THE BARBARIAN INVADERS
[476-814 A.D.]
It was into this Italy, such as despotism had made it, that the barbarians penetrated. Eager for the booty which it contained and could not defend, they repeatedly ravaged it during the last two centuries of the Western Empire. The mercenary troops that Rome had levied amongst them for its defence, preferring pillage to pay, frequently turned their arms against those they were engaged to defend. They vied with the Romans in making and unmaking emperors; and generally chose them from their own ranks, in order to secure to the soldier a greater share of the property of the citizen. The booty diminished as the avidity of these foreigners increased. The pomp of the Western Empire soon appeared, to an army thus formed, a useless expense. Odoacer, of the nation of the Heruli, chief of the mercenaries who then served in Italy, suppressed it by deposing, in 476, the last emperor. He took upon himself the title of king, and distributed among his soldiers one-third of the land in the most fertile provinces; he governed during seventeen years this still glorious country, as a rich farm which the barbarians had a right to cultivate for their sole use.
The mercenaries united under the sceptre of Odoacer were not sufficiently strong to defend Italy against a new invasion of barbarians. The Ostrogoths, encouraged by the Grecian sovereign of new Rome, the emperor of the East, arrived in 489, under the command of Theodoric, from the countries north of the Euxine to the borders of Italy; they completed the conquest of it in four, and retained possession of the peninsula sixty-four years, under eight successive kings. These new barbarians, in their turn, demanded and obtained a portion of land and slaves; they multiplied, it is true, but became rapidly enervated in a delicious climate where they had suddenly passed from the severest privations to the enjoyment of every luxury. They were at last conquered and subdued in the year 553 by the Romans of Constantinople, whom they despised as the degenerate successors of the same nation which their ancestors had vanquished.
The invasion of the Lombards in 568 soon followed the destruction of the monarchy of the Ostrogoths. Amongst the various hordes which issued from the north of Germany upon the southern regions, the Lombards were reputed the most courageous, the most cruel, and the proudest of their independence; but their number was inconsiderable, and they scarcely acknowledged any social tie sufficient to keep them united: accordingly, they never completed the conquest of Italy. From 568 to 774, twenty-one Lombard kings during 206 years succeeded each other without establishing their dominion either on the lagunes, at the extremity of the Adriatic Gulf, where such of the inhabitants of upper Italy as were personally the most exposed had taken refuge and founded the Venetian Republic; or on the shores of the Adriatic, now called Romagna, governed by a lieutenant of the emperor of Constantinople, under the title of exarch of the five cities of Pentapolis; or on Rome, defended only by the spiritual arms of the patriarch of the Western church; or on the southern coast, where the Greek municipalities of Naples, Gaeta, and Amalfi governed themselves almost as independent republics. The Lombards, nevertheless, founded a kingdom in northern Italy, of which Pavia was the capital; and in southern Italy the duchy of Benevento, which still maintained its independence two centuries after the kingdom was subjugated.
From the middle of the eighth century the Lombards, masters of a country where the great towns still contained much wealth, where the land had lost nothing of its fertility, where the example of the vanquished had taught the vanquishers the advantage of reviving some agricultural industry, excited the envy of their neighbours the Franks, who had conquered and oppressed the Gauls, who despised all occupation but war, and desired no wealth but what the sword could give. They by repeated invasions devastated Italy; and at length, in 774, completed the destruction of the Lombard monarchy.
For more than twenty years the popes or bishops of Rome had been in the habit of opposing the kings of France to the monarchs of Lombardy, who were odious to them, at first as pagans, and afterwards as heretics. Chief of the clergy of the ancient capital, where the power of the emperors of Constantinople had been nominally established but never felt, they confounded their pretensions with those of the empire; and the Lombards having recently conquered the exarchate of Ravenna, and the Pentapolis, they demanded that these provinces should be restored to Rome. The Frankish kings made themselves the champions of this quarrel, which gave them an opportunity of conquering the Lombard monarchy; but Charles, the king who accomplished this conquest, and who was the greatest man that barbarism ever produced, in treating with Rome, in subjugating Italy, comprehended all the beauty of a civilisation which his predecessors had seen only to destroy; he conceived the lofty idea of profiting by the barbarian force at his disposal to put himself at the head of the civilisation which he laboured to restore. Instead of considering himself as the king of the conquerors, occupied only in enriching a barbarous army with the spoils of the vanquished, he made it his duty and his glory to govern the country for its best interests, and for the common good. He did more: in concert with Pope Leo III, he re-established the monarchy of the conquered as a western Roman empire, which he considered the representative of right, in opposition to barbaric force; he received from the same pope, and from the Roman people, on Christmas Day in the year 800, the title of Roman emperor, and the name of Charlemagne, or Charles the Great, which no one before had ever so well deserved.