ITALY AND HER INVADERS.
BOOK VI
.
CHAPTER V.
THE INTERREGNUM
The death of Alboin occurred, as has been already said, in the spring of
the year, and that year was probably 572. The Lombard warriors, assembled,
after some interval, at Pavia, which was perhaps, now for the first time,
recognized as the capital of the new kingdom, chose Cleph, “of the race of
Beleo,” one of the most nobly born among them, to be their king.
Of Cleph we really know hardly anything beyond his own name and that of
his wife Masane. It is probable, though not
distinctly stated, that, previous to his elevation to the throne, he was Duke
of Bergamo. His rule bore hardly on the old Roman aristocracy, many of whom he
slew with the sword, while he banished others from their native land.
At the end of eighteen months, that is, probably about the middle of
574, king Cleph was slain with the sword by a slave in his own household, whom
he had probably exasperated by his overbearing temper.
Again the leaders of the Lombard nation were assembled at Pavia, but
this time their meeting did not result in the choice of a king. King Cleph had
left one son, Authari, who was apparently of tender years. The usual expedient
of a maternal regency was probably not acceptable to a barbarous and warlike
people. The chief nobles seem to have been all of nearly equal rank and power,
so that it was difficult to single out one for supreme dominion. The debate
(possibly a long and angry one) ended in a decision to elect no king, but to
divide the royal power between the thirty-six chief nobles, who are known in
history as the Lombard Dukes.
It was remarked, in an earlier chapter of this history, that the titles
of Duke and Count came into the political vocabulary of Mediaeval Europe out of
the Roman Imperial system, but were transposed on the way; “Duke” being in the
Middle Ages, as in modem times, always a title of higher honour than Count (or
Earl), whereas in the Notitia Utriusque Imperii, Comes is a higher rank than Dux. Under the Empire
both offices had to do with military administration, but the Comes had
generally a larger or more important sphere of duties than the Dux, and in some
cases the Comes of a diocese had directly under him the Duces of the various
subordinate provinces.
It was probably through the German invaders of the Empire that the
change in the relative value of the two titles was introduced, and, as far as
we can trace it, the process of thought which led to that change seems to have
been something like this. The word Dux, as implying him who led forth a tribe
or a nation to battle, was chosen as the equivalent of Heretoga, or whatever
might be the precise form then in use of the modem German Herzog. On the other
hand, Comes (which, after all, meant only companion, and so might be applied to
any member of a king's comitatus or band of henchmen) was chosen as the
equivalent of the German Graf. This was an officer who probably did not exist
when the Teutonic tribes were still in their native forests, but whom we meet with
in the early Frankish State as the king's representative (exercising judicial
as well as military functions) in the larger cities of Gaul.
The etymology of the two words seems to point to the conclusion
indicated above. Heretoga is without doubt the leader of the host. The
derivation of Graf is more doubtful, but one of our best German authorities
thinks that it can be traced to a root denoting “a companion.” However this may
be, the meaning of these titles among the Teutonic invaders of the Empire is
clear. Duke (Dux, Herzog or Heretoga) is a man who is looked upon as the
natural leader in war of a nation or a large tribe. He is sometimes perhaps the
descendant of earlier kings, and has only stooped to the condition of a Duke
when his tribe lost its independence and became merged in some larger national
unity. In other cases he has been chosen by some process of popular election or
even by lot. At any rate he is no mere delegate of the king; but from old
memories, as well as by right of his present power, he has a strong tendency to
make the dukeship hereditary in his family, and even
to break the bond of subordination which attaches him to royalty. Thus we get
the Dukes of the Bavarians, the Saxons and the Swabians, who are already, in
Merovingian times, not far short of sovereign princes. How unlike these great
nobles are to the modest Duces of the ‘Notitia', it is needless here to
indicate.
On the other hand, the Count (Garafio, Graf or Comes) is at this period always essentially the king's
representative. He governs a city, such as Tours, or Bourges, or Poitiers,
acting as judge as well as administrator therein, and when summoned to do so,
bringing that city’s contingent of soldiers to swell the royal army. He often
governs his city very badly—the counts who confront us in the pages of Gregory
of Tours are for the most part grasping and unscrupulous barbarians—but,
whether well or ill, he always governs it as the king's representative. He has
generally a life-tenure of the office (differing herein from the easily
displaced Roman comes), but he does not apparently, as yet, cherish any hope of
making it hereditary. He shines by the reflected light of the king's dignity,
having no inherent lustre of his own, whether derived from old traditions of
kingship or from recent popular election.
After this little digression, it will be easier for us to understand the
position of the Dukes at this period of Lombard history—a position to which, I
think, we may safely assert there was nothing analogous in the Visigothic
kingdom of Spain, or in the Frankish kingdom of Neustria.
Among the thirty-six Lombard dukes who were now about to share between
them the sovereignty of Italy, six appear to have held somewhat higher rank
than the others. These were Zaban, or Zafan, at
Pavia, a second Alboin, or Alboni, at Milan, Wallari at Bergamo, Alichis at Brescia, Euin at Trient, and Gisulf at Friuli. Among these six, Zaban, as
duke of Pavia, now the recognized Lombard capital, held the highest place, and
was, to borrow a term from much more modern politics, President of the Lombard
Confederation.
The form which this Teutonic aristocracy assumed deserves special
attention, for it is, in a certain sense, typical of the whole mediaeval
history of Italy. These Lombard leaders, fresh from the forests of Pannonia or
the wide pastures of the Feld, were, doubtless, essentially men of the country;
men who, like the old Scottish chief, ‘would rather hear the lark sing than the
mouse chirp'. Thus did Tacitus write of their ancestors, five centuries before
the time with which we are now dealing: ‘It is well known that none of the
German tribes live in cities, nor can they even bear houses in a row. They
dwell scattered and solitary, as a spring, a meadow or a grove may have taken
the fancy of each'. Yet these rustic warriors, having come into the land of
stately cities, at once succumbed to their fascinations, and became dwellers in
cities themselves. Of course, military considerations, as well as sensual
delights, determined such a change. The cities of Italy were there, erected at
every point of vantage, covering the passage of rivers and the entrance into
valleys; and, if they were not to be all levelled with the ground, it was
needful that they should be held by Lombard garrisons. Still, whatever the
cause, the result is clear and important. We see that the civic character of
Italian life has conquered even its rough Pannonian conquerors. Lordship now,
and for many long centuries in Italy, will be essentially lordship of a city.
The Lombard dukes are turning the page on which great feudal nobles like the Estes,
and clever and successful ‘tyrants' like the Medici, will write their names in
the centuries to come.
Historians have not informed us what were the thirty cities from which
the lesser dukes took their titles. Probably a pretty correct idea concerning
them may be derived from a study of the list of the Episcopal sees of Northern
and Central Italy. We may also safely assume that the duke of a city governed,
not only the city itself, but a certain extent, sometimes a pretty large extent,
of surrounding country. Here also we have an anticipation of mediaeval
geography, of the time when ‘the Milanese,’ ‘the Trevisan,’ ‘the Bolognese,’
were well-known descriptions of territory.
The rule of these mailed aristocrats was, as might have been expected,
hard and grasping, animated by the narrowest ideas of Lombard patriotism. Many
of the Roman (that is, native Italian) nobility were slain by the sword, simply
that their possessions might go to enrich some hungry Lombard warrior. The rest
were reduced into a condition of semi-serfdom, still holding their lands, but
only on condition of paying over one third of their produce to that one of the
unwelcome ‘guests' to whom they had been assigned. Harsh as this measure of
spoliation was, the impoverished ‘host' might console himself with the
reflection that it might have been worse. Following the precedent set by
Odovacar and Theodoric, the Lombards contented themselves (as has been said)
with one third of the produce of the soil, while the Visigoths had taken two
thirds, and the Burgundians a proportion varying between that fraction and a
half.
Not only, however, did the refined Roman land-owner feel the weight of
Lombard oppression in these years when there was no king in Italy. Among the
barbarous tribes who had flocked to Alboin's standard, to share in the plunder
of Italy, was a band of some 20,000 or 30,0003 Saxons, who had brought with
them their wives and children, intending to settle in the conquered land. To
their great disgust, however, they found that their confederates would only
suffer this on condition of their abandoning the laws and customs of their
fathers and becoming altogether subject to Lombard rule.
The decision of the Saxons was soon and firmly taken : that they would
abandon their new settlements and march back, with their families, to the home
of their forefathers, rather than abandon their Saxon nationality. The story of
their return, though it does not strictly belong to the history of Italy, is
worth studying for the light which it throws on the manners of the times, and
the thoughts of the wild barbarians who had streamed into Italy.
The land to which the Saxons wished to return was, apparently, the
country afterwards known as Swabia, and formed part of the dominions of
Sigibert, the Frankish king of Austrasia. The Saxons adopted a peculiar method
of recommending themselves to the favour of their new sovereign. Crossing the
Cottian Alps by the Col de Genevre, they poured down
into the plains of Dauphine, and pitched their camp there. The rich villas were
sacked; the inhabitants were carried captive; everywhere they spread desolation
and ruin. The brave Romano-Gallic general, Mummolus, to whom Guntram, the
Frankish king of Burgundy, had entrusted the defence of this region, came upon
them suddenly, found them unprepared, and slaughtered them till nightfall. When
morning dawned, it seemed as if the battle would be renewed, but messengers
arrived in the camp of Mummolus, bearing rich presents, and offering, on the
part of the Saxons, to surrender all their booty if only they might be allowed
to repass the Alps into Italy. The offer was accepted, and the Saxon warriors,
as they marched away, declared that they meant to return, not as the foes, but
as the loyal subjects of the Frankish kings.
Next year (apparently) the Saxons, finding their Lombard hosts
inflexible, collected their wives and children and again marched into Gaul.
They had divided themselves into two ‘wedges', one of which marched along the
Riviera to Nice and the other by the old road into Dauphine. It was the time of
the ingathering of fruits, and everywhere around them they saw the golden
sheaves standing in the fields and all the fatness of the fruitful land. The
simple barbarians, like felons let loose in London, could not keep their hands
from plunder. They gorged themselves and then their horses with the crops of
the peasants of Dauphine, and they even set fire to some of the villages. But
when they reached the banks of the Rhone, they found the terrible Mummolus
ready to execute judgment upon them. “You shall not pass this stream,” he said,
“till you have made satisfaction to my lord. See how you have laid waste his
kingdom, have gathered the crops, trampled down the oliveyards and vineyards, slain the flocks, cast fire into the houses. You shall not pass
till you have made atonement to those whom you have reduced to poverty.
Otherwise I will put your wives and little ones to the sword, and will avenge
the injury done to Guntram my king.” The brutal Saxons quaked with terror, paid
down many thousand golden solidi for their redemption, and were suffered to
march on into the kingdom of Sigibert on the east of the Rhine.
When they reached their old homes they found them filled up with
Swabians, whom Sigibert had planted there when they themselves had started for
Italy. The angry Saxons at once declared that they would sweep the intruders
from the face of the earth. “Take a third of our lands,” humbly pleaded the
Swabians; but the offer was indignantly refused. “Half? Two thirds? We will add
all our cattle if only we may have peace.” Every proposition that could be made
was contemptuously spurned by the Saxons, who, confident of victory, were
already dividing among themselves by anticipation the wives and property of the
hated Swabians. “But the mercy of a just God,’ says Gregory, “turned their
thoughts into another direction. Of 26,000 Saxons who joined battle on that
day, 20,000 were slain; of 6,000 Swabians only 480, and victory remained with
their comrades. The survivors of the Saxons swore a great oath that they would
cut neither hair nor beard till they had avenged them of their foes. But when
they again rushed to battle they only incurred deadlier slaughter : and so at
length there was rest from war.”
In the great work which lay before the Lombard nation, the conquest of
the Italian peninsula and the expulsion of the officials who represented the
majesty of the Eastern Augustus, but little progress was made by the
confederated dukes. It is true that they were able grievously to harass the
clergy and citizens of Rome. Already in 574 (perhaps before Cleph’s assassination) such swarms of Lombards surrounded the Eternal City that
communication with Constantinople was cut off, and after the death of Pope John
III (13 July) more than ten months elapsed before his successor, Benedict I,
could be chosen. Famine followed in the steps of the marauding invaders.
Hearing of the sufferings of the Roman citizens from hunger, the Emperor Justin
ordered a fleet of corn to sail from Egypt to the mouth of the Tiber. By this
time the severity of the Lombard blockade must have been relaxed, for the
mariners were able to ascend the Tiber and bring the longed-for relief to the
hungering citizens.
In the year 575 a great Byzantine official appeared at the head of an
army in Italy. This was Baduarius, the son-in-law of the Emperor and Count of
the Imperial Stables. He had shortly before been strangely insulted by Justin,
whose long latent insanity was then beginning to show itself openly. The
Emperor ordered his chamberlains to assault and buffet his son-in-law and then
to drag him into the wondering Consistory, while still bearing the marks of
their blows. Sophia, having heard of this outburst of frenzy, was much
distressed thereat and administered conjugal reproof to her husband. He too,
now that the paroxysm was over, repented of his violence and sought Baduarius
in the stables to make his apologies. When the Count of the Stables saw the
Emperor approaching he feared that he was about to repeat his outrages and
leaped from manger to manger in order to escape. But the Emperor adjured him in
God's name to abide where he was, went up to him, caught him by the arm and
covered him with kisses. ‘I have sinned against thee', said he, ‘but it was at
the Devil's prompting. Now I pray thee receive me again as thy father and thy
Emperor'. Then Baduarius fell at the Emperor's feet, which he watered with his
tears, and said, ‘My lord! in thy hands is supreme power over all of us : but
as thou didst once treat thy servant contemptuously in the presence of thy
counsellors, so now let these dumb creatures' (pointing to the horses) ‘be
witnesses of thy confession'. Whereupon the Emperor invited him to a banquet,
and so he and his son-in-law were reconciled. This was the man who was now sent
to try conclusions with the Lombards.
We hear, however, very little of the course of the campaign, except that
Baduarius was overcome by them in battle and shortly after ended his life.
Again in 579 a vacancy in the Popedom is the cause of our being informed
of that which was probably at this time the chronic condition of the regions
round Rome, Lombard ravage and blockade. After a little more than four years'
occupancy of the Papal throne Benedict I died and was succeeded by the Roman
Pelagius (second of that name), who was ordained without the command of the
Emperor, because the Lombards were besieging the City of Rome, and much
devastation was being wrought by them in Italy. At the same time so great rains
fell that all men said that the waters of the deluge were returning upon the
earth, and so great was the loss of human life that the oldest inhabitant
remembered nothing like it aforetime.
In their distress the citizens called upon the Emperor, their natural
protector, for help. Two embassies, apparently in the years 577 and 579, bore
to the New Rome the lamentable cry of the Old. The first was headed by the
Patrician Pamphronius and carried a tribute of 3,000
pounds weight of gold (about £120,000 sterling); the second consisted of
senators and ecclesiastics, one of the latter class being probably the man who
was to be afterwards the world-famous Gregory the Great.
Neither embassy obtained the military help which was so urgently
required. The Persian war pressed heavily on the resources of the state, and a
somewhat feeble, though well- intentioned, ruler was at the helm. For in the
year after his strange encounter with Baduarius the madness of Justin II
assumed so outrageous a form that it was deemed necessary to confine him to his
palace and to associate with him Tiberius a colleague who bore the humbler
title of Caesar, but who was in reality supreme governor of the Empire. The new
Caesar bore the ill- omened name of Tiberius, but was in character as unlike as
possible to the suspicious and secluded tyrant of Capri. Open-handed and
generous to a fault, he shocked his Imperial patroness Sophia by the profusion
with which he lavished his treasure on the poor; but he was rewarded for his
munificence, as was told in a previous chapter, by the opportune discovery of
the buried hoards of the eunuch Narses. This good-tempered, but not strenuous
monarch, before the second embassy reached Constantinople, had become in name
as well as in fact supreme Augustus, by the death of his brainsick colleague
Justin II. In neither capacity, however, could he be persuaded to send any
adequate supply of soldiers for the deliverance of Italy, but, true to his
character as a giver, he sent money—in the first case returning the tribute
brought by Pamphronius—which money was to be employed
in buying off individual Lombard dukes, or, if that resource should fail, in
hiring Frankish generals to lend their arms for the liberation of Italy.
The policy thus pursued was not altogether ineffectual. Both on this and
some later occasions Byzantine gold was found efficacious in detaching some
members from the loosely- knit Lombard confederacy. Farwald,
duke of Spoleto, who had probably hitherto taken the lead in the ravages of
Roman territory, seems to have, in some measure, withdrawn his forces from her
immediate neighbourhood. But it was only the recoil before a deadlier spring.
It was probably in the year 579 that Farwald with his
Lombards appeared before the town of Classis, the sea-port of Ravenna. We are
not told how long a resistance it offered, but it was eventually taken and
despoiled of all the treasures which had been accumulated within its walls
during six centuries of security. After the sack the Lombards seem still to
have held on to the city, hard as it was to do so in the face of the superior
naval forces of the Empire.
The chief events of the Lombard interregnum that remain to be noticed
relate to the Lombard invasions of Gaul. Some of these invasions were made in
the lifetime of Alboin and therefore should strictly have been described in the
preceding chapter, but in order to give a continuous narrative I have purposely
reserved them for this portion of the history.
It has been well pointed out by a German historian that these attacks on
their Frankish neighbours were utterly senseless and impolitic, mere
robber-raids caused by nothing else than the freebooter's thirst for plunder.
The one object which a Lombard statesman, whether he were called duke or king,
should have set before himself was to consolidate the Lombard rule in Italy, to
drive out the last representatives of the Empire, if possible to become master
of the sea. Instead of firmly pursuing this aim, scarcely had the Lombards
entered Italy when they began to swarm over the difficult passes of the Alps,
to rob and ravage in Dauphine and Provence. Thus did they make the old feud
between themselves and the Franks, which a few generations of peaceful neighbourhood
would perhaps have obliterated, an indelible national instinct, and, in fact,
they thus prepared the levers which at length, after the lapse of two
centuries, brought about the ruin of the Lombard monarchy at the hands of
Frankish Charles.
When we were last concerned with Frankish history we reached the point
where the divided monarchy was reunited by Chlotochar I. We must now glance at
the well-known events which intervened between that reunion and the
commencement of the Lombard interregnum.
For three years Chlotochar, the last surviving son of Clovis, reigned
over the whole of the vast territory which had been won by the Frankish
battle-axe. In 561 he died, and his kingdom was divided between his four sons.
But the fourfold partition now, as in the previous generation, soon became
threefold. Charibert, the king of Paris, died in 5672, and thus the well-known
sentence of Caesar, “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres,” was again true of Gaul and
remained true for the rest of the century. It is true that, whatever might be
the ostensible partition of the Gaulish territory, it was more and more tending
to group itself into four—not three—great divisions, namely, Neustria,
Austrasia, Burgundy and Aquitaine. But the last of these, the territory between
the Loire and the Pyrenees, the territory which had been won from Alaric the
Visigoth, and which was one day to give the Plantagenet princes their great
vantage ground for the conquest of France, was during the latter part of the
sixth century so split up and so squabbled over by the lords of the other
portions, that, for the sake of clearness, it will be well to leave it out of
sight altogether. Let us briefly consider the three other divisions and their
rulers.
BURGUNDY
The region which still bore the name of Burgundy was substantially that
which had obeyed the shifty Gundobad and his unwise son, Sigismund. It embraced
the later provinces of Burgundy, Franche Compté,
Dauphiné, the greater part of Switzerland, Lyonnois, Nivernois and a considerable part of Languedoc. It was, in
fact, the kingdom of the Rhone, including almost the whole territory watered by
that noble river and its tributaries except—a notable exception—that thin strip
of fruitful territory at the mouth of the Rhone which still bore the name of Provincia, and still keenly remembered that it had
been the first and the last of the Roman provinces in Gaul. Though the nucleus
of the new kingdom was the old Burgundian domain it included some lands in the
centre of Gaul, south and west of the Loire, which had never belonged to the
Burgundians, and the king's capital was Orleans, a city which had never owned
the sway of Gundobad. The king of this territory, from 561 to 593, bore the
uncouth name of Guntchramn, a name for which I will
venture to substitute, as many have done before me, the easier form, Guntram. A
good-tempered, easy-going man, who was not cruel, except when his interests
seemed to call for cruelty, a man who took and put away wives and concubines
with great facility, but was almost a moral man by comparison with the
unbridled licentiousness of most of the Merovingian kings, Guntram has, by
reason of his generosity to the Church and the comparative respectability of
his character, obtained the honours of canonization, though it is not often
that we meet with an historian sufficiently attentive to the rules of
ecclesiastical etiquette to call him Saint Guntram.
Our Lombard historian, Paulus, describes Guntram as ‘a peaceful king and
one conspicuous by all goodness'. He then proceeds to tell concerning him a
story which he had probably heard at Chalon-sur-Saone in the course of his
travels through France, and which, as he states with a thrill of
self-satisfaction, not even Gregory of Tours had related in his voluminous
history of the Franks :—
“The good king Guntram went one day into the forest to hunt, and as his
companions were scattered in various directions, he was left alone with one
faithful henchman, on whose knees he, being weary, reclined his head and so
fell fast asleep. From his mouth issued a little reptile, which ran along till
it reached a tiny stream, and there it paused, as if pondering how to cross it.
Then the henchman drew his sword out of its scabbard and laid it over the
streamlet, and upon it the little creature crossed over to the other side. It
entered into a certain cave of a mountain not far from thence, and returning
after an interval again crossed the streamlet by the sword and re-entered the
mouth of the sleeper. After these things Guntram, awaking from slumber, said that
he had seen a marvellous vision. He dreamed that he crossed a river by an iron
bridge, and entered a mountain in which he saw a vast weight of gold. Then he
in whose lap his head had lain told him in their order the things which he had
seen. Thereupon the king commanded an excavation to be made in that place, and
treasures of inestimable value, which had been stowed away there in ancient
days, were found therein. From this gold the king afterwards made a solid
canopy of great size and weight, which he adorned with most precious stones,
intending to send it to the sepulchre of the Lord at Jerusalem. But as he could
not do this, he ordered it to be placed over the shrine of the blessed martyr
Marcellus, at Cavallonum (Chalon-sur-Saone), and
there it is to this day, a work incomparable in its kind.” As I have said, it
was probably from the priests in the chapel of the martyr that Paulus, in his
travels, heard the marvellous tale.
Treasures buried in long departed days by kings of old, mysterious
caves, reptile guides or reptile guardians—are we not transported by this
strange legend into the very atmosphere of the Nibelungen Lied? And if the good
king Guntram passed for the fortunate finder of the Dragon-hoard, his brothers
and their queens, by their wars, their reconciliations and their terrible avengings, must surely have suggested the main argument of
that most tragical epic, the very name of one of whose heroines, Brunichildis, is
identical with the name of the queen of Austrasia.
AUSTRASIA
This kingdom of Austrasia, the eastern land, the name of which first
meets us about this time, is the same region with which we have already made
acquaintance under the government of the Frankish Theodoric and his
descendants; a region extending, it may be roughly said, from Rheims to the
Rhine, but spreading across the Rhine an unknown distance into Germany,
claiming the allegiance of Thuringians, Alamanni, and Bavarians, fitfully
controlling the restless Saxons, touching with warlike weapons and sometimes
vainly striving with the terrible Avars.
The capital of this kingdom was Metz—it is noteworthy how these royal
partners always strove to fix their seats as near as possible to the centre of
Gaul, as if to keep close watch on one another’s designs—and the son of
Chlotochar who reigned there as king was Sigibert.
Sigibert was the youngest, but the most capable and least vicious, of
the royal brotherhood. Disgusted at the profligacy of all his brothers, who
disgraced themselves by adulterous unions with the handmaids of their lawful
wives, he determined to wed a princess of his own rank, and accordingly he
wooed and won Brunichildis, daughter of Athanagild, the Visigothic king of
Spain. A brave and high-spirited woman, Brunichildis, in the course of her long
and strong career, became hard and unpitying as the rocks upon which she was
dashed by the waves of her destiny; but the ten years of her union with
Sigibert were the brightest portion of her life. The young Austrasian king and
queen seem to have loved one another with true and pure affection, and their
story is an oasis in the desert of Frankish profligacy and shame.
NEUSTRIA
The kingdom of Chilperic (who was half-brother to his three royal
colleagues) is generally spoken of as the realm of Neustria. This name strictly
belongs to a somewhat later period than that which we have yet reached, but as
‘the western kingdom', in antithesis to Austrasia, it conveniently expresses
the territory ruled over by Chilperic, which was in fact the old kingdom of the
Salian Franks, and comprised the Netherlands, Picardy, Normandy, and Maine,
with perhaps some ill-defined sovereignty over the virtually independent Celts
of Brittany. The capital of this kingdom was the ancestral seat of dominion,
Soissons.
Chilperic’s character is one of the strangest products of the strange
anarchic period in which he lived. Cruel, lustful, avaricious—a man whom the
kindly Gregory calls ‘the Nero and Herod of our time’—he nevertheless was,
after the fashion of his age, a religious man—wrote sacred histories in verse,
after the manner of Sedulius (it is true that his hexameters limped
fearfully)—composed masses and hymns, and wrote a treatise on the Trinity,
which he hoped to impose, Justinian-like, on his bishops and clergy, but the
theology of which was so grossly heretical, that the prelates to whom he showed
it could hardly be restrained from tearing it in pieces before his face.
Chilperic had already taken to himself many mistresses, whom he
dignified with the name of wives; but when he heard of the rich and lovely
young princess whom his younger brother had won for his bride, he was seized
with jealousy, and vowed that he too would have a princess for his wife. An
embassy to Athanagild, bearing the promise of a rich dower for the future queen
in case she survived her husband, and an assurance that the palace should be
purged of the concubines who then polluted it, was successful in obtaining the
hand of a sister of Brunichildis, named Galswintha. The princess, who might
almost seem to have had some forebodings of the dark fate reserved for her,
clung to her home and her parents, and begged for delay; but the ambassadors
insisted on her immediate return with them. State reasons prevailed, and the
weeping Galswintha set forth upon her long journey, accompanied by her fond
mother as far as the Pyrenees. There the mother and daughter parted; and the
latter journeyed in a kind of triumphal procession through Gothic Gaul, and
then through the territory of her future husband, till she reached the city of
Rouen. She was received with all honour by Chilperic, by whom she was loved
with great affection, “for” (says Gregory) “she had brought with her great
treasures.” On the day after the marriage, according to old Teutonic custom, he
gave her as ‘moming-gift’ (morgane-gyba)
Bordeaux and four other cities in the south-west of Gaul. These were to form
her dower in case she survived her husband.
For a short time all went well. Then one of concubines, Fredegundis,
succeeded in recovering her lost footing in the palace; the king's old passion
for her was rekindled, and the poor young Spanish bride was made to suffer
daily insults and mortifications, such as, eleven centuries later, her
countrywoman, the queen of Louis XIV, had to endure when she saw Montespan or
La Vallière preferred before her. With pitiful pleading, Galswintha besought
that she might leave her treasures behind her and return across the Pyrenees.
Chilperic soothed her with kind words, but not many days after she was found
dead in her bed, strangled by a slave, in obedience her husband's orders. The
royal hymn-writer professed to mourn for her for a few days, and then married
Fredegundis.
The wedding, the murder, the second marriage, all happened in the year
567. And now began that long duel between two beautiful and angry queens which
for thirty years kept the Frankish kingdoms in turmoil. Of Brunichildis I have
already spoken. She was not by nature cruel, and might, perhaps, have passed
through life with fair reputation, had not the longing for vengeance, first for
a murdered sister, and then for a murdered husband, transformed her nature and
turned her into a Fury. Fredegundis, evil from the first, utterly remorseless
and cruel, had yet a magnetic power of attracting to herself those whom she
would make the ministers of her wicked will. She ruled her husband with
absolute sway, though strongly suspected of unfaithfulness to her own marriage
vows. And whenever there was a rival to be disposed of, a brother-in-law, a
step-son, a dangerous confidant to be murdered, there was always to be found
some young enthusiast, willing, nay eager, to do the deed, going to certain
death for the sake of winning a smile from Fredegundis. In her marvellous power
of fascination over men, she resembled a woman with whom, in all other
respects, it would be a calumny to couple her name, Mary, Queen of Scots. With
all her wickedness, Fredegundis must have been a brilliant and seductive
Frenchwoman; and there is something about her strange demoniac power which
reminds us of the evil heroines of the Renaissance.
The murder of Galswintha, followed by the marriage with her low-born
rival, aroused the anger of the Franks, and Chilperic's brothers endeavoured to
eject so atrocious an offender from their royal partnership. In this, however,
they do not seem to have been successful. If war was actually waged by Sigibert
against the murderer (which is not clearly stated), it was terminated by a more
peaceful civil process, in which Guntram acted as arbiter between his brethren.
The result of this process was as follows: but both its terms and the
principles on which it was based would have been utterly unintelligible to any
of the Roman jurisconsults who, two centuries before, abounded in the great
cities of Gaul. “The morgane-gyba of Galswintha was
to form the weregild of Brunichildis.” In
other words, the five cities of Aquitaine, which Chilperic had assigned to the
murdered queen as her dower, were to be handed over to her sister and next of
kin in atonement for the crime. It would, seem as if the decision had scarcely
been given when the faithless Chilperic sought to overturn it; at any rate, it
is in Bordeaux (one of the cities of the ‘morning-gift') and its neighbourhood
that we find him constantly attacking his brother of Austrasia, in the obscure
wars which fill up the interval between 567 and 575. At length the dispute came
to a crisis. The fierce Austrasian warriors, Sigibert's subjects, were only too
ready to pour themselves westwards into Neustria, and enjoy the plunder of its
cities. Sigibert was a warrior and Chilperic apparently was not, though he
shrank from no deed of cowardly violence. And Guntram, though the most
uncertain and untrustworthy of allies, was at this time ranged, with some
appearance of earnestness, on the side of Sigibert. The campaign went entirely
in favour of the Austrasian army. It pressed on to Paris, to Rouen: Chilperic,
beaten and cowed, was shut up in Tournay (his capital now, instead of Soissons)
: a large part of the Neustrian Franks consented to
acclaim Sigibert as their sovereign instead of the unwarlike and tyrannical
Chilperic. The ceremony took place at Vitry, near Arras, not far from the
border of the two realms. Sigibert was raised on the shield and hailed king by
the whole army of the Franks; but almost in the moment of his triumph, two
serving-men rushed upon him and dealt him a mortal wound on either side with
their strong knives, which went by the name of scaramaxes.
The weapons, it was said, had been steeped in poison by the hands of
Fredegundis; the servants had been ‘bewitched' by the terrible queen.
There can be little doubt that for this murder, at, least, she was
justly held answerable by her contemporaries.
So fell, in the prime of his life and vigour, the gallant Sigibert—
“Titus, the youngest
Tarquin: too good for such a brood.”
Had
he lived and attained, as he well might have done, to the sole dominion of the
Franks, the course of European history might have been changed. He would
hardly, one thinks, have propagated so feeble a race as the faineant kings who
issued from the loins of the kings of Neustria; he would almost certainly have
checked the growing audacity, and resisted the overweening pretensions, of the
nobles of Austrasia.
Brunichildis, with her children, was at Paris (the capital of the late
king Charibert) when the terrible news reached her of the murder of Sigibert—a
crime which utterly reversed the position of affairs, and made her a helpless
outcast in the land of her deadly foe. Her little son Childebert, a child of
five years old, was carried off by one of Sigibert's generals, who succeeded in
conveying him safely to Metz, where he was accepted by the Austrasian warriors
as his father's successor. Thus began a reign which lasted for twenty-one
years—one which was upon the whole prosperous, and which had many points of
contact with the history of the Lombard neighbours of Austrasia. As Childebert,
however, was only twenty-six when he died, it is evident that during the
greater part of his nominal reign, the actual might of royalty must have been
in other hands than his. In fact it seems to have been during his long minority
that the power of the great Austrasian nobles (who must have formed a sort of
self-constituted Council of Regency) began distinctly to overshadow the power
of the crown. Our justification for lingering over these events, which
apparently belong to purely Frankish history, is that we are here watching the
beginnings of that singular dynasty of officials, the Mayors of the Palace,
whose descendant was one day to overthrow the Lombard monarchy.
As for Brunichildis, she, like the Kriemhild of the great German poem
after the death of her glorious young hero Siegfried, lived but to avenge his
death; and, like Kriemhild, she sought to compass her revenge by a second
marriage, the natural resource of a young and beautiful woman in a lawless
generation, which was ready to trample under foot the rights of the widow and
the fatherless. It was, perhaps, for this reason that she did not attempt to
return to Austrasia. Taken prisoner by Chilperic, she was despoiled of all her
treasures and sent to live in banishment at Rouen. Thither, before long, came Merovech, the son of Chilperic by one of the many wives
whom he had married before Galswintha. He saw the beautiful widow and loved
her, and, though she as his uncle's wife was within the forbidden degrees of
relationship, he was married to her within a few months of her first husband's
death, by Praetextatus, bishop of Rouen. Great was
the wrath of Chilperic, greater still probably the rage of Fredegundis, when
they heard that the hated Gothic princess had thus made good her footing in
their own family, and was the wife of the young warrior to whom all Franks
looked forward as chief of the descendants of Clovis in the next generation.
Chilperic marched to Rouen, intending to arrest the newly-wedded pair, but they
fled to the church of St. Martin at Tours, whose inviolable sanctity Chilperic
was forced to respect. On receiving his promise that he would not separate them
“if such were the will of God,” Merovech and his wife
came forth. The kiss of peace was exchanged, and the king, his son and his new
daughter-in-law banqueted together. Notwithstanding his oath, however,
Chilperic insisted on his son's accompanying him to Soissons, while
Brunichildis appears to have returned to Austrasia. Merovech fell under suspicion, perhaps just suspicion, of complicity with some rebels
who attacked the city of Soissons, where Fredegundis was then dwelling. He was
again arrested, shorn of the long hair which was the glory of a Merovingian
prince, and forcibly turned into an ecclesiastic. Another escape, a long
sojourn in the sanctuary at Tours, a visit to Austrasia (where he was coldly
received by the nobles, who desired the presence of no full-grown scion of the
royal house among them), and then an ill-judged expedition into his father's
kingdom followed. He was again taken prisoner and lodged in an inn, while his
captors sent messengers to his father to ask what should be done with him. But
meanwhile he had said to his henchman Gailen, ‘Thou and I have hitherto had but
one mind and one purpose. I pray thee let me not fall into the hands of mine
enemies, but take this sword and rush with it upon me'. This Gailen did; and
when Chilperic arrived he found his son dead. But some said that Merovech never space those words to his henchman, but that
the fatal blow was struck by order of Fredegundis.
The romance of Brunichildis' second marriage—at any rate in the
fragmentary shape in which it exists in the pages of Gregory—is a disappointing
one. Even Brunichildis seems to falter and hesitate in her great purpose of
revenge for the death of Sigibert, and Merovech seems
to spend most of his time cowering as a suppliant by the tomb of St. Martin.
And the least romantic part of the story is the calmness with which the
newly-wedded couple bear their separation from one another; a separation which
it was apparently in their power at any time to have ended.
The remainder of the reign of Chilperic was chiefly memorable for the
afflictions which befell him in his family. One after another of the sons of
his earlier marriage, young men just entering upon manhood, fell victims to the
jealous hatred of their step-mother; and as if to punish her for her cruelty,
one after another of her own sons died in infancy. The sons of Guntram also
perished in their prime; it seemed as if the whole lineage of Clovis might soon
fail from off the earth. Wars, purposeless but desolating, were waged between
the three Frankish kingdoms, and in some of these wars, strange to say,
Childebert—that is to say the counsellors of Childebert—were found siding with
Chilperic, his father's murderer, against the easy-tempered Guntram. This, however,
was only a passing phase; as a rule Austrasia and Burgundy stood together
against Neustria. The chief characteristic of the rule of Chilperic was the
increasing stringency of his financial exactions, not merely from his Roman,
but from his Frankish subjects, and the jealousy, a well-grounded jealousy,
with which he regarded the growing power and possessions of the Church. ‘He
would often say, “Behold! our treasury remains poor; behold! our riches are
transferred to the churches; none reign at all save the bishops; our honour
perishes and is all carried over to the bishops of the cities”. With this
thought in his mind, he continually quashed the wills which were drawn up in
favour of the churches, and thus he trampled under foot his own father's commands,
thinking that there was now none left to guard their observance'. No wonder
that such a prince—whom even secular historians must hold to have been a
profoundly wicked man—figures in an ecclesiastic's pages as “the Nero and Herod
of our time.”
At length, in the fifty-second year of his age, Chilperic met that
violent death, which in the sixth century was almost as much as the long hair
that floated around their shoulders—the note of a Merovingian prince. He went
to his country-house at Chelles, about twelve miles
from Paris, and there amused himself with hunting. Coming back one evening in
the twilight from the chase, he was about to dismount from his horse, and had
already put one hand on the shoulder of his groom, when some one rushed out of
the darkness and stabbed him with a knife, striking one blow under the armpit,
and one in his belly. “The blood gushed out from his mouth and from the two
wounds, and so his wicked spirit fled.”
The author and the motive of the assassination of Chilperic remained a
mystery. We do not even hear the usual details as to the death by torture of
the murderer, and it seems possible that in the obscurity of the night and the
loneliness of the forest he may have succeeded in escaping. Fredegundis was
accused of this, as of so many other murders. It was said that Chilperic had
discovered her infidelity to her marriage vows, and that she forestalled his
inevitable revenge by the hand of a hired assassin. This explanation, however,
seems in the highest degree improbable. No one lost so much by the death of
Chilperic as his widow; hurled, like her rival Brunichildis, in one hour from
the height of power to helplessness and exile, and obliged to seek temporary
shelter at the court of the hospitable Guntram.
After all its vicissitudes, the family of Chilperic at his death
consisted only of one babe of three years old, named, after its grandfather,
Chlotochar. This child, who was destined one day to reunite all the Frankish
dominions under his single sceptre, was at once proclaimed king, the reins of
government being assumed, not by Fredegundis, but by some of the more powerful
nobles, and thus Neustria had to pass through even a longer minority than that
from which Austrasia was now slowly emerging. There can be little doubt that
these long periods of obscuration of the royal power, however welcome to the
great nobles who exercised or controlled the authority of the regent, were
deplored by the poorer Franks and by the Gallo- Roman. population, to whom even
the worst king afforded some protection from the lawless violence of the
aristocracy.
But our rapid review of Frankish history, which began with the eleventh
year of the government of Narses, has taken us on to the end of the Lombard
Interregnum. It is time now to turn back and fit the Lombard invasions of Gaul
into the framework of Frankish history.
The year of the Lombard irruption into Italy was, it will be remembered,
568. This was one year after the murder of Galswintha, and at a time therefore
when the relations between Sigibert and Chilperic were probably strained to the
utmost; and yet, strange to say, it was rather against Burgundy than against
Neustria that the arms of Austrasia were at this time directed. Sigibert
wrested Arles from his brother Guntram; then he lost Avignon: but these
struggles, purposeless and resultless as they were, perhaps distracted the
attention of the Burgundian generals and made a Lombard invasion possible. We
are vaguely told that ‘in this year the Lombards dared to enter the
neighbouring regions of Gaul, where multitude of captives of that nation [i. e. the Lombards] were sold into slavery'. Evidently the
invasion, whithersoever directed, was a failure. Probably it was only by
isolated bands of marauders without concert or leadership.
The next invasion which was made, probably in the year 570, was more
successful. The Lombards made their way probably by one of the passes of the
Maritime Alps into Provence. Amatus (whose name makes it probable that he was a
man of Gallo-Roman extraction) held that region for king Guntram, wearing the
Roman title of Patrician. He delivered battle to the Lombards, was defeated and
fled. A countless number of Burgundians lay dead upon the field, and the
Lombards, enriched with booty, the value of which their barbarous arithmetic
could not calculate, returned to Italy.
In the room of the defeated, perhaps slain, Amatus, king Guntram
conferred the dignity of Patrician on Eunius,
surnamed Mummolus, and with his appointment an immediate change came over the
scene. Though a grasping and selfish man, Mummolus was a brave soldier, and if,
as seems probable, he too, like Amatus, was a Gallo-Roman by birth, his career
was a proof that there was still some martial spirit left in the descendants of
the old provincials of Gaul. His father, Peonius, had
been count of Auxerre, and entrusted to Mummolus the usual gifts by which—
perhaps on the accession of Guntram—he hoped to obtain the renewal of his
office. The faithless son, however, obtained the dignity, not for his father,
but for himself, and having thus placed his foot on the official ladder,
continued to mount step by step till he reached, as we have seen, the dignity
of the Patriciate, which was probably still considered the highest that could
be bestowed on a subject.
In the following year (apparently) the Lombards again invaded Gaul, not
now by the Maritime Alps, but by the Col de Geneve. They reached a point near
to Embrunl in the valley of the Durance; but here
they were met by Mummolus, who drew his army all round them, blocked up with
abattis the main roads by which they might have escaped, and then felling upon
them by devious forest paths took them at such disadvantage as to accomplish
their entire defeat. A great number of the Lombards were slain; some were taken
captive and sent to king Guntram, probably to be sold as slaves: only a few
escaped to their own land to tell the story of this, the first of many Lombard
defeats which were to attest the military skill of Mummolus. Ecclesiastics
heard with horror that in this battle two brothers and brother- prelates, Salonius and Sagittarius—the former bishop of Embrun and
the latter of Gap—had borne an active part, ‘armed, not with the heavenly
cross, but with helmet and coat of mail', and, which was worse, had slain many
with their own hands. But this was only one, and in fact the least censurable,
of many irregularities and crimes committed by this lawless pair, who had
already a few years before (in 566) been deprived of their sees by the Council
of Lyons, but had been replaced therein by the Pope. Again, at a later period,
deposed and confined in separate monasteries, they were once more let out by
the good-natured Guntram and again condemned by a council. The end of Salonius is unknown. Sagittarius, as we shall shortly see,
came to a violent end in consequence of joining a conspiracy against king
Guntram. Such were some of the bishops of Gaul in the sixth century, though it
must be admitted that few were as wildly brutal and licentious as Salonius and Sagittarius.
In the years immediately following the invasion, Mummolus distinguished
himself by that successful campaign against the Saxon immigrants of which
mention was made in the earlier part of this chapter. Then somewhat later
still, in the year which witnessed the assassination of Cleph the Lombard king,
a large army of Lombards under the command of duke Zaban again entered the
dominions of king Guntram. This time, however, it was not against Dauphine but
against Switzerland that their ravages were directed. They went, doubtless,
northward by the Great St. Bernard Pass from Aosta to Martigny, and descended into that long Alp-bounded
parallelogram through which the young Rhone flows, and which then as now bore pre-eminently
the name of ‘the Valley'. They reached the great monastery of Agaunum (now St. Maurice), scene of the devotions and the
vain penitence of Burgundian Sigismund, and there they tamed many days, perhaps
engaged in pillaging the convent, though this is not expressly stated by the
monkish chronicler from whom we derive our information. At length, at the town
of Bex, a little way down the valley from St. Maurice, they suffered so
crushing a defeat at the hands of the Frankish generals, that but a few
fugitives, duke Zaban among the number, succeeded in recrossing the mountains
and reaching Italian soil.
Undaunted by this terrible reverse, in the next year the Lombards
resumed their irritating inroads into Gaul. This time Zaban was accompanied by
two dukes, other dukes, Amo and Rodan, the names of whose cities have not been
recorded. The three armies all went by the same road till they had crossed the
Alps. This was that to which allusion has already been made, which is still the
well-known pass of the Mont Genevre. Though one of
the lowest in the great chain the Alps and frequently traversed by Roman generals,
it is, at the summit, nearly 6,500 feet high. Leaving the city of Turin in the
great plain of Piedmont, the road ascends the beautiful valley of the Dora Susa
till it reaches the little town of Susa, where a triumphal arch still preserves
the memory of Augustus, the founder of the Colony of Segusio.
A steep climb of several hours leads to the summit of the pass and the
watershed between the two streams, the Dora Riparia which flows eventually into
the Po, and the Clairet which flows into the Durance.
The Roman road from this point turned sharply to the south and followed the
course of the Durance till it reached the neighbourhood of Arles. In doing so
it passed the little cities of Ebrodunum (Embrun) and Vapincum (Gap), the seats of the two bellicose
bishops, Salonius and Sagittarius. In all the story
of these campaigns Embrun in the valley of the Durance plays an important part.
It was apparently a sort of mustering place for the invaders both after
crossing and before recrossing the Cottian Alps.
From this starting-point the three dukes diverged in order to make three
separate raids into south-eastern Gaul.
(1) Amo, keeping
to the great Roman road, descended into the province of Arles, which he ravaged
and perhaps hoped to subdue. He paid a hostile visit to a villa in the
neighbourhood of Avignon which Mummolus had received as a present from his
grateful king.
He threatened Aquae Sextiae (Aix) with a
siege, but on receiving 22 lbs. of silver, he marched away from the place. He
did not penetrate as far as Marseilles itself, but only to the ‘Stony Plain',
which adjoined that ancient seaport, and he carried off large herds of cattle
as well as many captives from the Massilian territory.
(2) Duke Zaban
took the road which branched off March. from Gap and led northwestward through Dea (Die) to Valentia (Valence) at the
confluence of the Isere and the Rhone, and there he pitched his camp.
(3) Higher up on
the course of the Isere, in a splendid March of amphitheatre of hills, lies the
stately city of Grenoble, recalling by its Roman name Gratianopolis the memory of the brilliant young Emperor Gratian. To this city duke Rodan laid
regular siege. Mummolus, hearing these tidings, moved southwards with a strong
army and first attacked the besiegers of Grenoble. ‘While his army was
laboriously crossing the turbid Isere, an animal, by the command of God,
entered the river and showed them a ford, and thus the whole army got easily
through to the opposite shores'. The Lombards flocked to meet them with drawn
swords, but were defeated, and duke Rodan, wounded by a lance, fled to the tops
of the mountains. With 500 faithful followers he made his way to Valence
through the trackless Dauphine forests—the high road by the Isere being of
course blocked by Mummolus. He told his brother duke Zaban all that had
occurred, and they jointly decided on retreat. Burning and plundering they had
made their way into the valleys of the Rhone and the Isere: burning and
plundering they returned to Embrun.
At Embrun Zaban and Rodan were met by Mummolus at the head of a
‘countless' army. Battle was joined; the ‘phalanxes' of the Lombards were
absolutely cut to pieces, and with a few of their officers, but far fewer,
relatively, of the rank and file, the two dukes made their way back over the
mountains into Italy. When they reached Susa they were coldly and ungraciously
received by the inhabitants. The reason for this coldness, which does not seem
to have passed into actual hostility, was that Sisinnius, Master of the
Soldiery, was then in the city as the representative of the Emperor. There was
no bloodshed, but a little southern astuteness freed the good town of Susa from
its unwelcome visitors. While Zaban was conferring with Sisinnius (perhaps
arranging as to the billeting of the remnant of the Lombard army), a man
entered who feigned himself to be the slave of Mummolus. He greeted Sisinnius
in his master's name, handed him letters, and said, ‘These are for thee from
Mummolus. He is even now at hand'. At these words (though in truth Mummolus was
nowhere in the neighbourhood) Zaban and Rodan left the city with all speed and
retreated panic-stricken to their homes.
When tidings of all these disasters were brought to Amo in the province
of Arles, he collected his plunder, and sought to return across the mountains.
The snow, however, had now begun to fall on the Mont Genevre,
and so blocked his passage that he had to leave all his booty and many of his
soldiers behind. With much difficulty and accompanied by only a few of his
followers, Amo succeeded in returning to his own land. So disastrously ended
the expedition of the three dukes. ‘For', as the Frankish historian truly says,
they were all terrified by the valour of Mummolus.
After the failure of this expedition we hear of no further invasion of
Gaul by the Lombard dukes. The only result of these invasions (except memories
which must long have made the name of Lombard hateful to the inhabitants of
Dauphine and Provence) was an extension of territory over the crest of the Alps
in favour of the Franks of Burgundy, and at the expense of the Lombards.
Ecclesiastical charters prove that about the year 588, the upper valley of the
Dora Baltea, with its chief city Aosta,
and that of the Dora Susa, with its chief city Susa, were treated as undoubted
portions of the dominions of king Guntram, and were spoken of as having been
formerly in Italy, but annexed by him. These two cities and the regions
surrounding them occupied the Italian side of the two great practicable passes
of that time—the Great St. Bernard and the Mont Genevre.
There can be little doubt that their occupation by Frankish generals was at
once the result of the campaigns which have been just described, and the cause
that the Lombard invasions of Gaul were not renewed.
The after-career of Mummolus, the brave champion of Burgundy against the
invading Lombards, forms one of the most striking pages in Gregory's history of
the Franks, but is too remote from our subject to be related here in any
detail. In an evil hour for himself he deserted the master whom he had hitherto
served so faithfully, and took up with a pretender, probably base-born and
certainly mean-spirited, who was named Gundovald and
called himself son of Chlotochar. The soldiers of the pretender, led by Mummolus,
obtained some temporary successes, but in 585 Guntram sent a powerful army
against him, and, at the mere rumour of its approach, Gundovald’s party began to crumble, and he and Mummolus were forced to take refuge in Convenae (now Comminges), a little city perched on one of
the outlying buttresses of the Pyrenees. Gundovald made a plaintive appeal to the Burgundian general, Leudegisclus, that he might
be allowed to return to Constantinople, where he had left his wife and
children. The general only scoffed at the meek petition of ‘the painting man,
who used in the time of king Chlotochar to daub his pictures on the walls of
oratories and bed-chambers'. After the siege of Convenae had lasted fifteen days, secret communications passed between Leudegisclus and
Mummolus, the result of which was that the latter persuaded or forced Gundovald to go forth and trust himself to the faintly
hoped for mercies of the foe. Vain was the hope : no sooner was he outside the
city than one of Guntram's generals gave him a push, which sent him headlong
down the steep hill on which Convenae was built. The
fall did not kill him, but a stone from the hand of one of his former adherents
broke the pretender's skull and ended his sorrows. Vengeance was not long in
overtaking his betrayers; one of whom was that same turbulent Bishop
Sagittarius, whom we have already seen fighting with carnal weapons against the
Lombard invaders. Leudegisclus sent a secret message to his king, asking how he
was to dispose of them. ‘Slay them all' was the answer of ‘good king Guntram'.
Mummolus, having received some hint of his danger, went forth, armed, to the
hut where Leudegisclus had his head-quarters.
“Why dost thou come thus like a fugitive?” said the Burgundian general.
“As far as I can see,” he answered, “none of the promises made to us are
being kept, for I perceive myself to be in imminent danger of death.”
Leudegisclus said, “I will go forth and put all right.” And going forth,
he ordered his soldiers to surround the house and slay Mummolus. The veteran
long kept his assailants at bay, but at length, coming to the door, he was
pierced in the right and left sides by two lances, and fell to the earth dead.
When Bishop Sagittarius, who had apparently accompanied Mummolus to the hut,
saw this, he covered his head with his hood, and sought to flee to a
neighbouring forest; but one of the soldiers followed him, drew his sword, and
cut off the hooded head. Such was the ignoble end of Mummolus, who at one time
bade fair to be the hero of Merovingian Gaul. The story is a miserable record
of brutality and bad faith. Not one of the actors keeps a solemnly plighted
promise or shows a trace of compassion to a fallen foe. These Frankish and
Gallo-Roman savages, with a thin varnish of ecclesiastical Christianity over
their natural ferocity, have not only no conception of what their descendants
will one day reverence as knightly honour, but do not even rise to the usual
level of truthfulness attained by their heathen forefathers in the days of
Tacitus.
The treasures of Mummolus came into the hands of king Guntram, who out
of them caused fifteen massive silver dishes to be wrought, all of which, save
two, he presented to various churches. And the residue of the confiscated
property he “bestowed upon the necessities of the churches and the poor.”
It is now time to return to the affairs of the Lombards, round whom the
clouds were gathering in menacing fashion a year before the death of Mummolus.
In the year 582, the Emperor Tiberius II, the generous and easy-tempered, had
died and had been succeeded by his son-in-law Maurice, who as a general had won
notable victories over the Persians, though he was eventually unsuccessful as a
ruler, owing to his riding with a sharper curb than the demoralized army and
nobles of Constantinople could tolerate.
The eternal quarrel with Persia wore during these years a favourable
aspect for the Empire, whose standards were generally victorious on the Tigris
and the mountains of Media, and the wild Avars on the Danubian frontier were for the moment at peace with their southern neighbours. Thus
freed from his most pressing cares, Maurice began to scheme for the attainment
of that object which could never be long absent from a Roman Emperor’s thought—
the recovery of Italy.
Already, before the death of Tiberius, an Austrasian army under duke Chramnichis had, from the Bavarian side, attacked the
Lombards in the valley of the Adige; but after winning a signal victory it had
at last been defeated and expelled from the country by Euin, duke of Trient. The court of Constantinople had doubtless heard of
this invasion, and knew that it would find in the nobles, who governed
Austrasia during Childebert's minority, willing helpers against the hated
Lombards. Troops indeed could not yet be spared from the Persian war, but
money, as in the days of the lavish Tiberius, could still be sent. The
ambassadors of Neustrian Chilperic had received from
Tiberius certain wonderful gold medals, each a pound in weight, bearing on the
obverse side the Emperor's effigy, with the inscription “Tiberii Constantini Perpetui Augusti”, and on the reverse, a
chariot and its driver, with the motto “Gloria Romanorum”. A more useful, if
less showy gift, now (in the year 584) reached the court of the Australian king.
The ambassadors of Maurice brought him a subsidy of 50,000 solidi (£30,000) and
a request ‘that he would rush with his army upon the Lombards and utterly
exterminate them out of Italy'. The young Childebert, now about fourteen years
of age, was permitted by his counsellors to lead his army across the Alps. The
force which poured in from Austrasia (probably by the Brenner or some other of
the eastern passes of the Alps) was too overwhelming for the Lombards to cope
with it. They shut themselves up in their cities (whose fortifications, wiser
than the Vandals, they had not destroyed) and saw the hostile multitudes sweep
over the desolated plains. But though unable to meet the Franks in arms, they
had other weapons which, as they probably knew, would be more efficacious with
the greedy nobles of the Austrasian Court. They sent ambassadors who offered
costly gifts, and, tempted by these, Childebert and his army retired. As a
pecuniary speculation the invasion had been a complete success for the Franks.
The 50,000 solidi were still almost untouched in the treasury of Metz, and
though the Emperor Maurice loudly demanded the return of the money, he demanded
in vain. To the same treasury were now carried the gifts of the Lombard dukes,
gifts which doubtless consisted chiefly of their own plunder from the palaces
of the Roman nobles, the work of generations of cunning craftsmen, while the
Lombards were still wandering through Pannonian wildernesses. These gifts
could, of course, be easily represented as tribute, and the returning Austrasians might boast that the Lombards had professed
themselves servants of king Childebert. There was none to say them nay; and
such is the colour put upon the treaty of peace by Frankish Gregory, but which
disappears .from the pages of his Lombard copyist.
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