With all these three monarchs the king of the Ostrogoths had many dealings. At the very beginning of his reign he asked for the hand of Augofleda, the sister of Chlodovech, and hoped that by this alliance he had bound the clever and unscrupulous Frank to himself. By Augofleda he became the father of Amalaswintha, the only child born to him in lawful wedlock, though he had two elder daughters by a concubine ere he came to Italy. |Marriages of Theodoric’s family.| Soon after his own marriage with the Frankish princess, Theodoric wedded one of these natural children to Sigismund, the son and heir of the Burgundian Gundobad, and the other to Alaric the Visigoth. Thus all his neighbours became his relatives.
But this did not secure peace between the new kinsmen of Theodoric. In 499 Chlodovech fell on Gundobad, to strip him of his realm, routed him, and shut him up in Avignon, the southernmost of his strongholds; but after many successes the Frank lost all that he had gained, and turned instead to attack the king of the Visigoths. Theodoric strove unsuccessfully to prevent both wars, and was not a little displeased when, in 507, his brother-in-law Chlodovech overran southern Gaul, and slew his son-in-law Alaric in battle. Burgundian and Frank then united to destroy the Visigoths, and might have done so had not Theodoric intervened. The heir of the Visigothic throne was now Amalric, the son of Alaric and of the king of Italy’s daughter. To defend his grandson’s realm Theodoric declared war both on Chlodovech and on Gundobad, and sent his armies over the Alps to save the remnants of the Visigothic possessions in Gaul. One host crossed the Cottian Alps, and fell on Burgundy; another entered Provence, and smote the Frank and Burgundian besiegers of Arles. With his usual good fortune, Theodoric recovered all Gaul south of the Durance and the Cevennes (509), so that the conquests of Chlodovech were confined to Aquitaine. The way was now clear for the Ostrogothic armies to march into Spain, to support the claims of the child Amalric against Gesalic, a bastard son of Alaric II., who had been proclaimed king of the Visigoths at Barcelona. After two years of guerilla fighting, the pretender was hunted down and slain, though he had sought and obtained some help from the Vandal king Thrasamund (511).
For the next fourteen years, till Amalric reached manhood, Theodoric ruled Spain in his grandson’s behalf. |Theodoric king of the Visigoths.| He was recognised as king of the Visigoths, in common with Amalric, and ruled both halves of the Gothic race—reunited after an interval of two hundred years—with equal authority, and his royal mandates ran in Spain as well as in Italy. His delegate was Count Theudis, an Ostrogothic noble, who was made regent, and ruled at Narbonne over all the Visigothic realm west of the Rhone; while the Roman Liberius, named praetorian praefect of Gaul, administered Visigothic Provence from the ancient city of Arles.
Theodoric’s power was now supreme from Sirmium to Cadiz, and from the upper Danube to Sicily. He ruled the larger half of the old Roman Empire of the West, and exercised much influence in Gaul and Africa, the two parts of it that were not absolutely in his hands. After the war of 507-10 Clodovech the Frank had died, and his four sons, who parted his realm, made peace with the Ostrogoth; while Gundobad, the Burgundian king, had been fain to follow their example even earlier.
Twelve years of peace followed (511-523) before Theodoric, now in extreme old age, had occasion to interfere in Gaul. Sigismund, the husband of Theodoric’s elder natural daughter, was now king of the Burgundians. He was a gloomy and suspicious tyrant, and drew down the wrath of Theodoric by murdering his own heir, Sigeric, who was the Gothic king’s eldest grandson. To punish this crime Theodoric leagued himself with the Franks, and attacked Burgundy. He conquered, and took as his share of the spoil the lands between Durance and Drôme, with the cities of Avignon, Orange, and Viviers, the farthest extension to the north-west of the Ostrogothic empire.
The circle of family alliances which Theodoric had made with his European neighbours was extended even beyond the Mediterranean. He married his sister, Amalafrida, a widowed princess, no longer in her first youth, to Thrasamund, the old king of the Vandals. In virtue of this connection he seems to have treated Thrasamund as a younger brother, if not as a vassal. When the Vandal dared to help the usurper Gesalic in Spain, Theodoric imposed a tribute on him, and bade him for the future do nothing without the counsel of his wife Amalafrida. Thrasamund did not resent this treatment, and for the future did all he could to propitiate his brother-in-law.
The Vandal state, indeed, was not in a condition to risk a quarrel with Theodoric. Ever since the death of Hunneric it had been steadily on the decline. In the reigns of Gunthamund (484-496) and Thrasamund himself (496-523) it was continually losing ground to the insurgent Moors of Atlas. Gunthamund, who was not a persecutor like his predecessor Hunneric, had endeavoured to win the favour of the Catholics by allowing them to recall their exiled bishops and open their churches. But these boons did not check the falling away of his subjects, and during his reign the Moors conquered from him the whole sea-coast from Tangiers to the gates of Caesarea. |Vandal Persecutions in Africa.| His brother Thrasamund tried the opposite policy, resumed the persecutions, deported two hundred Catholic bishops to Sardinia, and renewed the horrors of the days of Hunneric. Naturally, he was no more fortunate in dealing with the native rebels than his brother had been. A quarrel with Theodoric would have meant ruin, so he kept himself from all foreign war. He died in 523 at a great age, killed, it is said, by the news of a great defeat which his armies had suffered at the hands of the Moors. His successor was his cousin Hilderic, the son of Hunneric and the Roman princess Eudocia, the last scion of the house of Theodosius the Great. Educated by a Catholic mother, Hilderic was himself the first orthodox Vandal king, and ended the long African persecutions. But his reign was not happier than those of his two cousins. His enthusiastic championship of the Catholic cause brought him into collision with the bulk of his Vandal subjects, and he was attacked by a rebellious party, headed by Theodoric’s sister, the queen-dowager Amalafrida, who wished to proclaim as king of Africa one of her late husband’s nephews. Hilderic had the better of the fighting, defeated the rebels, and captured Amalafrida, whom he consigned to a dungeon, to the great wrath of her brother, the king of the Goths (523). As long as Theodoric lived he merely kept her in close confinement, but the moment he heard of the old man’s death, in 526, he had the cruelty to slay the aged queen, a deed which alienated for ever the Vandals and the Ostrogoths.
The captivity of his sister was not the only sorrow which clouded the last few years of Theodoric’s long life. He was left in some trouble as to the succession to his crown. He had married his only legitimate child, Amalaswintha, to a Visigothic prince named Eutharic, of whose prudence and valour much was expected. Theodoric intended him to reign with his daughter as colleague and king-consort, but in 522 Eutharic died, leaving as his heir a boy of only five years of age. Theodoric could not but see that on his death the accession of a woman and a child to the throne would be fraught with the gravest danger, more especially as his nephew Theodahat, the nearest male heir of the Amal house, was known to be an unscrupulous intriguer.
It was perhaps owing to a temper embittered by these family troubles that Theodoric was led, during the last few years of his life, into an unhappy quarrel with some of the best of his Italian subjects. Rightly or wrongly, he had imbibed a notion that the Italians would take advantage of his death to stir up the emperor at Constantinople against his infant heir. The idea was very justifiable; for, in spite of all Theodoric’s wisdom and goodness, most of his Roman subjects never learnt to look kindly upon a ruler who was at once an Arian and a Goth, and it seems that some, at least, of the Senate were secretly corresponding with the emperor Justin. That monarch, the first Eastern Emperor for fifty years who was undisputedly orthodox, had fired the enthusiasm of Catholics all over the world by his attempts to suppress Arianism, and the faithful in Italy were undoubtedly contrasting his action with the strict impartiality of Theodoric, to the latter’s disadvantage. |The Misfortunes of Boethius.| In 524 the patrician Albinus was accused by Cyprian, the magister officiorum, of sending disloyal letters to Constantinople. At his trial he was defended by the Consular Boethius, at once a great official and the best-known author of the day, noted as philosopher, theologian, astronomer, and mechanist—in short, the chief representative of the intellect of Italy. Boethius resented the impeachment of Albinus in the most fiery terms. ‘If this man is guilty,’ he cried, ‘then both I and all the Senate are guilty too.’ The accuser, Cyprian, proceeded to take him at his word, and brought forward further evidence to prove that Boethius himself had been one of the senators in correspondence with Justin, or had, at least, done his best to suppress evidence against those who actually were so engaged.[[3]] Such an accusation, even if not fully proved, seems to have fired the anger of the old king. He could not tolerate disloyalty in a man whom he had always distinguished by his favour, and preferred to the highest offices. By his orders Boethius was put on his trial before the Senate, and there condemned. For a year Theodoric kept him in prison—a year invaluable to future ages, for in it the captive composed his Consolation of Philosophy, a work which was to be the comfort of many a noble but unhappy soul in the Middle Ages, and to find countless readers from King Alfred down to Sir Thomas More. At the end of a year’s confinement Boethius was tortured and put to death. Possibly he was altogether innocent of the charge laid to his account, that of secret correspondence with Constantinople; but more probably he had actually written harmless letters into which a treasonable purpose was read by the malice of his accusers and the fears of the king.
[3]. This would seem to have been the charge which Boethius himself expressed by saying that he was accused of ‘having endeavoured to preserve the senators.’