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The transformation of Western Europe in the course of the fifth century
was by no means a uniform affair. The Barbarians were not all equally
Barbarian. The mode of their establishment differed very greatly, and
since the degree of the Catholic conquest, before the upheaval, also
differed from province to province, [ ] the effect of the
transformation was as varied in the religious world as in the
political. Two questions naturally arise: the effect upon the papal
centralising policy of this violent disintegration of political life;
and its effect on the Catholic establishment in the several provinces,
in Spain, Africa, Gaul, and Italy.
Spain had suffered greatly in this century of change. There were the
invasions of 407-409, then the long war of Visigoths against Vandals,
and Suevi. The Vandals soon passed into Africa, but the Suevi remained,
established in Portugal and Galicia, to carry on for the next eighty
years a sporadic warfare with the Visigoths.
Almost the only incident of the religious history of which any record
remains, is the intervention of the pope St. Leo I in the controversy
over Priscillian. Not all the losses of the upheaval had diminished
that fierce animosity, and at the very beginning of St. Leo's
pontificate, in the years 444-447, Turribius Bishop of Astorga in
Galicia sent to Rome a kind of memorandum explaining that
Priscillianism was by no means dead, that it numbered even bishops
among its supporters, and asking the aid of the Roman See. St. Leo, in
his reply, refers to the difficulty of communication with this distant
country since the breakdown of the imperial system. There is no
authority to enforce the old anti-Priscillianist legislation -- so
useful a complement, with its heavy sanctions, to the Church's clemency
-- synods are no longer held and therefore the heresy has a new lease
of life. To sift out the hidden Priscillianists from the hierarchy, the
pope sends a syllabus condemning in sixteen propositions the chief
doctrines of the sect, and, his only means of intervening, he suggests
that a general council of the bishops of Spain be summoned and the
syllabus proposed for their signature. Those who refuse to sign are to
be excommunicated. If it is not possible to summon a general council
the bishops of Galicia, at any rate, should meet.
Neither council could meet. Instead a formulary was drafted and sent to
all the bishops. They signed without an exception: more than one,
however, with strong reservations. There, apparently, the matter ended.
The pope could advise, could command, but in the circumstances of the
time, he must leave the execution of his decision to the local council
and if this council could not meet the trouble must endure.
Apart from this incident we know little until, seventy years later,
there is record of yet another Roman intervention. Spain had, for the
time, passed under the rule of Theodoric the Ostrogoth, the Barbarian
king who from Ravenna had ruled Italy since 493. In a sense Spain and
Italy were, for a moment, reunited. The years of Theodoric's rule were
years of peace, and it is perhaps to a new facility of communications
that we owe the appeal of the Bishop of Ilice to Pope Hormisdas in 517.
It was for a decision in disciplinary matters that Rome was approached.
There was the question of communion with what Greek clergy came to
Spain, for the sees of the East had been in schism for now thirty years
and more. There was, too, the eternal question as to the lawfulness of
episcopal elections, the ever-increasing complaint of simoniac
prelates. Hormisdas replied by letters for all the bishops of Spain.
The old laws governing elections were recalled, the sanctions against
simony re-enacted. Provincial synods were to be held annually, and to
provide for the execution of the reforms the pope named the Bishop of
Astorga his vicar. As to the Greeks, they were to be received only on
condition that they signed the formulary which the pope sent with his
letters. [ ]
The Vandal kingdom in Africa was exceptional in its relation to the
empire for it was definitely the result of conquest, and the Vandals
henceforward continued to be actively hostile to the empire now ruled
from Ravenna. The Vandals first came into the empire as a body in the
great invasion of 407, and not for nearly a century did they lose their
original character of ferocious marauders. From Gaul they passed to the
south of Spain, where the province of Andalusia to this day preserves
in its name their memory. Thence they crossed the narrow strait into
the Roman Mauritania and, at the invitation of its governor, into
Africa itself, as his allies in a revolt against the central
government. They occupied Africa by conquest, with pitched battles and
regular sieges, sacking and pillaging as they went. It was while they
were besieging his city of Hippo that St. Augustine, in 430, sickened
and died. The fruits of this conquest the government of Ravenna
confirmed to the Vandals in a whole series of treaties. The great man
of the movement was their king, Genseric, under whom they not only
conquered Africa but, taking to the sea, became for half a century the
terror of the Mediterranean. Political intrigue had brought them into
Africa, and it invited Genseric to Italy too where, in 455, he sacked
the ancient capital and carried off into captivity, in true Barbarian
fashion, the widow and daughters of the recently murdered Valentinian
III. One of these girls was married to a Vandal, and it is with the
last of the Vandal kings of Africa that the race of Theodosius finally
disappears from history.
The kingdom was exceptional, too, in that the Vandals, alone of these
Arian barbarian rulers, were bitter persecutors, and under their rule a
last chapter was added to the African Church's martyrology. The Vandals
brought with them into Africa an organised clergy, and soon there began
what was, to all intents and purposes, a war of Arian revenge on
Catholicism. The churches were burnt, all assemblies of Catholics
forbidden, the bishops and priests rounded up and deported. After
twenty years of this the emperor, Valentinian III, intervened and
Genseric answered his pleas to the extent of allowing a Catholic bishop
at Carthage. This bishop died in 457 -- two years after Valentinian's
murder, at the opening of the last twenty years of the imperial regime
-- and Genseric reverted to the policy of repression. It was forbidden
to elect a new bishop and for another twenty years the persecution
resumed its way. The administrative system had remained unchanged since
the days of the Roman governors, and its personnel was still Roman and
therefore Catholic. Whence an active Arian propaganda among the
official classes and, from the refusals, numerous martyrdoms.
Genseric died, after a reign of fifty years, in 477 and was succeeded
by a still more fanatical Arian, Huneric. The new king set himself to
exterminate Catholicism within a given time. A great congress of
Catholic bishops was summoned -- they still numbered as many as 466 --
and on their refusal to be convinced by their Arian rivals, the king
announced that the full Roman law against heretics would now be applied
against the Catholics, who were given four months in which to
apostatize. The bishops were exiled, some to Corsica where they were
set to work in the forests, others to the interior of Africa. The laity
found every profession and every trade closed against them unless they
could produce a certificate of conformity. There were numerous
apostasies, numerous forced baptisms. There were also many martyrs, who
died in terrible tortures. Within the year the persecutor was dead,
putrefactus et ebulliens vermibus, but the work of extermination
continued. The pope, Felix III, and the emperor, Zeno -- excommunicated
through the Acacian schism -- both intervened, pleading for a
mitigation of the terror, but in vain.
Meanwhile, within African Catholicism chaos reigned. There were no
bishops, no churches, hardly any priests, apostates of all degrees, and
in 487 the pope, in a council at Rome, drafted a series of rules to
regulate the reconciliation of the apostates.
That same year the persecution began to slacken. Once again a bishop
was allowed in Carthage and then, in 494, other bishops were recalled
from exile and their churches restored to them. In the provinces where
the Arians were fewest, there was a kind of peace. Elsewhere the old
law of repression was maintained in force.
The peace, such as it was, lasted but a short time. With the accession
of Trasimund (500) the bishops were once more deported -- this time to
Sardinia. Among them was the most distinguished Latin theologian of the
century, St. Fulgentius, Bishop of Ruspe. For the quarter of a century
during which Trasimund reigned the persecution continued and then, with
the accession of Hilderic in 523,-it ceased as suddenly as it had
begun. This king was the son of the savage Huneric by his marriage with
the captive daughter of Valentinian III. In him the line of Theodosius
the Great plays its last part in history. He recalled the bishops,
restored the churches, allowed all the vacant sees to be filled. For
the first time in almost a hundred years African Catholicism knew the
peace of ordinary life.
In that hundred years Mauritania, the most westerly province had been
abandoned to the native tribes; the Moors had occupied Numidia, and
from Zeugitana the Church had disappeared entirely. The Vandal kings
ruled over an Africa that had shrunk very considerably by comparison
with the Africa they had conquered in the last days of St. Augustine's
life.
Hilderic, by blood half Roman and the last descendant of the old
imperial family, pro-Catholic in his religious sympathies, in friendly
relation with the reigning Roman Emperor, Justinian, was too novel a
type to win much sympathy from his Vandal nobility. That he was not a
soldier increased their hostility, and in 532 a revolt broke out headed
by the heir to the throne. Hilderic was captured and dethroned and
thereupon Justinian -- braving the warnings of counsellors who recalled
the disastrous defeat at sea of the last Roman force that had ventured
itself against these barbarians -- intervened with a fleet and an army.
Hilderic and his friends were promptly massacred and then, on the 14th
September, the imperial general Belisarius laid hold of Carthage. His
victory was the beginning of the end of the Vandal regime. With ease,
almost, in the next few years he subdued one district after another and
by 539 Africa -- as much as the Vandals had managed to keep of it - -
was reunited to the empire. The empire's religion was Catholicism and
it was now the Arians who were persecuted as heretics.
The Church in Gaul, at the moment when the upheaval of the fifth
century began, had just lost its first great historical figure. This
was St. Martin, Bishop of Tours, who died in 397 and whose work was the
foundation upon which all the later structure of French Catholicism was
built, for it was St. Martin who first systematically undertook to
convert the pagan countryside. He was not himself a native of Gaul but
was born in Pannonia, about the time of Constantine's conversion. His
father was a soldier and a successful one and this determined the
saint's early career. He, too, though much against his will, must be a
soldier. His first preference, for a life of prayer and solitude,
survived his military life, however, and a meeting with St. Hilary,
Bishop of Poitiers, led to his establishment as a solitary in the wild
and inaccessible retreat of Marmoutier, on the Loire, nor far from
Poitiers itself. Disciples gathered round him and here, between 360 and
375, there was formed the first monastic settlement of the Western
Church.
Like the monks of the earliest Eastern groups, these disciples of St.
Martin lived as solitaries, coming together for certain common
exercises of piety, and practising heroic austerities. Unlike their
Eastern models they lived in the midst of a population wholly Pagan
and, inevitably, they added to their monastic occupations the work of
their neighbours' conversion. Sermons, instructions, the exposure of
the foolishness of the rustic Paganism, the practical exercise of the
charity of Christ, the example of their own heroic virtue began
gradually to tell. By the time of St. Hilary's death much had been
accomplished and more still when, eight years later, the clergy of
Tours came to announce to Martin that he was their new bishop. His
elevation was for the saint simply an occasion of extending the scope
of the work to which he had given himself. He established a new
monastery at Tours and, dressed in the same simple costume, he
continued as a bishop to live with the same austere simplicity to
achieve which he had left the world thirty years before. Long before he
died he was the greatest force in the Church of Gaul. Everywhere in the
West his monks were sought as bishops. From his death (397) his tomb at
Tours became the goal of innumerable pilgrimages, the scene of many
miracles, and to Martin were speedily paid the same liturgical honours
which, for a long time now, it had been customary to pay to the
martyrs. He is the first holy man not a martyr to be regarded
officially, as we say now, as a saint.
The west of Gaul had been the field of Martin's apostolate. In the
generation that followed his death a new centre of similar work, also
monastic, arose in the south. This was the settlement on the island of
Lerins, off the coast of Province. The monks, here also, lived a life
that followed Eastern fashions, a combination of the solitary and the
cenobite, an austerity in the matter of abstinences that verged on the
heroic, with an attachment to the practice of manual labour and, also,
a devotion to the study of Sacred Scripture.
In the first quarter of the fifth century, as the range of the central
power began to shrink, Treves had lost its civil importance; it was
Arles that was now the chief town of Roman Gaul. To the west of it the
Visigoths were established, with Toulouse as their chief centre. To the
east the Burgundians would soon be ceded a similar settlement. But for
yet another fifty years or so, the centre of Gaul with Arles for its
capital would continue to be occupied by armies and officials obedient
to the, by now, distant emperors in Ravenna. Something of the
ecclesiastical history of Arles we have seen in Pope Zosimus'
exaltation of its bishop as a kind of papal vicar with authority over
all the other metropolitans and in the speedy revocation of this
novelty by Pope Boniface I. The bishop for whom it had been created,
Patroclus, survived by just five years the death of the Emperor
Constantius III, whose favour had been the true cause of his temporary
greatness. To succeed Patroclus the Church of Arles called in Lerins,
electing as bishop the founder of that holy place, Honoratus (426). He
reigned, however, for two years only and in his place yet another monk
of Lerins was chosen -- Hilary.
St. Hilary of Arles showed himself a true bishop. He continued his life
of mortification. He gave himself to preaching and to the conversion of
the countryside, to the correction of his clergy and of his suffragans,
and to providing good bishops -- very often from Lerins -- as the sees
fell vacant. Like every reformer he made enemies, and these appealed
complainingly to Rome. Finally, his zeal to correct abuses took him
into territories beyond his metropolitan jurisdiction. He was found
arranging episcopal successions as far away as Besancon -- and that
before the bishop, Celidonius, was really dead. When the bishop
recovered and found that, during his illness, St. Hilary had
consecrated a good man to take his place there was more than a little
trouble. St. Hilary then took it upon himself to summon a council and
depose Celidonius.
Celidonius had in his time served the emperor as a judge. The death
sentences he had passed on criminals were, it was now said, an obstacle
lo his consecration. Again, he had been married and, it was said, he
had married a widow. This again made his consecration irregular.
Celidonius appealed to Rome (444) and went there in person to see the
case through. St. Hilary followed, actually to lecture the pope on the
facility with which he listened to complaints from the disaffected and
disobedient and then, in his simplicity, to depart with the appeal
still pending, in what looked very like flagrant contempt. the trial
finished. Celidonius cleared himself. Then the storm broke over the
unlucky Bishop of Arles. The pope, unfortunately for Hilary, was St.
Leo the Great. Celidonius he reinstated, and in a letter to the bishops
of the province he denounced the usurpation of the Bishop of Arles
unsparingly. As a punishment he stripped him of all his rights as
metropolitan, attaching his province to the see of Vienne and only
allowing him to retain his own see as a special act of grace. It was an
execution with the full rigour of the law, nor, despite St. Hilary's
endeavours, did the pope relent. After St. Hilary's death (448) a new
division of provinces was indeed made, and Arles recovered its rank as
a metropolitan see, but for as long as St. Hilary lived he was a living
witness of the reality of Rome's superior jurisdiction (as was to be, a
few years later, a much greater than he, the Patriarch of Alexandria)
and of the West's unquestioning acceptance of it.
The year that saw the death of St. Leo (461) saw also the murder of the
last emperor to matter in the West -- Maiorian. He was also the first
emperor for nearly a century to show himself in Gaul. Three years later
the death of the patrician Aegidius removed the last Roman general who
remained in touch with Ravenna. The last days, the last hours of the
Roman rule were approaching. The Visigoths at Toulouse knew it well
and, abandoning the fiction of their status as the emperor's men
defending a menaced province, they set themselves to capture what they
could of the now deserted centre of Gaul.
One by one the great cities were attacked and fell to them, the
inhabitants sometimes resisting not unsuccessfully until orders came
from the emperor to surrender. He had found it more convenient to
arrange with the enemy.
Of the life, ecclesiastical as well as civil, of this unhappy time, we
possess a by no means inconsiderable memorial in the work of St.
Sidonius Apollinaris. He was himself of Lyons, sprung from a family of
senatorial rank. His wife's father -- Avitus-was for a brief moment
emperor, and Sidonius climbed the cursus honorum to its heights,
becoming Prefect of Rome in 468. He returned to Gaul and in 470 was
elected Bishop of the Auvergne. It needs no great effort to believe how
greatly this was against the wishes of this cultured, leisurely
aristocrat upon whom, now, the end of all things seemed come. The
Visigoths were attacking. He was isolated from Ravenna, even had
Ravenna been disposed to help him. He rallied the city to defend itself
and resisted stoutly. In 475, however, the end came. The empire -- it
was almost its last act -- ceded the city to Euric the Visigothic king.
The bishop was carried off a prisoner to Toulouse. From his letters
written during this time we learn much of the " Barbarians " -- amongst
other things that their Arianism seems to have sharpened with the new
spirit of conquest, and that the king had found means to prevent the
election of bishops to many of the sees. Two years later Sidonius was
allowed to return. Euric had no longer any anxiety that the
ex-emperor's son-in-law, the one-time prefect of Rome, might combine
with Ravenna against him. Since 476 the emperors had gone. At Ravenna,
too. the Barbarian now ruled openly.
During these twenty years that lie between the deaths of St. Leo and of
St. Sidonius (461-479) the council of bishops continued to meet,
irregularly, haltingly, in a kind of ever feebler decrescendo. The
Visigothic advance toward the east, and the Burgundian advance down the
valley of the Rhone slowly set up a new barrier against communications
with Italy. The action of the Papacy on these now distant churches is
felt more and more rarely. To the north of the new Visigothic
conquests, however, all isolated Roman army still maintained itself:
Its leader was Syagrius whom the Barbarians called "the King of the
Romans." He was the son of that Aegidius who died in 464, and he too
was about to disappear.
The conquerors of Syagrius were not, however, the hitherto invincible
Visigoths. They were the Franks, associated with the empire for two
centuries, now as -foes and now as foederati, and settled under their
several kings (for they lacked the unity of the Visigoths) on the lower
Rhine since the time of Constantine's rather, Constantius I (293-306).
The Franks were, of all the foederati, the least civilised. There was
still about them a crude brutal bloodthirstiness that had long
disappeared from the Goths and the Burgundians, and, another mark of
the small effect of their long contact with the empire, they were still
pagans. The final stage in their history, in which they, too, begin to
occupy the territory of the empire as rulers really independent, begins
with the succession of Clovis as king of the Franks centred round
Tournai. This was in 481. Five years later he had overcome Syagrius and
was master of the north of Gaul as far as the Loire. He then turned on
the Alamans whom he drove back across the Rhine, and upon the other
kings of his own nation whom he also defeated and slew. In 493 he
married, and his wife, a Burgundian, was a Catholic. Three years later
he himself became a Catholic and was baptised at Rheims by the bishop,
St. Remy. Thousands of his warriors followed his example.
The stupendous importance of this conversion to all the succeeding
history of the Church is one of the commonplaces of history. At the
moment when it took place not one of the princes who ruled what had
been, and what still was, the Roman Empire was a Catholic. The
remaining emperor, Anastasius, was a Monophysite and his Catholic
subjects were cut off from the head of the Church by the Acacian
Schism. [ ] The new Barbarian rulers of the West, Ostrogoths,
Burgundians, Visigoths, and Vandals were, all of them, Arians. That the
new conqueror of the north should prefer to be Catholic was the first
break in a century of steady loss, the first sign of Catholicism's
future grip on the public life of the new Western world.
Its effect upon the future of the Franks was not less momentous. In
their case, and in their case alone, there was not between the
civilised subjects and the Barbarian ruler the greatest of all
barriers, namely, that the one was Catholic and the other
anti-Catholic. Here alone was the fusion of Roman and Barbarian
possible from the very beginning, and it began from the very moment of
the baptism. The bishops, who, when the chaos of the change had passed,
were everywhere revealed as the only leaders of what still endured,
were, in the kingdom where the Catholic Franks ruled, not merely
neutral spectators of the new order but its most active supporters.
Alone of these Barbarian kingdoms the kingdom of the Franks survived,
and it gave their name to the vast Roman territory where they
established it. The Vandals in Africa lasted until 534, the Ostrogoths
in Italy till 554, the Visigoths in Spain until 711. But under the
Franks, Gaul became France, the fruit of the union between Frank and
Gallo-Roman based on their common acceptance of the Catholic Faith.
Gibbon was right when he spoke of the French monarchy as founded on the
Catholic bishops.
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