Chapter III: Preface (3)

Kingship and a tendency towards unification went hand in hand in the history of the German races. And not in that history alone: we may safely illustrate the tendency of the kingly office among the Germans by what we read in the Old Testament of the election of Saul. The Twelve Tribes of Israel, conscious that they were losing national unity and were in danger of being absorbed by the great monarchies on their borders, elected Saul to be their king, and his very first act of kingship was the deliverance of the outlying settlement of Jabesh-gilead from the destruction with which it was threatened by Nahash, King of the Ammonites. In our own days we have seen the aspirations of the Germans after national unity, aspirations which seemed for centuries doomed to hopeless failure, at length successful; and the visible token of their success and of that victory over their foes which unity made possible, was the crowning of the Emperor William by a host of kings, dukes and generals[36], in the palace of Versailles. We must not press the conclusion too far, since the history both of Rome and of the United States of America shows that a Republic can found a great dominion and defend the oneness of a nation: but for the German peoples, properly so called, I think we may safely say Monarchy has meant Unity, and Unity has meant Monarchy.

[Sidenote: _Character of the kingly office among the Germans._]

Far other, however, than the languid despot upon the sanctity of whose presence-chamber we intruded in the beginning of this lecture, was the King of the Goths or the Alamanni. Whether himself the son of a king or not, it was necessary that he should be of noble birth[37], and he had therefore probably been reared in a house, rude but somewhat larger than the ordinary freeman’s dwelling, built by the side of a fountain or near a sacred grove, at some little distance from the village settlement[38]. But his life had been passed in the active exercises of war and the chase: and before he was chosen king of a great and important _civitas_ he had probably given some proof of valour and ability, to cause him to be singled out from the ranks of nobles, each of whom was a chief in his own canton. Even after his election as king, his power was by no means unlimited. He might not bind nor strike any one of the free German warriors under him. Both in council and in war he had so much authority as his gifts of intellect, of daring, or of strength enabled him to acquire and retain, and not much more[39]. And when thus elected he had no absolute right to transmit his crown to his first-born, nor indeed to any of his sons. Doubtless the eldest son of a recently deceased king, if himself a man of capacity and valour, had always a good chance of being chosen to succeed him, but that was all. Gradually as the nation and its royal race grew accustomed to one another, and especially when the kings of that race had often led the nation to victory, the feeling grew stronger and stronger that out of that race only the nation ought to choose its kings. Thus were the Amals looked upon as the natural kingly race of the Ostrogoths, the Merwings of the Franks, the Asdings of the Vandals. But still there was no strict hereditary right, and the nation on the death of its king exercised its power of choice often in utter defiance of the rule of primogeniture.

[Sidenote: _Meeting of the members of the Civitas._]

The choice of the ruler, the decision as to war or peace, the enactment of a few very simple laws, these formed the chief business of the assembly of the _civitas_, which was called probably by some name like our own Anglo-Saxon Folc-gemot or Folcs-thing. Tacitus gives us a concise but vivid picture of the proceedings of one of these national assemblies. The _gemots-men_ indicated their deep-seated love of liberty by the unpunctuality of their attendance. Two days, and sometimes three, would elapse before a sufficient number had arrived to enable them to commence their proceedings. Then, when the crowd was in the humour for beginning, they sat down on the ground, all arrayed in their armour. The priests called for silence, and upon them rested the duty of maintaining order during the deliberations of the assembly[40]. Then the king or chief whose age, or eloquence, or noble birth gave him the right of pre-audience, addressed the assembly, and afterwards each in his turn according to the same blended qualifications. All the speakers sought rather to persuade than to command. An unpopular proposal was drowned in murmurs of disapproval, while eagerly brandished lances testified the applause and the agreement of the assembly.

[Sidenote: _Judicial power of the popular assembly._]

In these assemblies an accusation might be brought against a man who was suspected of treason against the nation’s life, and if the charge were pushed home, a capital sentence was pronounced upon the offender. Betrayers and deserters were hanged from a tree; the mere coward and fugitive, the man whom our Saxon forefathers would have called a _nithing_, was plunged deep in mud and covered with a hurdle to prevent his struggling back to life—a mode of punishment which reminds one of some scenes in Dante’s _Inferno_.

[Sidenote: _Election of the King._]

Probably, however, it was neither the legislative nor the judicial, but the elective aspect of these national councils which was the most important. The chiefs, or elders, or judges, or by whatever name they were called, the men whose business it was to administer a rude justice in the cantons and the villages, were chosen in the national council[41]. And the highest act of the nation’s great assize was performed when the chief who was to repel the eagles of Rome, to lead the people across the frozen Danube, or to swoop upon the wealthy plains of Gaul, was solemnly chosen king. The clashing arms testified the nation’s assent to his nomination. Six strong warriors slowly upheaved the shield on which stood the newly-chosen one, and shouts of ‘Thiudans! Thiudans[42]!’ proclaimed to the echoing hills that the nation had once more a king. Thus was he singled out from his fellows who was to conduct the people’s quarrel with the far-off, mysterious, Imperator of Rome.

LECTURE III.

THE COMING OF THE HUNS.

Having thus given a cursory glance at the political and social condition of the Roman Empire and its German neighbours in the fourth century after Christ, let us now even more briefly survey the ethnological aspect of the barbarian world on its northern frontier at the same time.

[Sidenote: _Celtic nations._]

[Sidenote: _Slavonic nations._]

Of the three great groups into which the non-Latin nations of Europe are at this day divided, Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavonic, the Teutonic alone here claims our especial attention. The Celtic nationality had been beaten down in ten years of battle by Julius Caesar, and its last hope of offering a successful resistance to Rome vanished when Suetonius Paulinus crossed the straits of Menai and put the Druids to the sword in their hitherto inviolable island of Mona. The Slavonic group of nations, which now fills Russia and Poland, forms half the population of Austria and is founding new kingdoms and principalities in what was lately Turkey in Europe, had not then come fully on the stage of history. The vague term Sarmatians, used by Roman geographers, is probably the best indication that we have of their presence in Europe, but few ethnological questions are harder than to define the ever-shifting boundary which separated them from their Teutonic neighbours. It is very possible that many of the barbarian hosts that warred on Rome may have consisted of Slavonic marauders led on by Teutonic chieftains: but just because the initiative at any rate belonged to the Teutons, and because the Slaves originated so few expeditions against the Empire, we may practically leave them out of the question and consider only the great Teutonic population which, all round the northern frontier of the Empire, from the mouth of the Rhine to the mouth of the Danube, faced the Masters of the Soldiery and their Legions.

[Sidenote: _Tendency of the Teutonic nations to form confederacies._]

[Sidenote: _Franks._]

[Sidenote: _Alamanni._]

[Sidenote: _Goths._]

There had been a marked tendency during the third century after Christ in the barbarian nations to merge themselves into a few great confederacies, a tendency which possibly had something to do with the ill-success of the Roman arms during that period. A whole string of names of petty tribes on the lower Rhine, mentioned to us by Tacitus, disappears in order to form the nation of the _Franks_. In like manner the tribes which dwelt on the Main and the Neckar clustered together into the confederation of the _Alamanni_. On the Middle Danube the great nation of the Marcomanni, who once pressed Marcus Aurelius hard, disappeared, and no one nation of pre-eminent power arose in its place; but when we come towards the mouth of the Danube, to the countries which are now known as Roumania, Transylvania, and Bessarabia, we find them occupied by the great and powerful confederacy of the _Goths_. This race, of pure Teutonic origin, belonging to that which is called the Low-German family of peoples, and speaking a language much more akin to Lowland Scotch than to the modern German of Hanover, had migrated, probably in the second century of our era, from the district now known as East Prussia in the south-east corner of the Baltic. They had spread themselves along the northern shore of the Euxine, near the mouths of the Dnieper and the Dniester, and after a series of piratical expeditions by sea and marauding inroads by land upon the Eastern half of the Empire, had occupied without further opposition the Roman province of Dacia, constituted by Trajan in the early part of the second century. During the century before our narrative begins, they had been dwelling for the most part as friendly and peaceable neighbours of Rome. They had become gradually divided into two great groups of peoples, the Eastern and Western Goths, who eventually became known as the Ostrogoths and Visigoths.

[Sidenote: _Associations connected with the term Gothic._]

A hard and undeserved fate, as well as an unmerited glory, has come upon the possessors of the Gothic name. The glory is that of having given their name to the most solemn and impressive order of architecture that the world has ever seen. Men speak, and doubtless will ever continue to speak, of Gothic buildings, though the last traces of Gothic nationality had expired many centuries before a pointed arch was seen at Canterbury or Notre Dame. On the other hand the expression ‘What a Goth!’ as indicative of rudeness and lack of culture, is constantly used by the descendants of men who were centuries behind the Goths in refinement and civilisation, and who do not know that ‘What a Frank!’ or ‘What a Saxon!’ would be far nearer to historic truth. In point of fact, of all the Teutonic races none showed so early an appreciation of what was best in Roman civilisation as the Gothic, none showed a greater power of assimilating that civilisation, and none, had its career not been prematurely cut short, would more happily for Europe have blended the old with the new by uniting the culture and refinement of ‘Romania’ with the rough energy and freedom of ‘Barbaricum.’

[Sidenote: _The Visigoths and the Empire._]

[Sidenote: _Circa 350-376._]

At the particular period which we have reached these remarks apply rather to the Visigoth than to the Ostrogoth. While the Ostrogoths, wandering wide over the vast plains of Southern Russia, were coming in contact with and subduing the dim Slavonic peoples of the interior, and thus building up for their great king, Hermanric, a vast but ill-consolidated empire which his flatterers—those of them at least who had some slight knowledge of classical history—compared to that of Alexander the Great, the Visigoths dwelling in Transylvania and Wallachia, and acknowledging perhaps in a general way the suzerainty of Hermanric, but under the especial rule of their own native chieftains who bore the subordinate title of _Judges_, were continually coming more and more under the influence of the Empire. Latin and Greek words were creeping into their language. The soldier talked of his pay as _mizdo_ (evidently the same word as the Greek μισθός), and of his rations as _anno_ (probably the Latin _annona_). The _alewa_ displayed to the grateful husbandman the fatness of the olive-tree, and he carried home its produce in a _sakkus_.

[Sidenote: _Ulfilas and the Gothic Bible._]

[Sidenote: _348-370._]

Not only words like these and a knowledge of the arts of civilised life, but more far-reaching thoughts, those which overleap the grave and bind together in one all the generations of the family of God, were vibrating through the Visigothic brain. Ulfilas, the great Apostle of the Goths, himself a Goth, but resident in early manhood at Constantinople, began his missionary career in 341, and continued it for forty years, labouring during all that time by his tongue and pen at the conversion of his countrymen to Christianity. As an instrument in this great work he translated the Bible into Gothic, only omitting, according to the well-known story, the books of Samuel and Kings, ‘inasmuch as they contain the story of the wars, and the Gothic race was already fond enough of war, and needed rather a bit to hold it back from battle, than any spur to urge it thereunto.’ This Gothic Bible is a priceless possession for the philologist, being by far the earliest monument of any Teutonic language, and illustrating in a countless variety of ways, both the distant relationship which connects our family of languages with Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, and the points at which the members of our own family, German, Danish, Dutch, English, have parted company one from another.

[Sidenote: _Persecution of Gothic Christians. 370-375._]

The success of Ulfilas in Christianising the Goths was so great that a persecution arose, under the stress of which many of his converts determined to leave their homes and seek shelter in the dominions of the great Christian Emperor. This happened about the year 348. The emigrants, with Ulfilas at their head, ‘a second Moses,’ as he was often styled by his contemporaries, crossed the Danube and founded a settlement in the country about Nicopolis, on the northern slopes of the Balkans. Here their descendants were still living after the lapse of nearly two centuries[43], being known by the name of the Lesser Goths, ‘a numerous people, but poor and unwarlike, having no abundance of anything, save cattle of divers kinds, sheep and pastures and forests; having no wheat, though the soil is fertile in other crops. Vineyards they do not possess, but some of them as merchants buy wine from the neighbouring district: but most of them are nourished on milk.’

Probably Ulfilas did not remain constantly with his Lesser Goths in Moesia, but often crossed the Danube into Dacia, to strengthen the faith of his remaining converts there, or to add to their number. Apparently a second persecution broke out (if, indeed, it had ever ceased to rage) about 370. From a fragment of a Gothic calendar we learn that the 23rd October was dedicated ‘to the remembrance of many martyrs among the Gothic people, and of Frederic’ (doubtless one of the heroes of the persecution), and that the 29th was similarly dedicated ‘to the remembrance of the martyrs who remained, with Priest Vereka and Batvin, members of the Catholic Church, and were burned among the Gothic people.’

[Sidenote: _Athanaric Judge of the Visigoths._]

The leader of the persecuting party at this time was Judge Athanaric, a stern, unbending Gothic chief, who would brook no compromise with Rome or Roman ways, who had sworn a terrible oath that he would never set foot on Roman soil, and who now, to the cruel utmost of his power, strove to prevent Odin and Thunnor from being driven out of the Home of Gods by the Nazarene, whose cross glittered upon the banners of Rome.

[Sidenote: _Fritigern._]

On the opposite side, as leader of that section of the Visigoths which favoured the Roman civilisation and the Christian religion, appears the gallant Fritigern, one of the most attractive figures whom Gothic history presents to us. The contention between him and the bigoted old Gothic party under Athanaric was so sharp that it seems to have broken out into actual war, in which, as one author[44] tells us, Fritigern, on formally announcing his conversion to Christianity, asked and received the help of the Roman Emperor against his rival.

[Sidenote: _Outlook in 375._]

Such, then, was the relation of ‘Barbaricum’ towards ‘Romania’ about the year 375. Reading (as we are too apt to do) our knowledge of subsequent events into the history of that year, when the fourth century of our era had reached its fourth quarter, it is easy to imagine the Roman Empire lying rich and defenceless, at the mercy of barbarian foes all round its border and all athirst to devour it. But such was certainly not the aspect which it then wore to its contemporaries. The keen eye of a statesman, if he were also possessed of fine ethical instincts, might undoubtedly perceive many dangerous symptoms of moral and spiritual decay, from which he might forebode its future downfall; but to the ordinary observer, especially to the ordinary barbarian observer, seldom had the great fabric of Roman civilisation seemed stronger or more imposing. Of anything like a combined attack of the barbarian hordes upon the Roman frontier, no barbarian dreamed. A petty raid here or there might perhaps be successfully executed, and might enable its perpetrator to return with some cattle from a few Moesian farms, or some bracelets and golden chains from a sacked Illyrian town. But this was the height of his ambition as Rome’s enemy. He would much rather be Rome’s friend: enter her service as a leader of _foederati_[45]; mount guard in the ante-chamber of the Emperor; direct the arms of Rome against some hated rival chief; perhaps, even—supreme felicity—attain in his well-fed and corpulent old age to the overwhelming honour of a Roman consulship.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: _Sudden appearance of the Huns. 374._]

The appearance on the northern shore of the Sea of Azof of a horde of squalid savages from the steppes of Central Asia, each riding a little pony as ugly and as unkempt as himself, changed the whole current of men’s thoughts, and was the first visible link in the chain which drew mediaeval Europe, the Europe of Charlemagne, Barbarossa, and Dante,

‘forth from the abyss of things that were to be.’

These savages were the terrible Huns, of whose history I shall have to speak somewhat more in detail in my sixth lecture. For the present it will be enough to quote a chapter from the work of the Gothic historian Jordanes, in order to show how the Asiatic intruders were looked upon by the first European nation with whom they came in contact[46].

[Sidenote: _Description of the Huns by Jordanes._]

‘After no great interval of time the nations of the Huns, more cruel than Ferocity itself, flamed forth against the Goths. An unhallowed union between unclean spirits wandering through the wilderness, and certain Gothic women expelled [centuries before] for witchcraft from the tents of their countrymen, gave birth to this most ferocious people, which dwelt at first among the marshes—small, foul, and skinny, hardly human, but spoken of as men because they possessed something which distantly resembled human speech. This wild race formerly dwelt on the further shore of the Sea of Azof, and there practised no other labour than hunting, except that after they had grown into a great people they harried the neighbouring nations with constant robberies and frauds. Now when the huntsmen of this people were, according to their custom, pursuing the chase on the further shore of Azof, behold, upon a sudden, a female stag presented herself to their view, and stepping into the pool, first going forth and then stopping, seemed to offer herself as guide of their journey. Following her lead, therefore, the huntsmen passed over on foot through the Sea of Azof, which they had before thought to be as impassable as the ocean. Soon, too, when the Gothic shore loomed up before those unknown visitors, the stag disappeared. This, I trow, was done by those spirits to whom the Huns owed their origin, in order to spite the Gothic people. The huntsmen who had before thought that there was no other world beyond the Sea of Azof, were stricken with admiration of the Gothic land, the road to which, hitherto unknown, they deemed had been shown to them by the gods, and going back to their own people, persuaded them to hasten by the path which the stag had pointed out to them into the territory of the Goths. All whom they met on the way fell victims to their fury, and as soon as they had crossed that vast pool, five nations [whose uncouth names I need not transcribe] were swept away by that whirlwind of savage tribes. The Alans also, who were a match for them in war, but very unlike them in civilisation, in appearance, and in diet, were wearied out by them in incessant fighting, and at length subdued. For those whom they would perhaps never have conquered in fair fight they put to flight by the terribleness of their appearance, throwing the utmost possible hideousness into the expression of their faces, which were naturally of a frightful blackness, and resembled, if I may say so, a shapeless lump of dough rather than a face, having two black points in them instead of eyes. This scowling countenance reveals the boldness [?cruelty] of their hearts, who rage against their new-born offspring even on the first day of their birth, for all the male children’s cheeks are gashed by them with an iron tool, in order that before they begin to receive the nourishment of their mother’s milk they may learn to bear the pain of a wound. Hence their youth lacks the beauty, and their old age the dignity of a beard, because their faces, furrowed with iron, lose through scars the seasonable beauty of hair. They are little in stature, but nimble and clever in their movements, and especially ready in horsemanship: with broad shoulders, arms well adapted to the use of the bow, necks strong, and heads always held erect with pride. In short these people, wearing the shape of man, practise in their lives the ferocity of beasts.’

* * * * *

Through the uncouth sentences of the half-educated Gothic historian the general character of the Hunnish invaders may be sufficiently discerned. They stood on a distinctly lower grade of civilisation than any of the Teutonic invaders of the Empire. The Goth, the Frank, the Alaman, the Vandal were barbarians indeed, but barbarians with some capacity—in the case of the Goth with an extraordinary capacity—for appreciating the advantages of civilisation. The Hun, fresh from his centuries of wandering over the high table-land of Tartary, was an utter, an irreclaimable savage. To compare them with some of the native races with which our own has recently come in contact, the Goth was like the Maori, the Hun like a stronger and more warlike Australian savage.

[Sidenote: _The Huns were ‘Turanians,’ not Aryans._]

This social difference between the Hun and the Teuton corresponds to a deep ethnological chasm. Hitherto all the great struggles in which the European nations had been engaged (except the Punic wars) had been waged between members of the great Aryan family of nations. Persian, Greek, Italian, Celt, Teuton, however wide their divergences of religion, of culture, of intellectual development, were yet all children of the same family, some of whom, so to speak, had come of age, and entered into their inheritance, while others were still in a state of infancy and untaught childhood. But the Hun had no such link with the great historic peoples of the Mediterranean Sea. In his language probably no germ of affinity with Greek or Sanskrit would have been discernible. Wheresoever the common home of the Indo-European peoples may eventually be located, it is certain that the progenitors of the Hun never dwelt there. He was of kin to the Mongol, the Calmuck, the Turk, not to the Roman or the Englishman. In the world’s history he stands in line with Jenghiz Khan, with Tamerlane, with Bajazet, not with Alexander or with Caesar. In one word—to adopt a term which, however inaccurate, is convenient—he was not Aryan, but Turanian.

[Sidenote: _A nation of light cavalry._]

Such then were the invaders from Asia, who, about the year 374, precipitated themselves upon the settlements of the Ostrogoths in Southern Russia. What they may have lacked in size they made up in nimbleness of movement, and against the Goths, who do not appear to have been pre-eminently an equestrian people, they had this advantage, that every man of the tribe was mounted, and mounted on a hardy wiry little steed, which was probably satisfied with the roughest food, and which so perfectly understood its rider’s wishes, that it seemed as if horse and horseman were one being.

[Sidenote: _Hermanric defeated._]

Details as to the conflict between the Huns and the Ostrogoths are utterly wanting, but it is clear that the latter were completely defeated. Hermanric, ‘the Ostrogothic Alexander’ who is said to have reached the age of 110, in his rage and shame put an end to his own life. His wide but loosely compacted empire was broken up. Some Ostrogoths, under a prince of the house of Hermanric, moved southwards, and took part in the events which we are about to notice, on the Danube. But the larger part of the nation submitted to inevitable necessity and bowed their necks to the yoke. For three quarters of a century the Ostrogoths formed part of the great Hunnish Empire, and their sovereigns, descendants of the great Hermanric, ruled as vassals of the Hunnish king.

[Sidenote: _Athanaric defeated. 375._]

The barbarian flood rolled on and reached the river Dniester and the long line of earthworks which apparently separated the land of the Visigoths from that of the Ostrogoths[47]. Here Athanaric had drawn up his men, expecting a regular attack, to which he would have been prepared with a regular reply. Little did he know the nature of the nimble savages with whom he had to deal. Having learned from their scouts where the bulk of the Visigothic army was posted (which was probably by the rampart rather than by the river), and having found a ford across the Dniester, they crossed that ford by moonlight and fell like a thunderbolt on the flank of the unsuspecting Athanaric. He was stupefied at the assault, he saw his bravest friends slain, and he found he had no resource but flight. Withdrawing to the Carpathians he began to construct a new line of defence, partly formed by those mountains and partly by the river Sereth. He would have had but little leisure to construct this new stronghold, had not the Huns been so burdened with their booty that they could not follow him in haste.

[Sidenote: _The Visigoths seek refuge within the Empire. 376._]

And now that the strongest Gothic champions had been worsted, dismay and despair entered the hearts of the Visigoths. To share the hardships of a life in the Carpathians with Athanaric was not the course which commended itself to the majority. They looked across the broad Danube to the well-tilled plains of Moesia; they thought of the tightening bond which had of late united them to the Empire; they turned to Fritigern, the steadfast partisan of Rome, and deemed that through his friendship for the Emperor they might find a refuge from the storm. Fritigern (who, with a perhaps older colleague, Alavivus, is always spoken of as leader of the migration) may perhaps, through Ulfilas, have opened negotiations with the Imperial Court, negotiations which occupied many weeks, for Valens, the reigning Emperor, was at Antioch. The terms which Fritigern offered were that the Goths would all enter the military service of the Empire, and apparently that those who were still heathens would embrace the Emperor’s creed, which was one of the many forms of Arian Christianity. On the other hand there must have been some stipulation as to the supply of food, at least for one season, to give the new-comers time to till the fields for a future harvest.

[Sidenote: _The Goths on the shore of the Danube._]

While the tedious negotiations were going forward, a strange sight might be seen on that Wallachian shore of the Danube, where Europe beheld, in 1877, the vast host of the Russians manœuvring backwards and forwards, in order to find a place where they might cross into Bulgaria. On that same shore in the autumn of 376 stood 200,000 Goths, stretching out their hands in the attitude of entreaty, bewailing the hard fate that had befallen them, and shouting out, whenever a Roman official came within hearing, their eager offers of fealty to the Emperor.

[Sidenote: _Valens gives them permission to cross._]

At length the answer came from Antioch. Valens was flattered by the prospect of the submission of so many stalwart warriors; he persuaded himself that by enlisting them under his standards he might lighten the pressure of taxation on his subjects; he perhaps also thought that in the battle of the creeds which was still being waged, the adhesion of a strong and warlike nation to his own Arian form of faith would secure for it the victory. This last consideration, however, which is all-important on the pages of the ecclesiastical historians, was probably only a secondary one in the minds of the Emperor and his Council.

[Sidenote: _The Danube crossed._]

[Sidenote: _Rapacity of the Roman officials._]

Whatever the determining cause may have been, the Imperial orders came to Lupicinus the Count of Thrace, and Maximus the Duke of Moesia, that the refugees were to be admitted into the Empire on condition that they gave up their arms, and that the boys who were still under age for martial service should be surrendered as hostages to be quartered in various distant cities of the Empire. Thus the long suspense was ended. The Visigoths, who night after night had feared to see the Hunnish watch-fires blazing in the north and to hear the discordant battle-cry of the Asiatics sounding in their ears, were relieved from their terrible anxiety. To have to part with their gallant sons was hard: to have to part with their old and trusty broadswords was harder, but life was sweet. There was the Moesian shore and safety under the shadow of Rome, and here were the sloops ready to carry them across to the Promised Land. Night and day, for several days, the sloops were crossing and re-crossing, till at length 200,000 Gothic warriors, with their wives, and children, and aged parents, stood on the soil of the Empire. They stood there, not unarmed. Already they had made their first experience of the gigantic corruption of the Imperial service. Lupicinus and Maximus, and the officers under them, avaricious and lustful men, while superintending the transport of the Goths, were thinking all the time how to fill their villas with precious spoil and beautiful captives, rather than how to obey the orders of the Emperor. While they were intent on the golden torques, the linen robes, the costly-fringed carpets of the Goths, they allowed the broadswords and the hunting-knives to pass unquestioned. Already before the disembarkation was well over, a bitter sense of wrong, and consciousness of power to avenge that wrong, were brooding in thousands of Gothic hearts.

We may perhaps say of the reception by Valens of the Gothic fugitives, as of Elizabeth’s reception of Mary Queen of Scots, that either the request for asylum should have been refused, or, if granted, it should have been granted generously. There was abundance of room doubtless in the solitary spaces of Moesia for 200,000 sturdy cultivators, and if they had been wisely and fairly treated they might have formed a stout barrier against all other barbarian invaders. Who can say? The Roman Empire might be standing yet.

‘Trojaque nunc staret, Priamique arx alta maneret.’

But now, in addition to the grievance of their treasures stolen, came the far sorer grievance of food withheld. The promised rations, perhaps partly from incompetence as well as from bad faith, were not forthcoming. With such money as they still possessed the unhappy Goths offered to buy food: Lupicinus and Maximus bought up dogs from all the districts round and sold their flesh to the starving immigrants in return for slaves, among whom were some of the sons of the noblest of the Goths, driven to barter even their children for life. Such wickedness as this, thank God, does not often miss its reward even in this world.

A few months, however, elapsed before the storm of vengeance burst forth. Let us take advantage of that short interval to describe the characters of the rulers of the Roman State.

[Sidenote: _Roman Emperors._]

[Sidenote: West, _Valentinian I, 364-375._]

[Sidenote: East, _Valens, 364-378._]

For eleven years (364-375) after the death of Julian ‘the Apostate’ and his short-lived successor Jovian, Valentinian’s strong hand was at the Empire’s helm. A blunt, untutored soldier, with a strange dash of cruelty in his nature, he was nevertheless a good ruler for those times. He held an even balance between the warring Christian sects, insisting on toleration all round; he was careful not to oppress his subjects by too heavy taxation; he defended them from the barbarians, and he repressed the licentiousness which was sapping the energies of the Empire. The worst thing that he did for his country was associating his brother Valens in the throne, giving him the rule over the East. Both in person and character Valens presented a striking contrast to his brother. Valentinian was strong and well-shaped, with a bright complexion and clear blue eye: everything about him told of energy and decision. Valens, torpid and procrastinating, with muddy complexion, lack-lustre eye, bent legs and protuberant belly, neither looked nor spoke like an Emperor of Rome. And over against Valentinian’s inflexible and universal religious tolerance had to be set the somewhat bitter Arianism of Valens.

[Sidenote: West, _Gratian, 375-383. Valentinian II, 375-392._]

A year before the Hunnish irruption into Europe Valentinian died, leaving his brother Valens Emperor of the East, and his two sons, Gratian and Valentinian II, Emperors of the West, the former at Trier, the latter at Milan. Gratian was a lad full of noble promise, but only sixteen years of age; Valentinian II was a child of four, under the regency of his mother, Justina. Decidedly the Imperial partnership was weak, ill-adapted for the strain of a great crisis, and what made it yet weaker was that it was not united. The dull soul of the sluggish Valens was jealous of his brilliant nephew, who was already showing military aptitudes and earning the devotion of his troops. Justina also, who was the second wife of the deceased Emperor, looked probably with no friendly eye on the growing reputation of her step-son. The _Concordia Augustorum_[48], which was so often celebrated on the Imperial medals, was not strong in the year 376.

[Sidenote: _The banquet at Marcianople. 377._]

We return to the affairs of the betrayed and hunger-stricken Goths. There was as yet no open insurrection, but Alavivus and Fritigern were marching about in Moesia in a way which seemed to indicate independence and growing suspicion; and, moreover, some of the bands of their Ostrogothic cousins had taken advantage of the disorder of the times, and the occupied attention of the Imperial soldiery, to cross the Danube on rafts and pitch their camp not far from Fritigern’s. Before long Alavivus and Fritigern appeared at the gates of Marcianople (the modern Shumla), an important city at the intersection of two great cross-roads, and commanding a pass through the Balkans. The two Visigothic chiefs were still ostensibly captains of the Emperor’s _foederati_, and Lupicinus, Count of Thrace, bade them to a banquet. The barbarians who followed them had flocked into the city to purchase provisions. A dispute arose between them and the citizens which led to bloodshed, and the news of the disturbance reached Lupicinus when he was reclining at the luxurious banquet, flushed with wine and scarcely keeping his heavy eyes open by gazing at the performers of a pantomime. Languidly he ordered the tall young Gothic nobles who were keeping guard over their chief at the door of the _praetorium_ to be hewn down by the far more numerous Roman soldiery. The groans of the dying, and the battle-shout of those who were yet fighting for their lives, penetrated the innermost chambers of the palace, and aroused Fritigern from the pleasures of the dainty repast. If his host sought to soothe him by alleging that it was only a drunken brawl that was going on outside,

‘his soul more truly knew that sound too well.’

He drew his sword and stalked down through the banquet hall, exclaiming that if there was a tumult among the Goths he alone could quell it. The pretext, or the naked sword, secured him a safe passage through the trembling ranks of the banqueters. He was received with a shout of joy by his surviving companions. They mounted their horses and rode out of the gates of the city; and now, openly declaring war against the Empire, began to plunder and to burn the rich farmsteads in the neighbourhood of Marcianople. Lupicinus marched forth to meet them at the ninth milestone from the city; but his troops, hastily collected, were badly led. The Goths, in their fury and despair, beat down their enemies. All the tribunes (commissioned officers) and the larger part of the rank and file were stretched in death upon the plain. The base Lupicinus, whose cruelty and avarice had caused the disaster, escaped from this battle-field, but before long both he and his colleague in guilt, Maximus, fell victims to the righteous vengeance of the Goths[49].

That day, that fatal day of the banquet at Marcianople, ‘took away,’ says the Gothic historian, ‘the hunger of the Goths and the security of the Romans; and the former now began, not as strangers and foreigners, but as citizens and lords, to issue their orders to the cultivators of the soil, and to hold all the northern regions [from the Balkans] to the Danube in their own right.’

[Sidenote: _377-378. Gothic War._]

[Sidenote: _377. Battle of Ad Salices._]

The war thus commenced lasted, with varying success, through the years 377 and 378. The Emperor Valens, during the whole of the former year, remained at Antioch, but sent two officers of high rank, but of no great military skill, to conduct the campaign in his stead. On the whole, however, the fortune of war must have been unfavourable to the Goths (who evidently fought with more fury than science), since the chief battle of this year was fought at a place called Ad Salices (the Willows), as far north as the region now known as the Dobrudscha. Our chief historian[50] (himself long an officer of rank in the Imperial army) gives a striking description of the Gothic warriors, encamped in the centre of a rampart of waggons, and revelling in the abundance of the booty which they had carried off from the wasted plains of Thrace. All night the two armies lay encamped near to one another in sleepless suspense. With the dawn of day the barbarians made an attempt to reach some higher ground, from whence they might rush down on the enemy; but this manœuvre was checked by a well-executed counter-movement of the legions. As both armies halted and gazed at one another with scowling faces, the Romans raised their martial song (itself borrowed from other barbarians), which was known as the _barritus_, and which, beginning in a low bass key, rose, as it were, by steps to a shrill and exultant treble. The barbarians answered by the old war-songs (discordant in Roman ears, but in which our Saxon forefathers would probably have found familiar music), wherein they sang the praises of their glorious ancestors, sprung from the seed of gods, and dear to Odin.

Then the battle was joined, and the marshy willow-intersected plain was seen covered with every phase of human agony; but all was din and confusion, and if any well-concerted plan was formed or executed on either side, it does not appear in the pages of the historian. The battle was a drawn one; but apparently the Romans were left in possession of the field, for their dead were buried, while the bodies of the Goths were left to be devoured by vultures. Years after, the husbandman, ploughing in that fatal plain, marvelled at the mighty bones of the barbarians which his plough-share upturned.

[Sidenote: _Advance of Gratian._]

In this battle good service had been rendered by some troops which Gratian had sent from Gaul to the assistance of his uncle. The young Emperor had had his own hard battles to fight with the barbarians who dwelt on the northern shore of the Lake of Constance, but having subdued them he marched eastwards in 378 as far as Sirmium on the Save, from which place he sent a message to Valens that he was ready to co-operate with him in an attack on the Goths, whose invasion seemed to imperil the very existence of the eastern portion of the Empire.

[Sidenote: _378. Valens at Hadrianople._]

But Valens, who had by this time quitted Antioch for Constantinople, was jealous of his young nephew’s fame, and in no humour to add one needless leaf of laurel to his crown. He had pitched his camp near Hadrianople, and there received the messengers of Gratian, who earnestly besought him to wait for their master’s arrival. So Victor advised, a Slavonic barbarian by birth, but master of the Imperial cavalry, and a careful and cautious general. So, however, did not advise his other chief general Sebastian, who was elated by some recent victories that he had won over the barbarians: and his rash counsels found too sure an echo in the jealous heart of Valens. It was decided to fight at once and end the Gothic war by the unaided forces of the East.

[Sidenote: _Negotiations between Fritigern and Valens._]

But Fritigern on his side had allies whose arrival he was expecting. The Ostrogothic chiefs, Alatheus and Saphrax, were on their march to join him, and he would fain postpone the battle till they arrived. He therefore sent a Christian priest on an embassy to Valens, offering to make peace if he and his followers might be allowed to occupy Thrace as subjects of the Empire. Nothing came of these negotiations; nothing was meant to come of them; but time was gained for Alatheus and Saphrax to accomplish another day’s march towards the army of Fritigern.

[Sidenote: _Battle of Hadrianople, 9 Aug. 378._]

On the 9th August, 378, a day long and fatally memorable in the annals of the Empire, the legions of Valens moved forth from their entrenched camp under the walls of Hadrianople, and after a march of eight miles under the hot sun of August came in sight of the barbarian vanguard, behind which stretched the circling line of the waggons that guarded the Gothic host.

Yet another embassy did the artful Fritigern (perhaps not over-confident of victory) send into the Roman camp. There were discussions as to the dignity and powers of the messengers: the Goth was willing to send one of his noblest chiefs if the Roman would do the same as a pledge of his safety. Richomer, Count of the Domestics, Gratian’s representative, expressed his willingness to go as a hostage into the barbarian camp, but scarcely had he reached it when, behold! fresh standards were seen upon the surrounding hills. The long-waited for troops of Alatheus and Saphrax had arrived, and not pausing in their headlong career fell like a thunderbolt on the Roman flank.

The soldiers of the Empire, hot, thirsty, wearied out with hours of waiting under the blaze of an August sun, and only half understanding that the negotiations were ended and the battle begun, fought at a terrible disadvantage, but fought not ill. The infantry on the left wing seem even to have pushed back their enemies and penetrated to the Gothic waggons. But they were for some reason not covered as usual by a force of cavalry, and they were jammed into a too narrow space of ground where they could not use their spears with effect, yet presented a terribly easy mark to the Gothic arrows. They fell in dense masses as they had stood. Then the whole weight of the enemy’s attack was directed against the centre and right. When the evening began to close in, the utterly routed Roman soldiers were rushing in disorderly flight from the fatal field. The night, dark and moonless, may have protected some, but more met their death rushing blindly over a rugged and unknown country.

[Sidenote: _Fate of Valens._]

Meanwhile, Valens had sought shelter with a little knot of soldiers (the two regiments of Lancearii and Mattiarii), who still remained unmoved amidst the surging sea of ruin. When their ranks too were broken, and when some of his bravest officers had fallen around him, he joined the common soldiers in their headlong flight. Struck by a Gothic arrow he fell to the ground, but was carried off by some of the eunuchs and life-guardsmen who still accompanied him, to a peasant’s cottage hard by. The Goths, ignorant of his rank, but eager to strip the gaily-clothed guardsmen, surrounded the cottage and attempted in vain to burst in the doors. Then mounting to the roof they tried to smoke out the imprisoned inmates, but succeeding beyond their desires, set fire to the cottage, and Emperor, eunuchs, and life-guards perished in the flames. Only one of the body-guard escaped, who climbed out through one of the blazing windows and fell into the hands of the barbarians. He told them when it was too late what a prize they had missed in their cruel eagerness, nothing less than the Emperor of Rome.

Ecclesiastical historians for generations delighted to point the moral of the story of Valens, that he who had seduced the whole Gothic nation into the heresy of Arius, and thus caused them to suffer the punishment of everlasting fire, was himself by those very Goths burned alive on the terrible 9th of August.

LECTURE IV.

THEODOSIUS.

[Sidenote: _378._]

In the battle of Hadrianople two-thirds of the Roman army fell. The two Counts, Sebastian and Trajan (the General-in-Chief and his predecessor), Valerian, the Count of the Imperial Stables, and Aequitius, a relation of the Emperor and Superintendent of his palace[51], were all stretched dead upon the field. There too lay thirty-five Tribunes, officers whose military rank corresponded with that of our Colonels. The historian says, with perfect truth, that since the day of Cannae no such disaster had befallen the Roman army. Nor had the Roman State, now in the twelfth century of its existence, the same power of recovering from its reverses which it possessed in the sixth century from the building of the City, when the statue of Victory in the Capitol drooped her wings at the news of the slaughter on the Apulian plain.

[Sidenote: _Movements of the Goths after the battle of Hadrianople._]

[Sidenote: _378. Siege of Constantinople._]

Yet the Goths, though they had shown that they could win a battle, had as yet neither discipline nor warlike art sufficient to enable them to conquer in a campaign. An unsuccessful attack on Hadrianople was followed by an equal failure before the walls of Constantinople. By a strange inversion of its future fates, the Imperial capital by the Bosphorus was defended from these Visigoths (the ancestors of Don John of Austria and of all the Christian chivalry of Spain) by a body of Saracen soldiers who had been enlisted under the banners of the Empire. One of these wild defenders of civilisation, nearly naked but with long and shaggy hair, dashed forward with a melancholy howl into the Gothic ranks, stabbed an enemy with his short sword, and then putting his lips to the neck of the slain foe sucked his life-blood with eager zest. The thought of fighting against such monsters as this was too terrible for the impressionable Goths, and they retired disheartened from the walls.

[Sidenote: _Weakness of the Goths as besiegers._]

[Sidenote: _A Roman siege-train._]

[Sidenote: _378-9._]

But, quite independently of any such exceptional causes of panic, there was a striking weakness in the Gothic attack whenever they came face to face with a fenced city. When Fritigern marched away from the treacherous city of Marcianople, crying out, ‘I wage no war on stone walls,’ he expressed that which was of necessity the maxim of all the barbarian warriors during the succeeding century. It cannot be said that at this time the powers of the defence in sieges were necessarily superior to those of the attack. On the contrary, in the wars between Persia and Rome it is remarkable how often the same cities were taken and retaken. But a siege required patience, mechanical skill, and untiring vigilance, and could not be decided by a mere outburst of Berserker fury such as sometimes swept the legions before it on the field of battle. In reading the account of a Roman siege-train given by Ammianus Marcellinus[52], though I cannot say that I understand all his explanations (and I believe it would require the combination of an expert mechanician and an invincible translator of Latin to make sense of many of them), still it is easy to perceive this much—that a siege was then, as now, practically a duel of artillery, though in the working of that artillery the explosive force of gunpowder was not made use of, and that it was by the engineer, rather than by the warrior, that the strongest city was taken. There was the _Balista_, for the discharge of the strong iron-shod wooden arrow; the _Scorpion_, or the _Wild Ass_[53], which suddenly reared itself high in air and hurled forth its heavy stone; the _Battering Ram_[54], for butting at all the weakest places in a wall; the _City-taker_[55], which fastened its triangular prongs into the wall and tore it to pieces. By these and by the great moving towers the city was attacked, and by machines as complicated and as destructive, but of a somewhat different kind, it was defended. For all this sort of work, as I have said, not only the humbler qualities of the soldier—patience and vigilance—but also some of the skill of a trained mechanician, were needed; and these qualities, abundantly present in many even of the common soldiers among the Italians, the Greeks, and the Persians, were yet wanting in the untutored brains of the Teutonic warriors. Therefore the story of the wars between the barbarians and the Empire is for the most part a story of monotonous uniformity of ill-success, as far as the sieges undertaken by the former are concerned. They win battles in the open field; they occupy the great Roman roads, and cut off communication between the provinces and the capital; they lay waste the country districts, and sometimes by the famine thus caused they deprive the citizens of the means of prolonging their resistance. More often, by the treachery of slaves or fellow-countrymen of their own inside the walls, they bring about the city’s fall; but scarcely ever do they take it by fair and open warfare, in a regularly-conducted siege. And for a considerable part of those seventy years of struggle which I am briefly describing to you, you must think of the cities as standing up behind their quadrangular walls, little islands of civilisation and still unshaken loyalty to the Empire, while over the fields and through the unwalled villages rages the wide-sweeping flood of barbarian invasion.

[Sidenote: _The Gothic attack grows feebler, 378-379._]

This was essentially the character of the war during the years 378 and 379, though the Roman defence was gradually becoming stronger, and the attacks of the Goths wilder and more purposeless during the whole of that period. The despair and the hatred which had banded them together as one man under the leadership of Fritigern, lost their uniting power. They roamed southwards into the pleasant lands of Achaia, northwards to the Save, into and perhaps across the borders of Pannonia; but the hope of plunder and a child’s love of breaking beautiful things seem to have been their only motives. There is no longer a trace of that serious purpose of conquest which does seem to have animated them up to the day of Hadrianople.

[Sidenote: _The Gothic hostage-boys massacred. 378-9._]