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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.
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