Chapter XX: The Pineta (3)

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.]

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.]

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.

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.

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.