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READING HALLTHE DOORS OF WISDOM |
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ITALY AND HER INVADERS BOOK IV.
THE OSTROGOTHIC INVASION
CHAPTER VII.KING AND PEOPLE.
Now that Theodoric has safely brought his people into the promised land
of Italy, has conquered and slain his enemy, and seated himself at Ravenna,
undoubted king and ruler of the land, it may be well to pause for a little
space, and, before we contemplate the new State which he founded there, to ask
ourselves what was understood in the Gothic host by that word, kingship, in
virtue of which he ruled them. We shall find indeed, as we proceed, that the
spirit and maxims of the new kingdom, its form, and the machinery of its
administration, were Roman rather than Gothic. Still, even in order to grasp
this fact more clearly, it will be well to devote a few pages to a subject upon
which volumes have been usefully written, that of German Kingship.
‘God save the King!'—words how lightly spoken by revellers at a
banquet, or by shouting crowds as a monarch moves slowly through their midst!
Yet in this familiar formula are enshrined two words of mysterious power, which
have come down with the stream of national life, ‘through caverns measureless
to man,' from those distant highlands wherein the eye of science strains, and
strains in vain, to discover the origins of the human race and of human
society. To argue from the ancient origin of these two names of power that
there is any necessary connection between them; to maintain, as the advocates
of the divine right of kings once did, that religion forbids men to govern
themselves under republican forms, however clear it may be that the State will
best be so administered, is an absurdity of which few men will now be guilty.
But, nevertheless, it is permitted us to gaze, with a wonder in which there is
something of love and something of reverence, on this wonderful word, so
different in form in the various languages of the earth,—Melech, Basileus, Rex, Thiudans, King,—yet so essentially the same in power,
which constrains the many members of one vast community, her strong men, her
wise men, her holy men, to bring the best of their gifts to the treasury, and
to devote the strength of their lives to the service of one man, in mind and
body no different from themselves, but—a King.
Reverence for the kingly office seems to have been deeply implanted in
the heart of the Germanic branch of the great Aryan family; and it has been, in
the World-life, the especial function of the Germanic peoples to carry kingship
and faithfulness to the king, or—to borrow two words from the Latin
tongue—Royalty and Loyalty, farther down into the ages than any other group of
free nations. How early the old Homeric royalties of Greece and the kings of
Rome disappeared from the scene we all know. On the other hand, the long-lived
royalties of Assyria, of China and of Persia, were mere despotisms, giving no
free play to the national character, and stiffening the peoples that were
subjected to them with immobility. To reign on such terms, to be the master of
millions of slaves, was comparatively an easy task, when once the nation had
become used to the clank of its fetters. But to maintain for generations, to
prolong into the strangely different world of modem society, that peculiar
combination of kingly authority and popular freedom which was characteristic of
most of the Germanic royalties in the first century after Christ, and which
contained the seeds of the institution which we now call Constitutional
Monarchy,—this has been a great and marvellous work, and one which could only
be accomplished by a race with exceptional faculties for governing and being
governed.
We have the authority of Tacitus, that acute observer of the life of
states and nations, for asserting that German kingship was, in his day, for the
most part thus compounded of the two apparently antagonistic principles of
Authority and Liberty. He contrasts the libertas Germanorum with the regnum Arsacis,
when deciding that Rome has suffered more from the free barbarians beyond the
Rhine than from the compact despotism of the monarchy beyond the Euphrates.
When describing the sway of the Gothic kings, he says that, “though somewhat
stricter than that of most other German rulers, it still stretched not to the
infringement of liberty”. Only one race, the Suiones,
who dwelt in the islands of Baltic and on the Swedish promontories, were “under
the absolute rule of one man, to whom they were bound to pay implicit
obedience”. The great power attained in this tribe by even the slaves of
royalty, the fact that the nation could not be trusted with the custody of its
own arms, which were kept, in time of peace, in a locked-up arsenal guarded by
a slave, were emphatic proofs of the absence of the popular element in the
government of this nation, and strengthened by contrast the general picture of
German freedom.
It is, however, from Tacitus also that we receive our impressions of the
extraordinary manifoldness of political life amongst the German nations. In its
way, his sketch of Germania in the first century reminds us of the mediaeval
Reich, with its wonderful assortment of kingdoms, duchies, ecclesiastical
states, republican free towns, all congregated together, like the clean and
unclean beasts in the ark, under the rule, often only the nominal rule, of some
Hapsburg or Luxemburg emperor. Of course, in the Germania, even this semblance
of unity is wanting; but the variety of political life is there. Observing the
language of Tacitus with attention, we soon discover from his pages that the
kingly form of government was not universal among the Germans. Rex vel princeps, rex vel civitas, are alternative expressions, frequently used by him. The mere fact
that the chief ruler of a barbarian state is not always called by the same name
by the historians of a civilized country, who have occasion to mention his
existence, is not one upon which it would be safe to lay much stress. We must
be conscious that we talk with great looseness of Indian chiefs, of Zulu kings,
and so forth, and that we have no very clear idea of a difference in rank and
power between Cetewayo and the father of Pocahontas,
when we speak of the former as a king and of the latter as a chief. Something
of the same vagueness may be observed in the Homan writers, taken as a class,
from Caesar to Ammianus, when they speak of the leaders of the Teutonic tribes
who warred on Rome. But with Tacitus the case is different. His eye was quick
for all political facts. His mind was always revolving the advantages and
disadvantages of different forms of government. Even when describing the wild
freedom of Germany, he is half-thinking about Rome and her vanished liberties;
when face to face with Parthia, he is comforted by the thought that at least he
is not under the lawless despotism of an Eastern king.
Every word therefore of Tacitus respecting the political institutions of
our Teutonic forefathers is precious; and these hints of his about the Rex, or
the Civitas show us that there were German tribes not under the sway, however
lenient, of one sole king.. Some modern writers speak of these tribes as
Republican, and the expression, though not used by Tacitus himself, brings
before us more vividly than any other the nature of the rule under which the Cherusci, the Batavi, and many
other German tribes, were living at the Christian era. In time of war these
republican tribes elected a leader (Heritogo, in
modern German Herzog, translated in Latin by Dux, in English by Duke), who was
necessarily a man of tried bravery. In peace they may have been presided over
by some officer, also elective, who acted as supreme judge, and as president of
their assemblies; but even the name of this president has perished. In any
case, however, the distinguishing mark of these magistracies was their
non-hereditary character. The general or the judge was chosen for some special
emergency; perhaps in some cases he held his office for the term of his natural
life: but he held it only by the free choice of his countrymen, and had no
claim to transmit any power to his son.
In the royal tribes, on the other hand, the birth, of the supreme ruler
was everything. Doubtless the king was rich, doubtless he must be personally
brave (or else his warriors would soon find a fitter leader), doubtless he had
a large following of devoted henchmen; but none of these things alone would
qualify him to be chosen king. He must be sprung from some kingly family—the
Amals, or the Balthae, or the Asdings,
or the Merovings—who had been kings (or at any rate
nobles) from a time to which the mind of man runneth not to the contrary; some family which, while the nation was still heathen,
boasted that it was sprung from the seed of gods, and which still linked itself
with the remembrance of the heroes of old, even after the missionary-priest had dispeopled Walhalla and sent Odin and Gaut to dwell
for ever beside Jupiter and Venus in the penal lake of fire.
Yet, being born of the kingly family, it was by no means needful that he
should be what we call ‘the head of the house' by lineal descent. It is hardly
necessary to say, to those who know anything of the history even of mediaeval
monarchy, that the strict principles of primogeniture and representation, which
would make the crown descend in a line as definitely fixed as the course of
succession to an English estate settled ‘in tail male,' were quite unknown to
the Germanic nations. Of course a veteran Gothic warrior-king, gathered to his
fathers in a good old age, and leaving a warlike eldest son in the vigour of
his years, would generally be succeeded by that son.
That is the natural course of things, and in all such cases monarchy and
primogeniture easily become entwined together. Still, even in these instances,
the nation chose, the nation raised the first-born on the shield, and acclaimed
him as king. And if the dead king's children were minors, or if the eldest son
was a nothing, incapable in council or a coward in the field, if there was some
national hero standing near to the throne, and overshadowing by his fame the
relatives who came before him in the strict order of descent, in all such cases
the elective element in Germanic kingship asserted itself, and, by no fraud
upon the postponed claimants, by no usurpation of the preferred claimant, the
worthiest, kingliest, wisest, Amal or Balth, was
called to the throne.
No doubt this manner of bestowing the crown—inheritance tempered by
election—had its dangers, leading, as it did easily, to the wars and heartburnings of a disputed succession. It may very
probably have been a presentiment of these dangers which led Gaiseric to
promulgate a law of succession for the Vandals, according to which the oldest
of his descendents at each vacancy, in whatever line
of descent, was to be called to the empty throne; a provision, however, which
did not work well in practice nor avert the dreaded danger. But in the main,
for communities such as were the German tribes, living in the midst of foes,
and in need, before all things, of strong and wise leadership, we may believe
that the principle of choice out of one particular family worked well, and
tended, by ‘the survival of the fittest', to bring about an improvement in the
strain of royal blood, and to make the kings more and more fit by stature,
strength, and capacity of brain, to stand forth as unquestioned leaders of men.
Around the king's person, parting him off in some degree from the great
mass of the free but undistinguished warriors of the nation, but also
constantly checking and curbing his power, and compelling him ‘so to rule as
not to transgress the bounds of liberty,' stood the nobles. Who can say whence
they sprang? For they too, like the king, have an old-world origin, and if a
warrior is noble, it is because the oldest man in the host cannot remember a
tradition of the days when the ancestors of that warrior were anything else but
noble. Partly, perhaps, they are descended from younger branches of the kingly
house : partly they represent the vanished royalty of smaller tribes, whom the
great nation, as it rolled onwards, has incorporated with itself: partly, it
may be, here or there, they are the descendants of some great chief of a preexisting
people, Finnish or Basque or Celtic, whom the invading Teutons have found it
easier to win over and to assimilate than to destroy.
But in any case, whatever its origin, the important thing to notice
about this old Teutonic nobility is, that it is essentially a counterpoise to
the kingly power. In after days, when the new Teutonic kingdoms are reared ‘in Welshland’, a new nobility will arise, the so-called
‘nobility by service,’ represented by the ‘king's thegns' among our own
ancestors. These men, the king's butlers and seneschals and chamberlains, will
shine by the borrowed light of their master, and naturally for a time will do
nothing to check and everything to magnify his power. While they and the
obsequious ecclesiastics who stand with them round the new-raised throne are
hymning the praises of Our Lord Clovis or Chlotachar,
the old nobility, which used to remind him, sometimes with a certain roughness,
that he was only the first among his equals, will have had its ranks thinned by
the wars and the migrations, will find itself in the midst of a new and hostile
order of things, unpopular with the Roman provincials, anathematized by the
clergy, vexed by the exactions of the king's officers, and continually
postponed to the new and pliable ‘service-nobles' of the Court, and thus,
silently and sullenly, will vanish away.
A conspicuous feature in the social life of the ancient Germans, and one
which probably aided the development of kingly power (though assuredly it was
not the origin of that power), was the institution which the Latins called
comitatus, and which the Germans now speak of as Gefolgschaft.
We have no name exactly corresponding to it, but our historians are endeavoring to introduce the term Comrades to describe the
members of a Comitatus. The description of such a band given by Tacitus remains
the most accurate and the most vivid picture that we possess of it.
“When the young nobles have received their arms and are enrolled in the
ranks of the warriors, they take their places by the side of the hardy
veterans, nor do they blush to be seen among the ‘comrades'. Each receives his
rank in the ‘comradeship' according to the judgment of him whom they follow,
and great is the rivalry among the comrades which shall attain to the highest
place beside his chief, and of the chiefs which shall have the most numerous
and the most eager comrades. This is their dignity, this their strength : to be
ever surrounded by a great cluster of picked youths is in peace a distinction
and in war a defence. Nor is this so in a chief's own tribe only, but among
neighbouring states also; his name and his glory are spread abroad if his comradeship
excel in numbers and valour. Such chiefs are in request for embassies, are
loaded with presents: by their mere renown they often virtually end a war. When
the day of battle is come, it is disgraceful for the chief to be excelled in
bravery by the comrades, disgraceful for them not to equal the chief's valour.
Yea, and base for all the rest of his life is he accounted by himself and
others who has escaped alive from the battle, leaving his chief behind him. Him
to guard, him to defend, in his glory to merge every brave deed of his own,
this is the one great point of honour with the comrade. The chiefs fight for
victory, the comrades for their chief. If the community in which they were born
grows sluggish with too long peace and restfulness, most of the young nobles
seek of their own accord those nations which may then be waging war elsewhere,
both because this race hates rest, and because renown is more easily won on
well-balanced battlefields; nor can a great comradeship be well kept together
except by violence and war. Each comrade claims from the chief's generosity
that great war-horse of his, that gory and conquering spear. For the rest, the
seat at the banquet, the bountiful though coarse repast, are taken as
sufficient pay. The material for the chief's generosity is provided by war and
rapine. You would find it harder to persuade them to till the ground and wait a
year for the harvest, than to challenge a foe and earn honourable wounds. For
it seems ever to them a dull and stupid thing to accumulate, by the sweat of
your brow, that which you might make your own by the shedding of blood”.
This passage has given rise to many dissertations which are not perhaps
the most fruitful part of German archaeology. Who might become the head of a
comitatus, what precise relation existed between the ‘comrades' and their
chief, what states were founded by the leaders of a comitatus, and other
questions of the like nature, have been discussed with much ability and some
bitterness, but seem after all to resolve themselves only into the setting of
one man's guess against another's. More important is it to keep the poetical
aspect of this Germanic institution vividly before us. All admit that it has in
it the promise of chivalry, the germs of the feudal relation between lord and
vassal. We have already had occasion, in tracing the achievements of the young
Theodoric, to see how vigorous was the institution in his day, four centuries
after it had been described by Tacitus. It had undoubtedly a considerable
influence in developing the idea and the power of royalty among the German
races. Probably also the life of adventure and hardship which it promoted, favoured
the growth of great qualities of mind and body among the royal families from
whom some of the rulers of mediaeval, and a few of the rulers of modern Europe
have descended. For to what depths of degradation they might sink when the
stimulating influence, of the comitatus was withdrawn, and the barbarian king
could wallow undisturbed in the swinish delights of his barbarian royalty, is
abundantly shown by the dreary story of the sons of the Merovings.
Around the king and his ‘comrades', and around the outer circle of the
nobles, gathered the great mass of the nation, the free but not noble warriors,
who were known as ‘free Franks' in the army of Clovis, and as ceorls on the
soil of England. Of the social life of these men, of their days passed in
alternations of fierce excitement and sturdy idleness, of their carousings and their mad devotion to the dice-box, Tacitus
draws for us a striking and well-known picture. Our present business is to
follow them to what our fathers called the Folcmote,
other tribes the Folks-Thing or the Mall, and Tacitus the Concilium, the assembly
from which in direct lineal succession our own Parliament is descended. So long
as the tribe is contained in narrow limits, each new and full moon sees the
assembly of the tribesmen. As it grows into a wide-spreading nation, the times
of meeting are necessarily reduced, till, in the vast Frankish Empire, they
occur only twice or thrice in the year. The men come armed, and the mere fact
of being free and a warrior is enough to give a right to attend the Folc-mote,
though, for full voice and vote, it is necessary that a man should also have
land—which means a home—of his own. Among all these armed men the Things-fried,
the peace of the great meeting, prevails; and however hot the discussion may
be, none may dare to lift a hand against his opponent in debate. They do not
assemble punctually,—‘this,' says Tacitus, ‘is the fault of their German
freedom,'—but often waste two or three days in waiting for those who come not
on the appointed day. Then, at length, when it pleases the multitude to begin,
they sit down, all arrayed in their armour. The priests, inconspicuous
generally in the German polity, but prominent on these occasions,— perhaps in
order to guard the Things-fried by religious reverence,— call for silence, and
the clash of the barbarians talk and song ceases. The king, if there be a king,
if not, the head of the state, begins the debate. The warriors follow in no
exact order of precedence. Age, noble birth, mighty deeds in war, the gift of
eloquence, all give a speaker the right to be heard: but none, not even the
king, orders; all must seek to persuade. If the speaker's advice displeases, he
is interrupted by the indignant clamour of his hearers : if it meets their
approval, they brandish their mighty spears and so give to the barbarian orator
his most coveted applause.
And what is the business thus debated of? Many matters doubtless,
belonging to the peaceful life of the tribe, which Tacitus has not described to
us. He mentions the accusation, or, as we should call it, the impeachment, of
great offenders, upon whom the punishment of death may be inflicted. This man,
who was a traitor to the tribe, is hung from a tree; that one, who was only a Nithing and a coward, is plunged into a morass with a
hurdle over him to prevent his struggling out of it; another, who is found
guilty of some lighter offence, is fined so many horses or oxen.
The judicial work of the assembly at an end, its administrative work
begins. They elect the chiefs who are to dispense justice and keep some kind of
barbarian order in each shire or village. Then, no doubt, there are often
questions of boundary to settle, some rudimentary works of civilisation to be
talked over, the clearance of this forest, the dyking out of that encroaching stream. But after all, the debates of these warriors
turned most naturally towards war. Over and over again, in these German
Folc-motes, was the question raised, “When and how and where must we make a
stand against this all-pervading tyranny of Rome? Shall we make war on such
and such a subject-tribe and punish them for their submission to the common
enemy? Or shall we strike boldly at the great enemy himself? Shall we swim the
Rhine, shall we swarm over the easily crossed Pfahlgraben,
and win great spoil in the rich cities beyond?”.
To complete the picture of the social state of the German tribes we
should need to inquire into the condition of the slaves, and of the men, if
there were such, who occupied a position akin to that of the Roman colonus, bound to till the land of a lord and to
make him certain payments out of the produce, and yet not entirely dependent on
his caprices. That there were slaves following in the train of these stalwart
barbarians there can be no doubt: nay, we are informed by Tacitus that “even a
German warrior, in his overmastering passion for play, would sometimes sell
himself, and doubtless his wife and children also, into slavery”.
So far therefore, the grand outline of popular freedom exhibited to us
by the German folc-mote, at which every warrior has
a right to be present, requires some modification. Like the free commonwealths
of Greece and Rome, the German state does rest, to some extent, on a basis of
slavery. It is clear, however, that slavery was not, as in some of those
commonwealths, the cornerstone of the fabric. The most careful inquirers are of
opinion that slavery, or serfdom, constrained the movements of but a small part
of the population of ancient Germany: and it is noteworthy that
when Tacitus speaks of the idle life, during peace, of the German warrior, he
says that household cares and the tillage of the fields were left [not to the
slaves but] to the women, the old men, and the less robust members of the
family.
To go back to our main subject, the power of the kings in that Germany
which Tacitus described: it is manifest that it was subject to some strong
controlling forces. A body of nobles, nearly as proud of their birth as the
king himself, watched his movements and jealously resented every word or
gesture which would seem to imply that he was a master and they his slaves. The
frequently held popular assemblies, even if attended, as was probably the case
in quiet times, by but a small part of the nation, kept alive the tradition of
the rights of the people. It was a very different thing to dictate an unpopular
order, as the Caesar of Rome might do, in the privacy of his secretarium, leaving the odium of its execution to
the officer who sped with it to some distant province; and to have to defend
that order oneself, as must the leader of the free warriors of Germany, in the
next assembly of the people, to see the spears brandished in menace rather than
in applause, to hear the harsh murmur of martial voices uttering in no courtly
tones their disapprobation of the deed.
So far we have been dealing with the political life of our Teutonic
forefathers at the time when Tacitus wrote. From that date till Theodoric's
establishment of his Italian kingdom four centuries had passed; an interval of
time which may count for comparatively little in a changeless Oriental
monarchy, but which counts for much in European states, when the busy brain of
an Aryan people is kindled by some new and great idea, or is brought forcibly
into contact with other civilizations than its own. Four centuries before the
date at which these words are being written, the Canary Islands were believed
to be the uttermost limit of the habitable world in the direction of the
setting sun. All the myriad influences which America has exerted upon Europe—to
say nothing of those which Europe has exerted upon America— Peruvian gold,
voyages of the Buccaneers, Negro-slavery, the Rights of Man—have had but those
four hundred years to work in.
During the four centuries which we are now specially considering, from
Domitian to Zeno, the ever at heart and mind of Germany were ever in contact
with the wonderful fascination of the world-Empire of Rome. First, for two or
three generations, they had to fight the almost desperate battle of defence
against Roman aggression. Then, when Quadi and Marcomanni, by their stubborn
resistance to the 165-181. noble Marcus, had renewed the old teaching of
Arminius, and shown the barbarians that Rome was not invincible; still more
when, in the miserable anarchy of the third century, Rome herself seemed to
have lost the power of self-preservation, and to be falling from ledge to ledge
down the precipice of ruin, the Germans began to entertain the idea of
something more than self-defense, and with ever-increasing pertinacity to renew the attempt to carve out for themselves
settlements (not necessarily independent settlements) in the fair ‘ Welchland' on the other side of Rhine and Danube.
All these wars, all this stir and movement among the peoples, tended to
increase the power of the kingship. A weapon which was to pierce the Empire's
defensive armour of castles and legions needed to be sharpened to a point and
tipped with steel; and that steel point was royalty. Moreover, in the very act
of the migration, many old associations would be loosened, the kinships which
had dwelt in the same secluded valley for generations, and which mistook
‘the rustic murmur of their bourg
For the great wave that echoes round the world',
would
be shaken out of their boorish conservatism, which, with all its dullness,
nevertheless had been a certain bulwark against royal encroachments. Above all,
the members of the old nobility, conspicuous for their deeds of headlong
valour, would, many of them, leave their bones to whiten on the Roman
battlefield, and more and more, as they fell in war, would their places be
filled up by the young and dashing ‘comrades' of the king, men perhaps of noble
birth themselves, but magnifying the office of their chief, and prouder of
their loyal service to him round whose standard they gathered than of their own
descent from the gods of Walhalla.
Let the reader apply these general principles to some of those incidents
in the Germanic migration which have been already recorded: let him think of Fridigern, of Athanaric, of Eriulph,
the chiefs of the Visigoths, of Hermanric the mighty and wide-ruling king of
the Ostrogoths: then let him remember how Alaric's elevation on the shield and
the acclamation of his name as king gave at once a point and a purpose to the
previously desultory warfare of the Goths, and led, by no obscure connection of
causes and effects, to the occupation of the Eternal City itself by the forces
of the barbarians. One instance of a Folc-mote, at least of a council of war,
which might possibly bear that character, we noticed in the pages of Claudian.
It was that held before the battle of Pollentia, in
which the poet represents an old chief as pleading for peace and harshly
silenced by the vengeful voice of Alaric. We do not need the doubtful authority
of the poet to assure us that, if assemblies of the people were held during
these marchings and counter-marchings on the soil of Italy, this would generally be the result. All military instinct
would be in favour of obeying rather than arguing with the young and brilliant
leader of the Goths; and the necessities of the ‘war power,' which made a
temporary autocrat of so constitutional a ruler as President Lincoln, might
well make Alaric the Balth the unquestioned disposer
of the lives and fortunes of his people.
The vassalage into which so many German kings were forced under the yoke
of Attila the Hun probably tended towards the effacement of popular freedom.
Before Attila, Ardaric and Walamir might tremble, but to their subjects they
would be terrible, as representing not only their own power, but all the
consolidated might of that heterogeneous monarchy.
As for the polity of the Vandals, we saw, in tracing the history of the
conquest and land settlement of Africa, how vast a preponderating influence was
thereby assigned to the king. It is true that, by careful examination, some
traces of the old Teutonic freedom may still be discovered among the warriors
of Gaiseric, but they are indeed rare and feeble. Peace and war, treaties,
persecutions, all seem to be decided upon and carried through by the
overwhelming authority of the king.
And thus we come to the subject with which we are now specially
concerned, the kind and degree of kingly authority wielded by the Amal
Theodoric. It must be stated at once that this was absolutely unlike the
limited and jealously watched authority of the German kings described by
Tacitus. After the Ostrogoths crept forth from under the world-shadowing might
of Attila, they fell into a position of more or less dependence upon the power
of Eastern Rome; a power materially far less formidable than that of the terrible
Hun, but more potent in its influence on the minds and thoughts of men. It is
impossible to prove what effect the forty years between the death of Attila and
the death of Odovacar had upon the ‘Walamir-Goths but it is almost certain that
many old German ideas and customs were lost during that time of close
intercourse and frequently-renewed alliance with Byzantium. For the fact that
they did not become altogether Romanised and sink into the position of a mere
military colony of the Empire, their old hereditary loyalty to the Amal kings
was mainly answerable. The reader will remember in what insulting terms
Theodoric the son of Triarius taunted the squalid retinue of his rival for
their fall from their once high and prosperous estate. He was correct in saying
that it was their loyalty to Theodoric the Amal that had brought them into that
abyss of wretchedness. But the instinct of the nation was right. Theodoric was
indeed the people's hope, and their loyalty to him brought them safely through
so many dangers and trials and seated them at length as lords in the fairest
lands of Italy.
But when the great enterprise was thus at length crowned with success,
the author of it was no longer a king after the old Germanic pattern, bound to
consult and persuade his people at every turn. As an uncontrolled, unthwarted
ruler he had led them from Novae to Ravenna. As an uncontrolled, unthwarted
ruler he was thenceforward to guide the destinies of the nation in his palace
by the Adriatic.
There is no trace of anything like a single meeting of the Folc-mote
during the reign of Theodoric. All action in the State seems to proceed from
the king alone, and though he condescends often to explain the reason for his
edicts, he does this only as a matter of grace and favour, not of necessity,
and in doing so he employs the same kind of language which is used in the
Theodosian code. There is, as we shall see, at his death a faint acknowledgment
of the right of the people to be consulted as to his successor; but here again
there is no more recognition of the elective character of the monarchy, if so
much, as in the case of the successive wearers of the purple at Byzantium. In
short, though Theodoric never assumed the title of emperor, his power, for all
practical purposes, seems to have been exactly the same as an emperor's; and we
get a much more truthful idea of his position by thinking of him as the
successor of Theodosius and the predecessor of Charles the Great, than by
applying to him any of the characteristics of Teutonic royalty which we find in
the Germania of Tacitus.
But though the kingship of Theodoric was thus greatly changed from the
old model of his forefathers' royalty, there is one case of an early German
ruler, described to us by Tacitus himself, whose career is in some respects
very similar to that of the Amal hero. Maroboduus, king of the Marcomanni, a
very few years after the birth of Christ led his people across the Erzgebirge,
and established a strong kingdom in Bohemia and Bavaria and on the Middle
Danube. A disciplined army of 70,000 men, hovering upon a frontier only 200
miles from Italy, caused even the great Augustus to tremble for the peace of
his Transalpine provinces. No German had ever seemed more formidable to Rome,
but he was formidable only because he was despotic. It is evident that in his
kingship the rein was drawn far tighter than was usual in the Germanic states
of that day, and this harsher system of government, though it made him for the
time a more dangerous foe to Rome, prevented his dynasty from striking root in
the affections of his people. When Arminius attacked him after about twenty
years of rule, ‘the name of king,' that is, of despotic king, ‘alienated the
sympathy of his own countrymen from Maroboduus, while the cause of Arminius was
popular, as he was fighting for liberty.' By this war Maroboduus was greatly
weakened, and had to sue for the degrading help of Rome to avert absolute
overthrow. Only two years later the Gothic chieftain Catualda,
who had once been driven from his country by the might of Maroboduus, ventured
on an expedition of revenge, which, by the help of the disloyal nobles of the
Marcomannic kingdom, was completely successful; and forced Maroboduus, a hunted
exile and outlaw, to seek the protection of Tiberius, who received this
disarmed enemy of the Roman people into his territory, and permitted him to
spend the eighteen remaining years of his life in the friendly shelter of
Ravenna. Strange vicissitude of fortune, which caused the first great absolute
monarch of a German nation to grow old, amid the contempt of his people, in the
very same capital which witnessed the splendid reign and honoured death of the
greatest of German despots, Theodoric.
Happily the reign of the Amal king ended in no such disastrous collision
with the free spirit of his people as that which brought the might of Maroboduus
to the ground. Yet, if there were any traditions of a healthy national life
still lingering among the warriors whom he had settled in Italy, these must
have been continually wounded by what they saw and what they heard at the Court
of Ravenna. True, they still were summoned to appear, at any rate those who
lived in the north of Italy, once a year in the presence of their King, and to
receive a donative from his hand. They were not turned into Roman legionaries;
they fought still in the old national order, with the great Gothic broadsword
and under the command of their own captains of thousands. But when they stood
in the presence of their countryman, the great Amal, they found him surrounded
with all the pomp of Byzantine royalty. The diadem which the Western Emperors
had worn was upon his head, silken robes, dyed with the purple of the murex,
flowed over his shoulders, silentiarii in
bright armour kept guard before the curtain which separated the awful secretum
of the sovereign from the profane crowd of suitors and suppliants, the Prefect
of the Sacred Bedchamber, some Roman courtier intent on currying favour with
his new lord by an exaggerated display of servile devotion, stood ready to stop
on the threshold any of his old ‘comrades,' of however noble blood, who would
venture unbidden into the presence of the King.
The donative and the ration-money were given and were welcome to the
spendthrift Goth, who had perhaps already diced away his lands to some
fellow-soldier after they had sung together the old Gothic songs and drunk too
deeply of the new delights of the wine of Italy. But before receiving the
money, the old and grizzled warrior had perhaps to listen to some eloquent
harangue from the lips of the fluent Roman quaestor, Cassiodorus, about the
delights of being admitted to the royal presence and the living death which
those endured who beheld not the light of his countenance—a harangue which
almost made the donative loathsome, and which, if anything could have done so,
would have quenched his loyal enthusiasm, when at last the veil was drawn
asunder and the well-known form, conspicuous in so many battle-fields from the
Bosporus to the Ticino, moved forth to receive their acclamations.
The picture here drawn of Gothic dissatisfaction at the exaltation 01
the royal prerogative is chiefly a conjectural one, but the fact is that almost
all our information as to the feelings of the Gothic element in Theodoric's new
state has to be derived from a few faint and widely-scattered hints, combined
and vivified by the historical imagination. The information which reaches us as
to the manner of the kingdom—and it is abundant—comes all from the Roman side.
The rhetorical Cassiodorus, the courtly Ennodius, the dispirited Boethius, are
all Romans.
Even the Goth Jordanes is more than half-Roman at heart, and derives all
his materials from Cassiodorus. We are therefore really without a picture of
the Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy from the true Ostrogothic point of view. Only,
in reading the phrases in which these rhetoricians and churchmen magnify the
might of their master, we are sure that they must have grated on the ears of
all that was self-respecting and genuinely Teutonic in the countrymen of
Theodoric.
To a certain extent we, who have imbibed from our childhood the idea
that kingship is never so great a blessing to the world as when it is
rigorously—almost jealously—controlled by the national will, can share the
feelings of disgust with which our imaginary Gothic warrior listened to the
fulsome flatteries of his Roman fellow-subjects. It is difficult for the most
loyal admirer of Theodoric not to turn away with something more than weariness
from the volume of state correspondence in which, for page after page, the
great King, by the pen of his secretary, praises his own virtue, his own
wisdom, his own moderation, .his own love of equal justice for Goth and Roman.
Partly we become reconciled to this apparent want of modesty by remembering
that, though the King is supposed to speak, it is well understood that the
clever Quaestor really speaks for him. All the world knew that in these letters
it listened, not to Theo- doric praising himself, but to Cassiodorus praising
Theodoric. The will of the King is undoubtedly expressed in these letters, and
we may be sure that his share in them was by no means limited to a mere formal
assent, or the languid addition of his stencilled signature at the bottom. Yet
when Theodoric knew that the substance of the royal will was therein contained,
he probably gave himself little trouble about the form. For that, the learned
Quaestor was responsible. A brave Gothic warrior would-have blushed
to enumerate his own good qualities with so many swelling words of vanity. But
if this was the custom of the country, it must be complied with; and probably
the King saw his short, business-like, verbal instructions expanded into the
turgid state document, with similar feelings to those with which an Englishman
receives from his lawyer the great expanse of sheepskin covered with legal
verbiage, that is required to give validity to a purchase which was settled in
an interview of an hour.
After all, the great justification for the somewhat despotic form
assumed by the government of Theodoric must be found in the object which he
proposed to himself, and which, with signal success, he achieved. What was that
object? It was in one word, Civilitas; the
maintenance of peace and tranquillity, and the safeguarding of all classes of
his subjects from oppression and violence at the hands either of lawless men or
of the ministers of the law. The golden words of Ataulfus,
as recorded by Orosius, seem to have expressed
exactly the aim which Theodoric kept constantly before him. Not to obliterate
the Roman name, not to turn Romania into Gothia, but to correct the inherent
lawlessness of the Gothic character by the restraint of those laws without
which the state would cease to be a state, to restore the Roman name to its old
lustre and increase its potency by Gothic vigour; this was the dream which
floated before the mind of Ataulfus, this was the
dream which became a reality for forty years under Theodoric and his
descendants.
The state papers of the Ostrogothic monarchy, as will be seen by any one
who glances through the abstract of the letters of Cassiodorus, are filled
almost to satiety with the praises of this great gift, Civilitas.
It was attained, however, not by the fusion, but rather by the federation, of
the two peoples, over both of whom Theodoric was king. Whatever may have been
his hope as to the ultimate effect of his measures, and probably the vision of
a united Italian people did sometimes fascinate the mind of the King, or at any
rate of his ablest minister, they well knew that at present the absolute
assimilation of the two nations was impossible.
The Goth could not be taught in one generation that reverence for the
name of Law, that disposition to submit to authority, however harshly
displayed, which had become an instinct with the Roman people. The Roman could
not in one generation become imbued with that free heroic spirit, that love of
danger and of adventure, which rang in every Gothic battle-song. This had
perhaps never been precisely the endowment even of his forefathers, for even
the Fabricii and the Valerii were inspired to do
great deeds rather by a lofty sense of duty, self-respect, loyalty to their
comrades and their country, than by the mere animal delight in fighting which
fired the sons of Odin. And whatever the Roman's prowess had once been, it had
now utterly left him, and generations of intermixture with a new stock were
needed to bring back the iron into his blood.
Meantime, then, the two nations were to be governed with a strong and
impartial hand, not as one people, but for one end, the happiness of all. The
Gothic sword was to preserve the soil of Italy from foreign foes, while the
Roman practised the arts of peace and administered the laws which had come down
from his forefathers. The situation was like that which existed in Normandy
under William Longsword, like that which his descendant William the Bastard
strove to establish in England after the Conquest; striving unsuccessfully
because his English subjects, at any rate after the revolt of 1068, refused to
give him that willing obedience which undoubtedly was rendered during the
larger part of his reign by the Roman population to Theo- doric. Or, to choose
an illustration from our own times, the relation of the Ostrogothic King to the
two classes of his subjects was like that of an enlightened and conscientious
Governor General of India to the Europeans and Hindoos under his sway. Fusion of the two nations is at present an impossibility. It is
impossible to legislate for the European indigo-planter exactly as if he were a
native Rajah, or for the headman of a Hindoo village as if he had the same
ideas as a Queen's soldier from Devonshire. The best rulers keep the fusion of
the two nations before them as an event possible in the far-distant future, and
meanwhile strive so to govern that the thought of a common interest in the
prosperity of the whole country, the idea of a true Res Publica, may take root
in the minds of both races, that no violence be practised by the European
against the Hindoo, and no chicane by the Hindoo against the European, that
‘Ephraim shall not envy Judah, and Judah shall not vex Ephraim.’
This equal balance held between the two diverse nations requires,
however, a steady hand the scales. A Folc-mote of the Goths would have made
short work of the liberties of the Romans; a meeting of citizens in the Roman
Forum, lashed to fury by the harangue of some windy orator, would soon have
pulled down the statues of the Gothic king. And thus we are brought by these
considerations to the same conclusion to which, as we have seen, all the events
in the history of his nation tended. German kingship as wielded by Theodoric
had to be despotic. The crown of the arch must be made strong and heavy to
repress the upward thrust of the two opposing nationalities.
This being so, the laws and usages of the Gothic-Roman state throw not
much light on the development of Teutonic institutions. It is the dying Empire,
as we shall see, rather than dawning Feudalism, which is displayed in the
correspondence of Theodoric's secretary. The Edictum Theodorici, to which reference will be made in
the next chapter, is not, like the codes of other German races—the Burgundian,
the Salian, the Ripuarian—an exposition in barbarous Latin of the customary law
of the tribes who had come to seat themselves within the borders of the Empire;
but it is rather a selection of such parts of the Theodosian code and of the
Roman Responsa Prudentum as were suitable for the new
monarchy, a few unimportant changes being made in some of their provisions by
the supreme will of the king.
Gothic law we may be sure there was, to be administered where Goths only
were concerned; but it has left little trace in any written documents, no doubt
because in the great majority of cases Romans were concerned either alone or
together with Goths, and here the irresistible tendency of the magistracy which
Theodoric had taken over from the Empire was to make Roman law supreme.
There are two offices, however, which we may notice here, before we pass
on to consider the Roman side of Theodoric's administration, since they are
both purely Teutonic, and were no doubt always held by men of barbarian origin.
One is that of the Count of the Goths, the other that of the Saiones.
1. The Comes Gothorum (we know not his Gothic
title) was no doubt in practice always a general high in office, perhaps
usually a great provincial governor. But his chief duty was to decide,
doubtless according to the old traditional law of his people, any disputes
which might arise between one Goth and another. Should the controversy he
between a born Goth and a born Roman, in that case he was to associate with
himself a Roman jurisconsult and decide the strife ‘according to fair reason'.
In estimating what ‘fair reason' required, we may probably conclude that the
Roman law, with its vast store of precedents, the accumulated experience of
ages, aptly quoted and enforced by a quick-witted jurisconsult, would be almost
uniformly victorious over the few and crude maxims of German Right, born in the
forest or the pastureland, and dimly present in the brain of some stalwart
Count of the Goths, more able to enforce his conclusions with his sword than
with his tongue.
2. The Saiones were apparently a class of men
peculiar to the Ostrogothic monarchy. More honoured than the Roman lictor (who
was but a menial servant of the magistrate), but hardly perhaps rising to the
dignity of a sheriff or a marshal, they were, so to speak, the arms by which
Royalty executed its will. If the Goths had to be summoned to battle with the
Franks, a Saio carried round the stirring call to
arms. If a Praetorian Prefect was abusing his power to take away his
neighbour's lands by violence, a Saio was sent to
remind him that under Theodoric not even Praetorian Prefects should be allowed
to transgress the law. If a new fort had to be built on some dolomite peak
commanding the ravines of the Adige, and shutting out the barbarians of
Northern Tyrol, a Saio was dispatched to urge and
guide the exertions of the provincials. The Saiones seem to have stood in a special relation to the king. They are generally called
‘our Saiones,’ sometimes ‘our brave Saiones,' and the official virtue which is always credited
to them (like the ‘Sublimity' or the ‘Magnificence' of more important
personages) is ‘Your Devotion.'
One duty which was frequently entrusted to the Saio was the tuitio 0f some wealthy and unwarlike Roman.
It often happened that such a person, unable to protect himself against the
rude assaults of sturdy Gothic neighbours, appealed to the King for protection.
When the petition was granted, as it probably was in almost all cases, the
person thus taken under the tuitio regii nominis acquired peculiar rights, and any maltreatment of his person or injury to his
property was treated as more than an ordinary offence against civilitas, as a special act of contempt towards the
royal authority. He seems to have had, at any rate in certain cases, a peculiar
privilege of suing and being sued directly in the Supreme Court (comitatus) of
the King, overleaping all courts of inferior jurisdiction. But the chief
visible sign of the King's protection, and the most effective guarantee of its
efficiency, was the stout Gothic soldier who as Saio was quartered in the wealthy Roman's house, ready to fight all his battles, and
to make all other Goths respect the person and the property of him to whom
Theodoric had pledged the royal word for his safety. A payment, of the amount
of which we are not informed, but which probably varied according to the wealth
of the Roman and the lineage of the Goth, was paid, commodi nomine, by way of douceur, by the defended to the
defender.
The relation thus established was one which, being itself a somewhat
barbarous remedy for barbarism, might easily degenerate from its original
intention. Sometimes the protected Roman, having this robust Goth in his house,
sharing his hospitality and ready to do his bidding, used him not merely for
his own defence but for the oppression of his poorer and
Slight indications like this of the footing upon which the two nations
lived may help us to understand the difficulty of the problem set before
Theodoric the common ruler of both of them, and to appreciate more highly the
skill which for thirty years he displayed in solving it.
CHAPTER VIII.
THEODORIC AND HIS COURT.
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