| #### 2. SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CHANGES DURING THE FIFTH CENTURY, 395-526 |

| #### #### The Empire which, at the time of Constantine's conversion, had thus, for a good hundred and fifty years already, suffered the continuous strain of these internal weaknesses, had during the same time been obliged to face the menace of troubles no less serious from beyond its frontier -- the menace of the "Barbarians." These were the people who dwelt beyond the frontier -- Picts to the north of Hadrian's wall in Britain, Goths, Franks, Alamans and other tribes of Germanic race to the east of the Rhine and the north of the Danube, Moors and Nubians to the south of Roman Africa. They were pastoral and agricultural peoples, living on the produce of their lands, civilized in various degrees, with a primitive and fluctuating political system and an equally primitive social organisation. For those among them who lived near to the frontier, the life within the empire was a source of perpetual attraction, partly from the comfort its superior material civilisation promised, partly from the greater security and protection of its more settled organisation. For these pastoral Barbarians were, and had been for centuries, at the mercy of peoples still more primitive, the hordes of fierce nomads whose sphere of operation was the vast continent that stretches from the Carpathians across the steppes of Russia beyond the Urals and the Caspian Sea as far as the very wall of China, a world of savage plunderers and destroyers never at rest, yellow-skinned non-Aryan peoples, Huns, Avars, Magyars, Tartars, Mongols, Turks. Against these the pastoral tribes had no defence. The organised might of the Roman world, its guarded frontier, its settled towns promised them security; and from a very early time they sought to enter it. #### From the time of Marcus Aurelius (161-180) the defence of the long northern frontier was the chief anxiety of the State, the final reason for the army's domination of its life, political and economic. This anxiety was, in the later empire -- the empire of the third and fourth centuries -- enormously increased by the new developments within the army itself. In the first place the tactics, strategy and system of fortification were so altered by the necessity of this frontier warfare that the army almost disappeared as a mobile thing, before the demands made on it to provide the innumerable garrisons of the new system. It was indeed a serious development that the time had now come when it was hardly possible to put 10,000 troops in the field, for all that the army numbered half a million. But far more serious was the fact that the army had really ceased to be Roman at all. Since Septimius Severus (193-211) it had been more and more recruited from the Barbarians themselves. By the time of Valentinian I (364-375) it was entirely Barbarian. The words “soldier" and "Barbarian" were henceforward synonymous. #### It was a still graver development that the command, too, had ceased to be Roman. In the third century (Gallienus 253-268) the Roman senator and his class had been debarred from the command. The exclusion had then been extended to the provincial aristocracy, both the senatorial and that of the curiales. Already in the time of Constantine's father the officers of this almost Barbarian army were of the lowest ranks of provincial citizens. By the time of Constantine's death (337) they had ceased to be Roman at all. The army was, henceforth, a wholly Barbarian thing, officered by Barbarians, armed as the Barbarians were armed, using their methods as it used their weapons, even beginning to be clad in the once-despised Barbarian dress. Constantine favoured Franks; Theodosius Goths. Vandals and Alans, too, were to be found, and in the very highest posts. As in the third century the low class of officer had produced, inevitably, a low class of emperor in this state where the soldier was ruler, so now the Barbarian-held command brought the supreme posts of the empire within the Barbarians' grasp. No Barbarian, it is true, ever took for himself the imperial crown, but the daughters of Barbarians married the sons of emperors and Theodosius the Great's own grandson was thus half Barbarian in blood. #### In addition to the now Barbarianised " regular " army, the empire disposed also of the troops of its allies, the Foederati. These were groups, tribes, “nations" of Barbarians, admitted within the Empire, granted lands on which to live, and giving in return military service. Such a nation were the Goths, settled on the Danube by Valens in 376. These Foederati kept all their national organisation, including their king, and their own laws. As it suited the imperial policy, or as their kings were able to exact the concession, they moved about within the empire for the empire's service. #### The difference between the western empire in the fourth and in the fifth centuries is the difference between the first and second stage of a continuous development. In the fifth century that empire as a political unity disappears, but the disappearance is not due to revolution nor to conquest by foreign peoples. It is the term of the previous development -- a development whose pace has been accidentally quickened by unforeseen events, and which has of course been conditioned in its detail by the chance of the particular personalities engaged in it. The emperor has steadily ceased to count. The sixty years which followed the death of Theodosius the Great saw in succession two crowned weaklings -- his son, Honorius (395-423) and his grandson, Valentinian III (423-455) -- inert, incompetent princes who lived in an orientalised retirement at Ravenna while mightier forces decided the fate of their world. The Barbarian elements, already present in overwhelming force in the army of the fourth century had come, in the fifth century, to dominate it entirely and to dominate the court too. Between these Barbarians and what remained of Rome in the high places of the State, the rivalry was continuous. Ravenna is a court of endless intrigue. More than once the all-powerful subject is murdered: Stilicho, a Barbarian, by the order of Honorius; Aetius, the last great man of the Roman line, by Valentinian III -- a miserable debauchee who recalls the last of the Valois. In the next stage (455-476) the Barbarian is more powerful still. He murders Valentinian, the last of the line of Theodosius, and for the next twenty-one years sets up and dethrones and sets up again as emperor whoever seems most likely to play the part as he desires. For a short period there is no emperor at all. The Barbarian has not thought it worth while to nominate one. Finally, in 476, the Barbarian decides that the institution may just as well end. He orders the child who holds the title -- Romulus, whom in a kind of appropriate mockery men called Augustulus -- to resign, and he sends the insignia of the office to the emperor at Constantinople. No more emperors are needed in the West. The Barbarian will continue to rule as for the last fifty years, to rule nominally in the name of the remaining eastern emperor as, for those fifty years, he had ruled through his western colleague. #### This period of the passing of the emperors was marked by the most serious breakdown of the frontier yet known, when hordes of the fiercer Barbarian nomads poured into Gaul and Spain and, unhindered, ravaged and plundered for the best part of two years (407-409). From the anarchy of those years the imperial hold on these provinces never really recovered. It was now that the kings of the Barbarian foederati, thanks to accidental combinations of favourable circumstances -- the emperor's weakness, the unstable position of his Barbarian ministers, the jealousies of the court, and the scale of this unprecedented invasion -- were able to wrest unheard-of concessions, and so to achieve the beginnings of real independent political power. #### To dislodge the marauding hordes the government at Ravenna could do no better than despatch into Gaul the nation of the Visigoths who, since the death of Theodosius in 395, had been a continual embarrassment. Their king, Alaric, had turned against the eastern emperor in whose territories this people was first settled, and, disappointed in his hopes of advancement, he had then for two years (406-408) ravaged Macedonia and Greece as far as the Peloponnesus. Next, as the price of peace, he was named commander-in-chief of Illyricum -- the key province where the two empires met. He used his position to attempt to dislodge his enemy the Vandal, Stilicho, then supreme at the western court. But Stilicho was too much for him, and Alaric's invasion of Italy from Illyricum was turned back. Stilicho's murder in 408 left the road open, and after an attempt to wring from the western emperor a concession of rank and a commission Alaric and his people swept down upon Italy as far as Rome, which in 410 fell to them. Alaric died shortly after, as he was preparing to cross from Sicily to Africa, and his nation was still in southern Italy when it was "commissioned" to serve in Gaul and Spain to deal with the remnants of the great invasion of 407-409. In southern Gaul the fighting went on in a haphazard, Barbarian fashion for another ten years, Visigoths as foederati in the service of Honorius fighting first against Alans, Suevi and Vandals, and then against the emperor's own Barbarian army under Constantius. The new feature of this war was that it ended in the establishment of the Visigothic king as the emperor's representative in the lands where he had defeated the empire's invaders. The first of the Barbarian kingdoms was thus founded, Toulouse its capital. #### The Visigothic king at Toulouse was not independent of the emperor. The cession involved no revolution in law or administration, no wholesale change in ownership. It was not in any sense a conquest. The king of a Barbarian allied nation was now the supreme authority, under the empire, in territory governed for the empire until now by imperial officials. The emperor's hold on these provinces through these officials had been lessening steadily before the change. With the change it shrank to a mere formality. Everything was still done in the emperor's name, but it was the new king's will that settled what should be done. For his own nation he was, as he had always been, master so far as their own law made him so. For the Roman population his rule was exercised through the Roman law and the courts and administrative service which, in the main, the Romans still manned. It cannot be too often emphasised that, in the establishment of these kingdoms, no political revolution was involved. What did accompany them was a wholesale material destruction, towns sacked and burnt, countrysides ravaged. The material organisation by which the ordered central government lived -- means of communication for example -- suffered too. And, the most important point of all, the substitution of Barbarian kings for the centralised rule of the Respublica Romana aided most powerfully that social revolution already in progress by which one class of citizens was becoming the master, the political and juridical lord, of another, and in which ownership of land and political authority were becoming fast associated. This revolution, under the new regime, proceeded, one may say in very general terms, with the positive assistance of the rulers. #### The Barbarian kingdoms of this kind, ultimately established within the limits of the Roman Empire of the West, were five in all -- the Visigoths in Spain and Gaul; the Burgundians, from 443, in the valley of the Rhone and the lands between the Rhone and Italy; the Vandals in Africa from 430; the Franks in northern and western Gaul from 486; and the Ostrogoths in Italy from 493. ####  |