Chapter IV: , VII (26)

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

Odoacer.

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

Theodoric the Ostrogoth.

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

The Empire in the East.

To understand the events which immediately caused the fall of
the Ostrogothic power, we must turn back for a moment to the
Empire in the East. Marcian, whom Pulcheria, the wise daughter
of Arcadius, made Emperor by marrying him, died in 457, and
Aspar, the barbarian who commanded the mercenaries, selected
his successor. He chose his own steward, one Leo, who proved
to have more independence than his patron expected, and who
succeeded in destroying the latter. After Leo I. came (474)
his infant grandson; Leo II., whose father, an Isaurian
chieftain, took his place when he died, within the year. The
Isaurian assumed a Greek name, Zeno, and occupied the
throne—with one interval of flight and exile for twenty
months—during seven years. When he died, his widow gave her
hand in marriage to an excellent officer of the palace,
Anastasius by name, and he was sovereign of the Empire for
twenty-seven years.

The reign of Justinian.

After Anastasius, came Justin I., born a peasant in Dacia
(modern Roumania), but advanced as a soldier to the command of
the imperial guards, and thence to the throne. He had already
adopted and educated his nephew, Justinian, and before dying,
in 527, he invested him with sovereignty as a colleague. The
reign of Justinian was the most remarkable in the whole
history of the Empire in the East. Without breadth of
understanding, or notable talents of any kind: without
courage; without the least nobility of character; without even
the virtue of fidelity to his ministers and friends,—this
remarkable monarch contrived to be splendidly served by an
extraordinary generation of great soldiers, great jurists,
great statesmen, who gave a brilliance to his reign that was
never rivalled while the Byzantine seat of Empire stood. It
owes, in modern esteem, its greatest fame to the noble
collection of Roman laws which was made, in the Pandects and
the Code, under the direction of the wise and learned
Tribonian. Transiently it was glorified by conquests that bore
a likeness to the march of the resistless legions of ancient
Rome; and the laurelled names of Belisarius and Narses claimed
a place on the columns of victory with the names of Cæsar and
Pompeius.
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But the splendors of the reign were much more than offset by
miseries and calamities of the darkest kind. "The reign of
Justinian, from its length, its glory and its disasters, may
be compared to the reign of Louis XIV., which exceeded it in
length, and equalled it in glory and disaster. … He extended
the limits of his empire; but he was unable to defend the
territory he had received from his predecessors. Everyone of
the thirty-eight years of his reign was marked by an invasion
of the barbarians; and it has been said that, reckoning those
who fell by the sword, who perished from want, or were led
into captivity, each invasion cost 200,000 subjects to the
empire. Calamities which human prudence is unable to resist
seemed to combine against the Romans, as if to compel them to
expiate their ancient glory. … So that the very period which
gave birth to so many monuments of greatness, may be looked
back upon with horror, as that of the widest desolation and
the most terrific mortality" (Sismondi). The first and longest
of the wars of Justinian was the Persian war, which he inherited
from his predecessors, and which scarcely ceased while the
Persian monarchy endured. It was in these Asiatic campaigns
that Belisarius began his career. But his first great
achievement was the overthrow and extinction of the Vandal
power in Africa, and the restoration of Roman authority (the
empire of the new Rome) in the old Carthaginian province (A.
D. 533-534). He accomplished this with a force of but 10,000
foot and 5,000 horse, and was hastily recalled by his jealous
lord on the instant of his success.

Conquests of Belisarius in Italy.

But the ambition of Justinian was whetted by this marvellous
conquest, and he promptly projected an expedition against the
kingdom of the Eastern Goths. The death of Theodoric had
occurred in 526. His successor was a child of ten years, his
grandson, whose mother exercised the regency. Amalsuentha, the
queen-regent, was a woman of highly cultivated mind, and she
offended her subjects by too marked a Romanization of her
ideas. Her son died in his eighteenth year, and she associated
with herself on the throne the next heir to it, a worthless
nephew of Theodoric, who was able, in a few weeks, to strip
all her power from her and consign her to a distant prison,
where she was soon put to death (A. D. 535). She had
previously opened negotiations with Justinian for the
restoration of his supremacy in Italy, and the ambitious
Emperor assumed with eagerness a right to avenge her
deposition and death. The fate of Amalsuentha was his excuse,
the discontent of Roman orthodoxy with the rule of the heretic
Goths was his encouragement, to send an army into Italy with
Belisarius at its head. First taking possession of Sicily,
Belisarius landed in Italy in 536, took Naples and advanced on
Rome. An able soldier, Vitiges, had been raised to the Gothic
throne, and he evacuated Rome in December; but he returned the
following March and laid siege to the ancient capital, which
Belisarius had occupied with a moderate force. It was defended
against him for an entire year, and the strength of the Gothic
nation was consumed on the outer side of the walls, while the
inhabitants within were wasted by famine and disease. The
Goths invoked the aid of the Franks in Gaul, and those fierce
warriors, crossing the Alps (A. D. 538), assailed both Goths
and Greeks, with indiscriminate hostility, destroyed Milan and
Genoa, and mostly perished of hunger themselves before they
retreated from the wasted Cisalpine country.

Released from Rome, Belisarius advanced in his turn against
Ravenna, and took the Gothic capital, making Vitiges a
prisoner (A. D. 539). His reward for these successes was a
recall from command. The jealous Emperor could not afford his
generals too much glory at a single winning. As a consequence
of his folly, the Goths, under a new king, Totila, were
allowed to recover so much ground in the next four years that,
when, in 544, Belisarius was sent back, almost without an
army, the work of conquest had to be done anew. Rome was still
being held against Totila, who besieged it, and the great
general went by sea to its relief. He forced the passage of
the Tiber, but failed through the misconduct of the commander
in the city to accomplish an entry, and once more the great
capital was entered and yielded to angry Goths (A. D. 546).
They spared the lives of the few people they found, and the
chastity of the women; but they plundered without restraint.

Rome a Solitude for Forty Days.

Totila commanded the total destruction of the city; but his
ruthless hand was stayed by the remonstrances of Belisarius.
After demolishing a third of the walls, he withdrew towards
the South, dragging the few inhabitants with him, and, during
forty days, Rome is said to have been an unpeopled solitude.
The scene which this offers to the imagination comes near to
being the most impressive in history. At the end of that
period it was entered by Belisarius, who hastily repaired the
walls, collected his forces, and was prepared to defend
himself when Totila came back by rapid marches from Apulia.
The Goths made three assaults and were bloodily repulsed.

End of the Ostrogothic Kingdom.

But again Belisarius was recalled by a mean and jealous court,
and again the Gothic cause was reanimated and restored. Rome
was taken again from its feeble garrison (A. D. 549), and this
time it was treated with respect. Most of Italy and Sicily,
with Corsica and Sardinia, were subdued by Totila's arms, and
that king, now successful, appealed to Justinian for peace. It
was refused, and in 552 a vigorous prosecution of the war
resumed, under a new commander—the remarkable eunuch Narses,
who proved himself to be one of the great masters of war.
Totila was defeated and slain in the first battle of the
campaign; Rome was again beleaguered and taken; and the last
blow needed to extinguish the Gothic kingdom in Italy was
given the following year (A. D. 553), when Totila's successor,
Teia, ended his life on another disastrous field of battle.

The Exarchate.

Italy was restored for the moment to the Empire, and was
placed under the government of an imperial viceroy, called
Exarch, which high office the valiant Narses was the first to
fill. His successors, known in history as the Exarchs of
Ravenna, resided in that capital for a long period, while the
arm of their authority was steadily shortened by the conquests
of new invaders, whose story is yet to be told.

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Events in the West.

Leaving Italy and Rome, once more in the imperial fold, but
mere provinces now of a distant and alienated sovereignty, it
is necessary to turn back to the West, and glance over the
regions in which, when we looked at them last, the
institutions of Roman government and society were being
dissolved and broken up by flood upon flood of barbaric
invasion from the Teutonic North.

Teutonic Conquest of Britain.

If we begin at the farthest West which the Roman dominion
reached, we shall find that the island of Britain was
abandoned, practically, by the imperial government earlier
than the year 410, when Rome was sinking under the blows of
Alaric. From that time the inhabitants were left to their own
government and their own defense. To the inroads of the savage
Caledonian Picts and Irish Scots, there were added, now, the
coast ravages of a swarm of ruthless pirates, which the tribes
of northwestern Europe had begun to launch upon the German or
North Sea. The most cruel and terrible of these ocean
freebooters were the Saxons, of the Elbe, and they gave their
name for a time to the whole. Their destructive raids upon the
coasts of Britain and Gaul had commenced more than a century
before the Romans withdrew their legions, and that part of the
British coast most exposed to their ravages was known as the
Saxon Shore. For about thirty years after the Roman and
Romanized inhabitants of Britain had been left to defend
themselves, they held their ground with good courage, as
appears; but the incessant attacks of the Picts wore out, at
last, their confidence in themselves, and they were fatally
led to seek help from their other enemies, who scourged them
from the sea. Their invitation was given, not to the Saxons,
but to a band of Jutes—warriors from that Danish peninsula in
which they have left their name. The Jutes landed at
Ebbsfleet, in the Isle of Thanet (A. D. 449 or 450), with two
chiefs, Hengest and Horsa, at their head. They came as allies,
and fought by the side of the Britons against the Picts with
excellent success. Then came quarrels, and presently, in 455,
the arms of Hengest and Horsa were turned against their
employers. Ten years later the Jutes had secure possession of
the part of Britain now called Kent, and Hengest was their
king, Horsa having fallen in the war. This was the beginning
of the transformation of Roman-Celtic Britain into the
Teutonic England of later history. The success of the Jutes
drew their cousins and piratical comrades, the Saxons and the
Angles, to seek kingdoms in the same rich island. The Saxons
came first, landing near Selsey, in 477, and taking gradual
possession of a district which became known as the kingdom of
the South Saxons, or Sussex. The next invasion was by Saxons
under Cerdic, and Jutes, who joined to form the kingdom of the
West Saxons, or Wessex, covering about the territory of modern
Hampshire. So much of their conquest was complete by the year
519. At about the same time, other colonies were established
and gave their names, as East Saxons and Middle Saxons, to the
Essex and Middlesex of modern English geography. A third tribe
from the German shore, the Angles, now came (A. D. 547) to
take their part in the conquest of the island, and these laid
their hands upon kingdoms in the East and North of England, so
much larger than the modest Jute and Saxon realms in the south
that their name fixed itself, at last, upon the whole country,
when it lost the name of Britain. Northumberland, which
stretched from the Humber to the Firth of Forth, Mercia, which
covered at one time the whole middle region of England, and
East Anglia, which became divided into the two English
counties of Norfolk (North-folk) and Suffolk (South-folk),
were the three great kingdoms of the Angles.

The Making of England.

Before the end of the sixth century, almost the whole of
modern England, and part of Scotland, on its eastern side, as
far to the north as Edinburgh, was in possession of the German
invaders. They had not merely subdued the former
possessors—Britons and Roman provincials (if Romans remained
in the island after their domination ceased),—but, in the
judgment of the best investigators of the subject, they had
practically swept them from all the parts of the island in
which their own settlements were established. That is to say,
the prior population was either exterminated by the merciless
swords of these Saxon and English pagans, or was driven into
the mountains of Wales, into the peninsula of Cornwall and
Devon, or into the Strathclyde corner of Scottish
territory,—in all which regions the ancient British race has
maintained itself to this day. Scarcely a vestige of its
existence remains elsewhere in England,—neither in language,
nor in local names, nor in institutions, nor in survivals of
any other kind; which shows that the inhabitants were effaced
by the conquest, as the inhabitants of Gaul, of Spain, and of
Italy, for example, were not.

The new society and the new states which now arose on the soil
of Britain, and began to shape themselves into the England of
the future, were as purely Germanic as if they had grown up in
the Jutish peninsula or on the Elbe. The institutions,
political and social, of the immigrant nations, had been
modified by changed circumstances, but they had incorporated
almost nothing from the institutions which they found existing
in their new home and which they supplanted. Broadly speaking,
nothing Roman and nothing Celtic entered into them. They were
constructed on German lines throughout.

The barbarism of the Saxons and their kin when they entered
Britain was far more unmitigated than that of most of the
Teutonic tribes which overwhelmed the continental provinces of
Rome had been. The Goths had been influenced to some extent
and for quite a period by Roman civilization, and had
nominally accepted Christian precepts and beliefs, before they
took arms against the Empire. The Franks had been allies of
Rome and in contact with the refinements of Roman Gaul, for a
century or two before they became masters in that province.
Most of the other nations which transplanted themselves in the
fifth century from beyond the Rhine to new homes in the
provinces of Rome, had been living for generations on the
borders of the Empire, or near; had acquired some
acquaintance, at least, with the civilization which they did
not share, and conceded to it a certain respect; while some of
them had borne arms for the Emperor and taken his pay. But the
Saxons, Angles and Jutes had thus far been remote from every
influence or experience of the kind.
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They knew the Romans only as rich strangers to be plundered
and foes to be fought. Christianity represented nothing to
them but an insult to their gods. There seems to be little
doubt, therefore, that the civilizing work which Rome had done
in western Europe was obliterated nowhere else so ruthlessly
and so wantonly as in Britain. Christianity, still sheltered
and strong in Ireland, was wholly extinguished in England for
a century and more, until the memorable mission of Augustine,
sent by Pope Gregory the Great (A. D. 597), began the
conversion of the savage islanders.

The Kingdom of the Franks.

In Gaul, meanwhile, and in southwestern Germany, the Franks
had become the dominant power. They had moved tardily to the
conquest, but when they moved it was with rapid strides. While
they dwelt along the Lower Rhine, they were in two divisions:
the Salian Franks, who occupied, first, the country near the
mouth of the river, and then spread southwards, to the Somme,
or beyond; and the Ripuarians, who lived farther up the Rhine,
in the neighborhood of Cologne, advancing thence to the
Moselle. In the later part of the fifth century a Roman
Patrician, Syagrius, still exercised some kind of authority in
northern Gaul; but in 486 he was defeated and overthrown by
Chlodvig, or Clovis, the chief of the Salian Franks. Ten years
later, Clovis, leading both the Salian and the Ripuarian
Franks in an attack upon the German Alemanni, beyond the Upper
Rhine, subdued that people completely, and took their country.
Their name survived, and adhered to the whole people of
Germany, whom the Franks and their successors the French have
called Allemands to this day. After his conquest of the
Alemanni, Clovis, who had married a Christian wife, accepted
her faith and was baptized, with three thousand of his chief
men. The professed conversion was as fortunate politically for
him as it had been for Constantine. He adopted the
Christianity which was that of the Roman Church—the Catholic
Christianity of the Athanasian creed—and he stood forth at
once as the champion of orthodoxy against the heretic Goths
and Burgundians, whose religion had been poisoned by the
condemned doctrines of Arius. The blessings, and the more
substantial endeavors, of the Roman Church were, therefore, on
his side, when he attacked the Burgundians and made them
tributary, and when, a few years later, he expelled the Goths
from Aquitaine and drove them into Spain (A.D. 500-508).
Beginning, apparently, as one of several chiefs among the
Salian Franks, he ended his career (510) as sole king of the
whole Frank nation, and master of all Gaul except a Gothic
corner of Provence, with a considerable dominion beyond the
Rhine.

The Merovingian Kings.

But Clovis left his realm to four sons, who divided it into as
many kingdoms, with capitals at Metz, Orleans, Paris, and
Soissons. There was strife and war between them, until one of
the brothers, Lothaire, united again the whole kingdom, which,
meantime, had been enlarged by the conquest of Thuringia and
Provence, and by the extinction of the tributary Burgundian
kings. When he died, his sons rent the kingdom again, and
warred with one another, and once more it was brought
together. Says Hallam: "It is a weary and unprofitable task to
follow these changes in detail, through scenes of tumult and
bloodshed, in which the eye meets with no sunshine, nor can
rest upon any interesting spot. It would be difficult, as
Gibbon has justly observed, to find anywhere more vice or less
virtue." But, as Dean Church has remarked, the Franks were
maintained in their ascendancy by the favor of the clergy and
the circumstances of their position, despite their divisions
and the worthless and detestable character of their kings,
after Clovis. "They occupied a land of great natural wealth,
and great geographical advantages, which had been prepared for
them by Latin culture; they inherited great cities which they
had not built, and fields and vineyards which they had not
planted; and they had the wisdom, not to destroy, but to use
their conquest. They were able with singular ease and
confidence to employ and trust the services, civil and
military, of the Latin population. … The bond between the
Franks and the native races was the clergy. … The forces of
the whole nation were at the disposal of the ruling race; and
under Frank chiefs, the Latins and Gauls learned once more to
be warriors." This no doubt suggests a quite true explanation
of the success of the Franks; but too much may easily be
inferred from it. It will not be safe to conclude that the
Franks were protectors of civilization in Gaul, and did not
lay destroying hands upon it. We shall presently see that it
sank to a very darkened state under their rule, though the
eclipse may have been less complete than in some other of the
barbarized provinces of Rome.

Rise of the Carolingians.

The division in the Frankish dominion which finally marked
itself deeply and became permanent was that which separated
the East Kingdom, or Austrasia, from the West Kingdom, or
Neustria. In Austrasia, the Germanic element prevailed; in
Neustria, the Roman and Gallic survivals entered most largely
into the new society. Austrasia widened into the Germany of
later history; Neustria into France. In both these kingdoms,
the Frankish kings sank lower and lower in character, until
their name (of Merwings or Merovingians, from an ancestor of
Clovis) became a byword for sloth and worthlessness. In each
kingdom there arose, beside the nominal monarch, a strong
minister, called the Major Domus, or Mayor of the Palace, who
exercised the real power and governed in the king's name.
During the last half of the seventh century, the Austrasian
Mayor, Pippin of Heristal, and the Neustrian Mayor, Ebroin,
converted the old antagonism of the two kingdoms into a
personal rivalry and struggle for supremacy. Ebroin was
murdered, and Pippin was the final victor, in a decisive
battle at Testry (687), which made him virtual master of the
whole Frank realm, although the idle Merwings still sat on
their thrones. Pippin's son, Charles Martel, strengthened and
extended the domination which his father had acquired. He
drove back the Saxons and subdued the Frisians in the North,
and, in the great and famous battle of Tours (732) he
repelled, once for all, the attempt of the Arab and Moorish
followers of Mahomet, already lodged in Spain, to push their
conquests beyond the Pyrenees.
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The next of the family, Pippin the Short, son of Charles
Martel, put an end to the pretence of governing in the name of
a puppet-king. The last of the Merovingians was quietly
deposed—lacking even importance enough to be put to death—
and Pippin received the crown at the hands of Pope Zachary (A.
D. 751). He died in 768, and the reign of his son, who
succeeded him—the Great Charles—the Charlemagne of mediæval
history—is the introduction to so new an era, and so changed
an order of circumstances in the European world, that it will
be best to finish with all that lies behind it in our hasty
survey before we take it up.

The Conquests of Islam.

Outside of Europe, a new and strange power had now risen, and
had spread its forces with extraordinary rapidity around the
southern and eastern circuit of the Mediterranean, until it
troubled both extremities of the northern shore. This was the
power of Islam—the proselyting, war-waging religion of
Mahomet, the Arabian prophet. At the death of Mahomet, in 632,
he was lord of Arabia, and his armies had just crossed the
border, to attack the Syrian possessions of the Eastern Roman
Empire. In seven years from that time, the whole of Palestine
and Syria had been overrun, Jerusalem, Damascus, Antioch, and
all the strong cities taken, and Roman authority expelled. In
two years more, they had dealt the last blow to the Sassanian
monarchy in Persia and shattered it forever. At the same time
they were besieging Alexandria and adding Egypt to their
conquests. In 668, only thirty-six years after the death of
the Prophet, they were at the gates of Constantinople, making
the first of their many attempts to gain possession of the New
Rome. In 698 they had taken Carthage, had occupied all North
Africa to the Atlantic coast, had converted the Mauretanians,
or Moors, and absorbed them into their body politic as well as
into their communion. In 711 the commingled Arabs and Moors
crossed the Straits and entered Spain, and the overthrow of
the Christian kingdom of the Visigoths was practically
accomplished in a single battle that same year. Within two
years more, the Moors (as they came to be most commonly
called) were in possession of the whole southern, central, and
eastern parts of the Spanish peninsula, treating the
inhabitants who had not fled with a more generous toleration
than differing Christians were wont to offer to one another.
The Spaniards (a mixed population of Roman, Suevic, Gothic,
and aboriginal descent) who did, not submit, took refuge in
the mountainous region of the Asturias and Galicia, where they
maintained their independence, and, in due time, became
aggressive, until, after eight centuries, they recovered their
whole land.

The Eastern Empire.

At the East, as we have seen, the struggle of the Empire with
the Arabs began at the first moment of their career of foreign
conquest. They came upon it when it was weak from many wounds,
and exhausted by conflict with many foes. Before the death of
Justinian (565), the transient glories of his reign had been
waning fast. His immediate successor saw the work of
Belisarius and Narses undone, for the most part, and the
Italian peninsula overrun by a new horde of barbarians, more
rapacious and more savage than the Goths. At the same time,
the Persian war broke out again, and drained the imperial
resources to pay for victories that had no fruit. Two better
and stronger emperors—Tiberius and Maurice—who came after
him, only made an honorable struggle, without leaving the
Empire in a better state. Then a brutal creature—Phocas—held
the throne for eight years (602-610) and sunk it very low by his
crimes. The hero, Heraclius, who was now raised to power, came
too late. Assailed suddenly, at the very beginning of his
reign, by a fierce Persian onset, he was powerless to resist.
Syria, Egypt and Asia Minor were successively ravaged and
conquered by the Persian arms. They came even to the
Bosphorus, and for ten years they held its eastern shore and
maintained a camp within sight of Constantinople itself; while
the wild Tartar nation of the Avars raged, at the same time,
through the northern and western provinces of the Empire, and
threatened the capital on its landward sides. The Roman Empire
was reduced, for a time, to "the walls of Constantinople, with
the remnant of Greece, Italy, and Africa, and some maritime
cities, from Tyre to Trebizond, of the Asiatic coast." But in
622 Heraclius turned the tide of disaster and rolled it back
upon his enemies. Despite an alliance of the Persians with the
Avars, and their combined assault upon Constantinople in 626,
he repelled the latter, and wrested from the former, in a
series of remarkable campaigns, all the territory they had
seized. He had but just accomplished this great deliverance of
his dominions, when the Arabs came upon him, as stated above.
There was no strength left in the Empire to resist the
terrible prowess of these warriors of the desert. They
extinguished its authority in Syria and Egypt, as we have
seen, in the first years of their career; but then turned
their arms to the East and the West, and were slow in
disputing Asia Minor with its Christian lords. "From the time
of Heraclius the Byzantine theatre is contracted and darkened:
the line of empire which had been defined by the laws of
Justinian and the arms of Belisarius recedes on all sides from
our view" (Gibbon). There was neither vigor nor virtue in the
descendants of Heraclius; and when the last of them was
destroyed by a popular rising against his vicious tyranny
(711), revolution followed revolution so quickly that three
reigns were begun and ended in six years.

The so-called Byzantine Empire.

Then came to the throne a man of strong character, who
redeemed it at least from contempt; who introduced a dynasty
which endured for a century, and whose reign is the beginning
of a new era in the history of the Eastern Empire, so marked
that the Empire has taken from that time, in the common usage,
a changed name, and is known thenceforth as the Byzantine,
rather than the Eastern or the Greek. This was Leo the
Isaurian, who saved Constantinople from a second desperate
Moslem siege; who checked for a considerable period the
Mahometan advance in the East; who reorganized the imperial
administration on lasting lines; and whose suppression of
image-worship in the Christian churches of his empire led to a
rupture with the Roman Church in the West,—to the breaking of
all relations of dependence in Rome and Italy upon the Empire
in the East, and to the creating of a new imperial sovereignty
in Western Europe which claimed succession to that of Rome.

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Lombard Conquest of Italy.

On the conquest of Italy by Belisarius and Narses, for
Justinian, the eunuch Narses, as related before, was made
governor, residing at Ravenna, and bearing the title of
Exarch. In a few years he was displaced, through the influence
of a palace intrigue at Constantinople. To be revenged, it is
said that he persuaded the Lombards, a German tribe lately
become threatening on the Upper Danube, to enter Italy. They
came, under their leader Alboin, and almost the whole northern
and middle parts of the peninsula submitted to them with no
resistance. Pavia stood a siege for three years before it
surrendered to become the Lombard capital; Venice received an
added population of fugitives, and was safe in her
lagoons—like Ravenna, where the new Exarch watched the march
of Lombard conquest, and scarcely opposed it. Rome was
preserved, with part of southern Italy and with Sicily; but no
more than a shadow of the sovereignty of the Empire now
stretched westward beyond the Adriatic.

Temporal Power of the Popes.

The city of Rome, and the territory surrounding it, still
owned a nominal allegiance to the Emperor at Constantinople;
but their immediate and real ruler was the Bishop of Rome, who
had already acquired, in a special way, the fatherly name of
"Papa" or Pope. Many circumstances had combined to place both
spiritual and temporal power in the hands of these Christian
pontiffs of Rome. They may have been originally, in the
constitution of the Church, on an equal footing of
ecclesiastical authority with the four other chiefs of the
hierarchy—the Patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria,
Antioch and Jerusalem; but the great name of Rome gave them
prestige and weight of superior influence to begin with. Then,
they stood, geographically and sympathetically, in nearest
relations with that massive Latin side of Christendom, in
western Europe, which was never much disturbed by the raging
dogmatic controversies that tore and divided the Church on its
Eastern, Greek side. It was inevitable that the Western Church
should yield homage to one head—to one bishopric above all
other bishoprics; and it was more inevitable that the See of
Rome should be that one. So the spiritual supremacy to which
the Popes arrived is easily enough explained. The temporal
authority which they acquired is accounted for as obviously.
Even before the interruption of the line of emperors in the
West, the removal of the imperial residence for long periods
from Rome, to Constantinople, to Milan, to Ravenna, left the
Pope the most impressive and influential personage in the
ancient capital. Political functions were forced on him,
whether he desired to exercise them or not. It was Pope Leo
who headed the embassy to Attila, and saved the city from the
Huns. It was the same Pope who pleaded for it with the Vandal
king, Genseric. And still more and more, after the imperial
voice which uttered occasional commands to his Roman subjects
was heard from a distant palace in Constantinople, and in
accents that had become wholly Greek, the chair of St. Peter
grew throne-like,—the respect paid to the Pope in civil
matters took on the spirit of obedience, and his aspect before
the people became that of a temporal prince.

This process of the political elevation of the Papacy was
completed by the Lombard conquest of Italy. The Lombard kings
were bent upon the acquisition of Rome; the Popes were
resolute and successful in holding it against them. At last
the Papacy made its memorable and momentous alliance with the
Carolingian chiefs of the Franks. It assumed the tremendous
super-imperial right and power to dispose of crowns, by taking
that of the kingdom of the Franks from Childeric and giving it
to Pippin (751); and this was the first assumption of that
right by the chief priest of Western Christendom. In return,
Pippin led an army twice to Italy (754-755), humbled the
Lombards, took from them the exarchate of Ravenna and the
Pentapolis (a district east of the Appenines, between Ancona
and Ferrara), and transferred this whole territory as a
conqueror's "donation" to the Apostolic See. The temporal
sovereignty of the Popes now rested on a base as political and
as substantial as that of the most worldly and vulgar
potentates around them.

Charlemagne's restored Roman Empire.

Pippin's greater son, Charlemagne, renewed the alliance of his
house with the Papacy, and strengthened it by completing the
conquest of the Lombards, extinguishing their kingdom (774),
and confirming his father's donation of the States of the
Church. Charlemagne was now supreme in Italy, and the Pope
became the representative of his sovereignty at Rome,—a
position which lastingly enhanced the political importance of
the Roman See in the peninsula. But while Pope and King stood
related, in one view, as agent and principal, or subject and
sovereign, another very different relationship slowly shaped
itself in the thoughts of one, if not of both. The Western
Church had broken entirely with the Eastern, on the question
of image-worship; the titular sovereignty of the Eastern
Emperor in the ancient Roman capital was a worn-out fiction;
the reign of a female usurper, Irene, at Constantinople
afforded a good occasion for renouncing and discarding it. But
a Roman Emperor there must be, somewhere, for lesser princes
and sovereigns to do homage to; the political habit and
feeling of the European world, shaped and fixed by the long
domination of Rome, still called for it. "Nor could the
spiritual head of Christendom dispense with the temporal;
without the Roman Empire there could not be," according to the
feeling of the ninth century, "a Roman, nor by necessary
consequence a Catholic and Apostolic Church." For "men could
not separate in fact what was indissoluble in thought:
Christianity must stand or fall along with the great Christian
state: they were but two names for one and the same thing"
(Bryce). Therefore the head of the Church, boldly enlarging
the assumption of his predecessor who bestowed the crown of
the Merovingians upon Pippin, now took it upon himself to set
the diadem of the Cæsars on the head of Charlemagne. On the
Christmas Day, in the year 800, in the basilica of St. Peter,
at Rome, the solemn act of coronation was performed by Pope
Leo III.; the Roman Empire lived again, in the estimation of
that age, and Charles the Great reopened the interrupted line
of successors to Augustus.

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Before this imperial coronation of Charlemagne occurred, he
had already made his dominion imperial in extent, by the
magnitude of his conquests. North, south, east, and west, his
armies had been everywhere victorious. In eighteen campaigns
against the fierce and troublesome Saxons, he subdued those
stubborn pagans and forced them to submit to a Christian
baptism—with how much of immediate religious effect may be
easily surmised. But by opening a way for the more Christ-like
missionaries of the cross, who followed him, this missionary
of the battle-ax did, no doubt, a very real apostolic work. He
checked the ravages of the piratical Danes. He crushed the
Avars and took their country, which comprised parts of the
Austria and Hungary of the present day. He occupied Bavaria,
on the one hand, and Brittany on the other. He crossed the
Pyrenees to measure swords with the Saracens, and drove them
from the north of Spain, as far as the Ebro. His lordship in
Italy has been noticed already. He was unquestionably one of
the greatest monarchs of any age, and deserves the title
Magnus, affixed to his name, if that title ever has been
deserved by the kings who were flattered with it. There was
much more in his character than the mere aggressive energy
which subjugated so wide a realm. He was a man of
enlightenment far beyond his time; a man who strove after
order, in that disorderly age, and who felt oppressed by the
ignorance into which the world had sunk. He was a seeker after
learning, and the friend and patron of all in his day who
groped in the darkness and felt their way towards the light.
He organized his Empire with a sense of political system which
was new among the Teutonic masters of Western Europe (except
as shown by Theodoric in Italy); but there were not years
enough in his own life for the organism to mature, and his
sons brought back chaos again.

Appearance of the Northmen.

Before Charlemagne died (814) he saw the western coasts and
river valleys of his Empire harried by a fresh outpouring of
sea-rovers from the far North, and it is said that he had sad
forebodings of the affliction they would become to his people
thereafter. These new pirates of the North Sea, who took up,
after several centuries, the abandoned trade of their kinsmen,
the Saxons (now retired from their wild courses and
respectably settled on one side of the water, while subdued
and kept in order on the other), were of the bold and rugged
Scandinavian race, which inhabited the countries since known
as Denmark, Sweden and Norway. They are more or less confused
under the general name of Northmen, or Norsemen—men of the
North; but that term appears to have been applied more
especially to the freebooters from the Norwegian coast, as
distinguished from the "Danes" of the lesser peninsula. It is
convenient, in so general a sketch as this, to ignore the
distinction, and to speak of the Northmen as inclusive, for
that age, of the whole Scandinavian race.

Their visitations began to terrify the coasts of England,
France and Germany, and the lower valleys of the rivers which
they found it possible to ascend, some time in the later half
of the eighth century. It is probable that their appearance on
the sea at this time, and not before, was due to a revolution
which united Norway under a single king and a stronger
government, and which, by suppressing independence and
disorder among the petty chiefs, drove many of them to their
ships and sent them abroad, to lead a life of lawlessness more
agreeable to their tastes. It is also probable that the
northern countries had become populated beyond their
resources, as seemed to have happened before, when the Goths
swarmed out, and that the outlet by sea was necessarily and
deliberately opened. Whatever the cause, these Norse
adventurers, in fleets of long boats, issued with some
suddenness from their "vics," or fiords (whence the name
"viking"), and began an extraordinary career. For more than
half a century their raids had no object but plunder, and what
they took they carried home to enjoy. First to the Frisian
coast, then to the Rhine—the Seine—the Loire,—they came
again and again to pillage and destroy; crossing at the same
time to the shores of their nearest kinsmen—but heeding no
kinship in their savage and relentless forays along the
English coasts—and around to Ireland and the Scottish
islands, where their earliest lodgments were made.

The Danes in England.

About the middle of the ninth century they began to seize
tracts of land in England and to settle themselves there in
permanent homes. The Angles in the northern and eastern parts
and the Saxons in the southern part of England had weakened
themselves and one another by rivalry and war between their
divided kingdoms. There had been for three centuries an
unceasing struggle among them for supremacy. At the time of
the coming of the Danes (who were prominent in the English
invasion and gave their name to it), the West Saxon kings had
won a decided ascendancy. The Danes, by degrees, stripped them
of what they had gained. Northumberland, Mercia and East
Anglia were occupied in succession, and Wessex itself was
attacked. King Alfred, the great and admirable hero of early
English history, who came to the throne in 871, spent the
first eight years of his reign in a deadly struggle with the
invaders. He was obliged in the end to concede to them the
whole northeastern part of England, from the Thames to the
Tyne, which was known thereafter as "the Danelaw"; but they
became his vassals, and submitted to Christian baptism. A
century later, the Norse rovers resumed their attacks upon
England, and a cowardly English king, distrusting the now
settled and peaceful Danes, ordered an extensive massacre of
them (1002). The rage which this provoked in Denmark led to a
great invasion of the country. England was completely
conquered, and remained subject to the Danish kings until
1042, when its throne was recovered for a brief space of time
by the English line.

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The Normans in Normandy.

Meanwhile the Northmen had gained a much firmer and more
important footing in the territory of the Western
Franks—which had not yet acquired the name of France. The
Seine and its valley attracted them again and again, and after
repeated expeditions up the river, even to the city of Paris,
which they besieged several times, one of their chiefs, Rolf
or Rollo, got possession of Rouen and began a permanent
settlement in the country. The Frank King, Charles the Simple,
now made terms with Rollo and granted him a district at the
mouth of the Seine, (912), the latter acknowledging the
suzerainty or feudal superiority of Charles, and accepting at
the same time the doubly new character of a baptised Christian
and a Frankish Duke. The Northmen on the Seine were known
thenceforth as Normans, their dukedom as Normandy, and they
played a great part in European history during the next two
centuries.

The Northmen in the West.

The northern sea-rovers who had settled neither in Ireland,
England, nor Frankland, went farther afield into the West and
North and had wonderful adventures there. They took possession
of the Orkneys, the Shetlands, the Hebrides, and other islands
in those seas, including Man, and founded a powerful
island-kingdom, which they held for a long period. Thence they
passed on to Faroë and Iceland, and in Iceland, where they
lived peaceful and quiet lives of necessity, they founded an
interesting republic, and developed a very remarkable
civilization, adorned by a literature which the world is
learning more and more to admire. From Iceland, it was a
natural step to the discovery of Greenland, and from
Greenland, there is now little doubt that they sailed
southwards and saw and touched the continent of America, five
centuries before Columbus made his voyage.

The Northmen in the East.

While the Northmen of the ninth and tenth centuries were
exciting and disturbing all Western Europe by their naval
exploits, other adventurers from the Swedish side of the
Scandinavian country were sallying eastwards under different
names. Both as warriors and as merchants, they made their way
from the Baltic to the Black Sea and the Bosphorus, and bands
of them entered the service of the Eastern Emperor, at
Constantinople, where they received the name of Varangians,
from the oath by which they bound themselves. One of the
Swedish chiefs, Rurik by name, was chosen by certain tribes of
the country now called Russia, to be their prince. Rurik's
capital was Novgorod, where he formed the nucleus of a kingdom
which grew, through many vicissitudes, into the modern empire
of Russia. His successors transferred their capital to Kief,
and ultimately it was shifted again to Moscow, where the
Muscovite princes acquired the title, the power, and the great
dominion of the Czars of all the Russias.

The Slavonic Race.

The Russian sovereigns were thus of Swedish origin; but their
subjects were of another race. They belonged to a branch of
the great Aryan stock, called the Slavic or Slavonic, which
was the last to become historically known. The Slavonians bore
no important part in events that we have knowledge of until
several centuries of the Christian era had passed. They were
the obscure inhabitants in that period of a wide region in
Eastern Europe, between the Vistula and the Caspian. In the
sixth century, pressed by the Avars, they crossed the Vistula,
moving westwards, along the Baltic; and, about the same time
they moved southwards, across the Danube, and established the
settlements which formed the existing Slavonic states in
South-eastern Europe—Servia, Croatia and their lesser
neighbors. But the principal seat of the Slavonic race within
historic times has always been in the region still occupied by
its principal representatives, the Russians and the Poles.

Mediæval Society. The Feudal System.

We have now come to a period in European history—the middle
period of the Middle Ages—when it is appropriate to consider
the peculiar state of society which had resulted from the
transplanting of the Germanic nations of the North to the
provinces of the Roman Empire, and from placing the well
civilized surviving inhabitants of the latter in subjection to
and in association with masters so vigorous, so capable and so
barbarous. In Gaul, the conquerors, unused to town-life, not
attracted to town pursuits, and eager for the possession of
land, had generally spread themselves over the country and
left the cities more undisturbed, except as they pillaged them
or extorted ransom from them. The Roman-Gallic population of
the country had sought refuge, no doubt, to a large extent, in
the cities; the agricultural laborers were already, for the
most part, slaves or half-slaves—the coloni of the Roman
system—and remained in their servitude; while some of the
poorer class of freemen may have sunk to the same condition.

How far the new masters of the country had taken possession of
its land by actual seizure, ousting the former owners, and
under what rules, if any, it was divided among them, are
questions involved in great obscurity. In the time of
Charlemagne, there seems to have been a large number of small
landowners who cultivated their own holdings, which they
owned, not conditionally, but absolutely, by the tenure called
allodial. But alongside of these peasant proprietors there was
another landed class whose estates were held on very different
terms, and this latter class, at the time now spoken of, was
rapidly absorbing the former. It was a class which had not
existed before, neither among the Germans nor among the
Romans, and the system of land tenure on which it rested was
equally new to both, although both seem to have contributed
something to the origin of it. This was the Feudal System,
which may be described, in the words of Bishop Stubbs, as
being "a complete organization of society through the medium
of land tenure, in which, from the king down to the landowner,
all are bound together by obligation of service and defence:
the lord to protect his vassal, the vassal to do service to
his lord; the defence and service being based on, and
regulated by, the nature and extent of the land held by the
one of the other." Of course, the service exacted was, in the
main, military, and the system grew up as a military system,
expanding into a general governing system, during a time of
loose and ineffective administration. That it was a thing of
gradual growth is now fairly well settled, although little is
clearly known of the process of growth. It came to its
perfection in the tenth century, by which time most other
tenures of land had disappeared. The allodial tenure gave way
before it, because, in those disorderly times, men of small or
moderate property in land were in need of the protection which
a powerful lord, who had many retainers at his back, or a strong
monastery, could give, and were induced to surrender, to one
or the other, their free ownership of the land they held,
receiving it back as tenants, in order to establish the
relation which secured a protector.

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