Part 3 (1/2)
These words of Tacitus, written in the year 98 after Christ, describe with wonderful exactness the state of Ostrogothic society in the year 472. We are not expressly told of Theodoric's a.s.sumption of the s.h.i.+eld and spear in the great Council of the nation, but probably this ceremony immediately followed his return from Constantinople. Then we see the gathering together of the band of henchmen, the sudden march away from the peaceful land, growing torpid through two or three years of warlessness, the surprise of the Sclavonic king, the copious effusion of blood which was the preferred alternative to the sweat of the land-tiller, the return to the young chief's own land with spoils sufficient to support perhaps for many months the ”generosity” expected by the henchmen.
There is one point, however, in which the description of the Germans given by Tacitus is probably not altogether applicable to the Goths of the fifth century: and that is, their invincible preference for the life of the warrior over that of the agriculturist. There are some indications that the Germans, when Tacitus wrote, had not long exchanged the nomadic life of a nation of shepherds and herdsmen (such as was led by the earlier generations of the Israelitish people) for the settled life which alone is consistent with the pursuits of the tiller of the soil. Hence the roving instinct was still strong within them, and this roving instinct easily allied itself with the thirst for battle and the love of the easy gains of the freebooter. Four centuries, however, of agriculture and of neighbourhood to the great civilised stable Empire of Rome had apparently wrought some change in the Goths and in many of the other Teutonic nations. The work of agriculture was now not altogether odious in their eyes; they knew something of the joys of the husbandman as well as of the joys of the warrior; they began to feel something of that ”land-hunger” which is the pa.s.sion of a young, growing, industrious people. Still, however, the songs of the minstrels, the sagas of the bards, the fiery impulses of the young _princeps_ surrounded by his _comitatus_ pointed to war as the only occupation worthy of freemen.
Hence we can perceive a double current in the ambitions of these nations which often perplexes the historian now, as it evidently then perplexed their mighty neighbour, the Roman Augustus, and the generals and lawyers who counselled him in his consistory. Sometimes the Teutonic king is roused by some real or imagined insult; the minstrels sing their battle-songs; the fiery henchmen gather round their chief; the barbarian tide rolls over the frontier of the Empire: it seems as if it must be a duel to the death between civilisation and its implacable foes. Then suddenly
”he sinks To ashes who was very fire before”.
Food, not glory, seems to be the supreme object of the Teuton's ambition. He begs for land, for seed to sow in it, for a legal settlement within the limits of the Empire. If only these necessary things are granted to him, he promises, and not without intending to keep his promise, to be a peaceable subject, yes and a staunch defender, of the Roman Augustus. Had the Imperial statesmen truly understood this strange duality of purpose in the minds of their barbarian visitors, and had they set themselves loyally and patiently to foster the peaceful agricultural instincts of the Teuton, haply the Roman Empire might still be standing. As it was, the statesmen of the day, men of temporary s.h.i.+fts and expedients, living only as we say ”from hand to mouth”, saw, in the changing moods of the Germans, only the faithlessness of barbarism, which they met with the faithlessness of civilisation, and between the two the Empire--which no one really wished to destroy--was destroyed.
Even such a change it was which now came over the minds of the Ostrogothic people. There was dearth in Pannonia, partly, perhaps, the consequence of the frequent wars with the surrounding nations which had occurred during the twenty years of the Ostrogothic settlement. But even the cessation of those wars brought with it a loss of income to the warrior cla.s.s. As the Gothic historian expresses it: ”From the diminution of the spoils of the neighbouring nations the Goths began to lack food and clothing, and to those men to whom war had long furnished all their sustenance peace began to be odious, and all the Goths with loud shouts approached their king Theudemir praying him to lead his army whither he would, but to lead it forth to war”.
Here again it can hardly be doubted that Jordanes, writing about the fifth century, describes for us the same state of things as Tacitus writing about the first, and that this loudly shouted demand of the people for war was expressed in one of those national a.s.semblies--the ”Folc-motes” or ”Folc-things” of Anglo-Saxon and German history--which formed such a real limitation to the power of the early Teutonic kings.
”Concerning smaller matters”, says Tacitus,[31] ”the chiefs deliberate; concerning greater matters, the whole nation; but in such wise that even those things which are in the power of the commonalty are discussed in detail by the chiefs. They come together, unless any sudden and accidental emergency have arisen, on fixed days determined by the new or full moon; for these times they deem the most fortunate for the transaction of business. An ill consequence flowing from their freedom is their want of punctuality in a.s.sembling; often two or three days are spent in waiting for the loiterers. When the crowd chooses, they sit down, arrayed in their armour (and commence business). Silence is called for by the priests, who have then the power even of keeping order by force. Then the king or one of the chiefs begins to speak, and is listened to in right either of his age, or his n.o.ble birth, or his glory in the wars, or his eloquence. In any case, he rather persuades than commands; not power, but weight of character procures the a.s.sent of his hearers.”
[Footnote 31: Germania, xi.]
”If they mislike his sentiments they express their contempt for them by groans, if they approve, they clash their spears together. Applause thus expressed by arms is the greatest tribute that can be paid to a speaker”.
Before such an a.s.sembly of the nation in arms, the question, not of Peace or War? but of War with whom? was debated. It was decided that the Empire should be the victim, and that East and West alike should feel the heavy hand of the Ostrogoths. The lot was cast (so said the national legend),[32] and it a.s.signed to Theudemir the harder but, as it seemed, more profitable task of warring against Constantinople, while his younger brother Widemir was to attack Rome.
Of Widemir's movements there is little to tell. He died in Italy, not having apparently achieved any brilliant exploits, and his son and namesake was easily persuaded to turn aside into Gaul, where he joined his forces to those of the kindred Visigoths, and became absorbed in their flouris.h.i.+ng kingdom. This branch of Amal royalty henceforward bears no fruit in history.
More important, at any rate in its ultimate consequences, was the march of Theudemir and his people into the dominions of the Eastern Csar.
They crossed the Save, and by their warlike array terrified into acquiescence the Sclavonic tribes which were settled in the neighbourhood of Belgrade.
[Footnote 32: Kopke ”Anfange des Konigthums”, (p. 146) throws doubt on this story of the decision by lot, and there seems something to be said on his side.]
Having pushed up the valley of the Morava, they captured the important city of Naissus (now Nisch), ”the first city of Illyric.u.m”. Here Theudemir tarried for a s.p.a.ce, sending on his son with a large and eager _comitatus_ farther up the valley of the Morava. They reached the head of that valley, they crossed the watershed and the plain of Kossova, and descended the valley of the Vardar. Monastir in Macedonia, Larissa in Thessaly were taken and sacked; and a way having thus been made by these bold invaders into the heart of the Empire, a message was sent to Theudemir, inviting him to undertake the siege of Thessalonica. Leaving a few guards in Naissus, the old king moved southward with the bulk of his army, and was soon standing with his men before the walls of the Macedonian capital. The Patrician Hilaria.n.u.s held that city with a strong force, but when he saw it regularly invested by the Goths and an earthen rampart drawn all round it, he lost heart, and, despairing of a successful resistance, opened negotiations with the besiegers. The result of these negotiations (accompanied by handsome presents to the king) was that Theudemir abandoned the siege, resumed the often adopted, perhaps never wholly abandoned, position of a _fderatus_ or sworn auxiliary of the Empire, and received for himself and his people the unquestioned possession of six towns[33] and the surrounding country by the north-east corner of the gean, where the Vardar discharges itself into the Thermaic Gulf.
[Footnote 33: The best known of these towns are Pella, Pydna, and Bercea.]
Thus ingloriously, thus unprofitably ended the expedition into Romania, which had been proposed amid such enthusiastic applause at the great Council of the nation, and pressed with such loud acclamations and such brandis.h.i.+ng of defiant spears upon the perhaps reluctant Theudemir. The Ostrogoths in 472 were an independent people, practically supreme in Pannonia. Those broad lands on the south and west of the Danube, rich in corn and wine, the very kernel of the Austrian monarchy of to-day, were theirs in absolute possession. Any tie of nominal dependence which attached Pannonia to the Empire was so merely theoretical, now that the Hun had ruled and ravaged it for a good part of a century, that it was not worth taking into consideration; it was in fact rather an excuse for claiming _stipendia_ from the Emperor than a bond of real va.s.salage. But now in 474 this great and proud nation, crowded into a few cities of Macedonia, with obedient subjects of the Empire all round them, had practically no choice between the life of peaceful provincials on the one hand and that of freebooters on the other. If they accepted the first, they would lose year by year something of their old national character. The Teutonic speech, the Teutonic customs would gradually disappear, and in one or two generations they would be scarcely distinguishable from any of the other oppressed, patient, tax-exhausted populations of the great and weary Empire. On the other hand, if they accepted (which in fact they seem to have done) the other alternative, and became a mere horde of plunderers wandering up and down through the Empire, seeking what they might destroy, they abandoned the hope of forming a settled and stable monarchy, and, doing injustice to the high qualities and capacities for civilisation which were in them, they would sink lower into the depths of barbarism, and becoming like the Hun, like the Hun they would one day perish. Certainly, so far, the tumultuous decision of the Parliament on the sh.o.r.es of Lake Pelso was a false step in the nation's history.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
[Ill.u.s.tration]
CHAPTER V.
STORM AND STRESS.
Death of Theudemir, and accession of Theodoric--Leo the Butcher--The Emperor Zeno--The march of Theodoric against the son of Tria.n.u.s--His invasion of Macedonia--Defeat of his rear guard--His compact with the Emperor.
The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy, but there is a s.p.a.ce of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted.--(KEATS, Preface to ”Endymion”.)
The sentence thus written by the sensitive young poet, a child of London of the nineteenth century, was eminently exemplified in the history of the martial chief of the Ostrogoths. The next fourteen years in the life of Theodoric, which will be described in this chapter, were years of much useless endeavour, of marches and countermarches, of alliances formed and broken, of vain animosities and vainer reconciliations, years in which Theodoric himself seems never to understand his own purpose, whether it shall be under the shadow of the Empire or upon the ruins of the Empire, that he will build up his throne. Take the map of what is now often called ”the Balkan peninsula”, the region in which these fourteen years were pa.s.sed; look at the apparently purpose, less way in which the mountain ranges of Hmus, Rhodope, and Scardus cross, intersect, run parallel, approach, avoid one another; look at the strange entanglement of pa.s.ses and watersheds and table-lands which their systems display to us. Even such as the ranges among which he was manuvring--perplexed, purposeless, and sterile--was the early manhood of Theodoric.
About 474, soon after the great Southward migration, Theudemir died at Cyrrhus in Macedonia, one of the new settlements of the Ostrogoths. When he was attacked by his fatal sickness he called his people together and pointed to Theodoric as the heir of his royal dignity. Kings.h.i.+p at this time among the Germanic nations was not purely hereditary, the consent of the people being required even in the most ordinary and natural cases of succession, such as that of a first-born son, full grown and a tried soldier succeeding to an aged father. In such cases, however, that consent was almost invariably given. Theodoric, at any rate, succeeded without disputes to the doubtful and precarious position of king of the Ostrogoths.
Almost at the same time a change was being made by death in the wearer of the Imperial diadem. In order to ill.u.s.trate the widely different character of the Roman and the Gothic monarchies it will be well to cease for a little time to follow the fortunes of Theodoric and to sketch the history of Leo, the dying Emperor, and of Zeno, who succeeded him.