]See my “Ravenna” (Dent, 1913), pp. 1-10.