In our general survey of the fifth century in the West, we have passed but lightly over the most striking event of its earlier years, the taking of the Roman city by the Goth. Before the century was out, Rome had become used to capture and plunder. Gaiseric and Ricimer had harried her more fiercely than ever Alaric had done. As an event, as an incident, none in the whole history of the world was ever fitted to make a deeper impression on men’s minds than the first Teutonic capture of Rome. For the purposes of the preacher and the moralist it was all that the preachers and moralists of the time painted it. But on the actual course of events it had little effect. And why? Because the world had so largely become Rome that the momentary woes of the city which had once alone been Rome were of comparatively little moment. The invasion of Italy by Alaric led indirectly to those invasions of Gaul and Spain which laid the foundations of the modern world; but his actual sack of Rome had no effect on the busy series of revolutions which followed on those invasions. So it was with that other event of the later half of the century in which so many have so strangely seen the end of the Roman Empire, the boundary line between ancient and modern history. It was doubtless an impressive fact, we see in the annals of the time that it was an impressive fact, when Emperors ceased to reign either at Rome or at Ravenna. But as the news that the Roman Empire had come to an end would have sounded very strange at Constantinople, so it would have sounded no less strange at Soissons or at Salona. It did not greatly touch the Roman realm of Syagrius in northern Gaul that Italy had acknowledged Zeno as sole Emperor, and that he was represented in the Italian diocese by the patrician Odowakar. That those decent formalities veiled a revolution by which the reigning Emperor had been set aside by a chief of barbarian mercenaries was nothing new or wonderful. The only difference between the revolution of 476 and a crowd of earlier revolutions was that Odowakar found that it suited his purpose to acknowledge the nominal superiority of an absent sovereign rather than to reign in the name of a present puppet of his own creation. Presently it was found convenient at Constantinople to brand the patrician as a tyrant, and to grant a new commission to another Teutonic leader to displace him and to rule in his stead. The personal greatness of Theodoric overshadowed Emperor and Empire; from his palace at Ravenna, by one title or another, by direct dominion, as guardian, as elder kinsman, as representative of the Roman power, as head by natural selection of the whole Teutonic world, he ruled over all the western lands save one; and even to the conquering Frank he could say, Thus far shalt thou come and no further. In true majesty such a position was more than Imperial; moreover there was nothing in the rule of Theodoric which touched the Roman life of Italy. What might have happened if the East-Gothic power in Italy had been as lasting as the Frankish power in Gaul, or even as the West-Gothic power in Spain, it is vain to guess. As far as we can see, it was the very greatness of Theodoric which kept his power from being lasting. Like so many other of the very greatest of men, he set on foot a system which he himself could work, but which none but himself could work. He sought to set up a kingdom of Goths and Romans, under which the two nations should live side by side, distinct but friendly, each keeping its own law and doing its own work. And for one life-time the thing was done. Theodoric could keep the whole fabric of Roman life untouched, with the Goth standing by as an armed protector. He could, as he said, leave to the Roman consul the honours of government and take for the Gothic king only the toils. Smaller men neither could nor would do this, and even a succession of Theodorics could hardly have kept on for generations the peculiar relations between Goths and Romans which he established. His rule was the best, as that of the Franks was about the worst, to be found in Roman and Teutonic Europe in his day. Still fusion between Roman and Teuton was the very essence of Frankish rule; under the system of Theodoric no direct step towards fusion could be taken. It was the necessary result of his position that he gave Italy one generation of peace and prosperity such as has no fellow for ages on either side of it, but that, when he was gone, a fabric which had no foundation but his personal qualities broke down with a crash. Then came the two events of the sixth century at which we have already glanced. Italy was wasted by a long and bloody war, which in the end swept the East-Gothic people from the earth, and for a moment left the Roman Augustus undisputed master of every corner of the Italian peninsula. Then, before the land had rested from the long struggle, came another Teutonic invasion, the invasion of a people far less touched by Roman teaching than the Goths had been. The Lombards, establishing their rule and their name in the two ends of Italy, never won the whole of Italy. They never reigned in Rome; it was only in the last days of their power that they reigned in Ravenna. Throughout the land, if there was a bit of Lombardy here, there was a bit of untouched Romania there, and if the Roman Terminus often fell back, he also sometimes went forward. Even after the Lombard had yielded to the Frank, after the Frank had taken on himself the titles and mission of the Roman, a large part of Southern Italy, the once Greek land, with the old Greek life which had never wholly died out kept up and strengthened, acknowledged the lordship, not of the German-speaking Augustus of the Old Rome, but of the Greek-speaking Augustus of the New.
Of the Empire itself, its unions, its divisions, the general position which it kept in the world, I shall speak in another lecture. My present subject is the influence of Rome on the new nations which in the course of the fifth century found themselves homes within her borders. And that practically means her influence on the Teutonic nations of the Western European mainland. It is true that the greatest Teutonic migration of all, the long marches of the Goths, Eastern and Western, began in the East. While Vandals, Burgundians, Franks, came in by way of Rhine, the Goths came in by way of Danube. Their course in the Danubian lands forms one of the most striking pieces of the history of the fourth century and one of the most confused pieces of the history of the fifth. But that history of the Goths which really affected the world, the history both of the West-Goths of Alaric and of the East-Goths of Theodoric, was wrought in the West. The Western Goths, as their name implies, came before the Eastern and found homes further to the West. And after the withdrawal of Theodoric and the East-Goths from the Eastern provinces, those provinces which still remained under the immediate rule of the Emperors at the New Rome, all part of the first Teutonic invaders in the history of the Eastern peninsula may be said to come to an end. In that peninsula they had been hardly more than invaders; they had formed no important abiding settlement. For them the Eastern lands were mainly a road to Italy and Spain and Gaul. The part which the Teutons played in the West was to be played in the East, so far as it was to be played at all, by quite another branch of the Aryan stock.
I have often had to point out the analogy between the position of the Teutonic settlers in the West and that of the Slavonic settlers in the East. The East, mainly the South-East, of Europe is the true field for Slavonic growth. Of the Slaves of the North-West we have already spoken a word or two, as coming within the range of the dominion and the creed of the Western Rome. The North-Western Slaves have been largely exterminated or assimilated by Teutonic conquerors; even those who escaped this lot have passed, by their union with the Latin Church, into the general group of the nations of Western Europe. The historic calling of the Slavonic nations lies in the East, within the range of the Eastern Empire and the Eastern Church. There we may make our comparison between their position towards that side of the Roman world and the position of the Teutons towards its Western side. The analogy between the two is real and strong; but it is an analogy which presents almost as many points of contrast as of likeness. In the phrase that I have so often had to use, the Slaves were to the Eastern lands of Rome, as the Teutons were to the Western, at once conquerors and disciples. But they were neither conquerors nor disciples in exactly the same sense. The difference largely turned on the different positions of the Old and the New Rome. In the West, the more deeply Roman influences took root, the less did the city of Rome show itself as a seat of actual rule, till the days came when it became the seat of an œcumenical rule of another kind. From the third century to the nineteenth, Rome never was the abiding dwelling-place of Emperors; wherever they dwelled, they were, as far as the local Rome was concerned, non-resident. The influence of Rome, the use of the Roman language, had nothing to do with any political boundary; it was only here and there, in the Exarchate and in the Imperial possessions in Spain, that there was any distinct geographical frontier between Roman and Teutonic rule. The possession of the Roman city did not necessarily carry with it any special dominion in other Roman lands, and a great dominion in other Roman lands might be won without its possession. With the Eastern Rome it was far otherwise; there the city was the life and soul and centre of all. The too discerning eye of its founder had planted his New Rome at the junction of two worlds, to prolong the being of successive powers which, save for its possession, might sooner have passed away. Constantinople was never without an Emperor dwelling within its walls, and holding a greater or less extent of territory in fact as well as in name. His boundaries might fluctuate; the position of this or that land might fluctuate. In the process of constant warfare along a long and ill-defined boundary, this or that land or city might sometimes be under the undisputed authority of the Emperor; it might sometimes be absolutely cut off from the Empire and form part of a barbarian kingdom; it might sometimes be in the intermediate state of a dependency over which the Emperor held an outward superiority which he could enforce or not according to circumstances. All this has its like in the West; but there is nothing in the West like the firm abiding of the Imperial power at Constantinople. Whatever was the extent or the nature of the dominion of the Eastern Emperor, the Eastern Rome was its local centre, the spot to which every corner of that dominion looked as its head. No Slavonic host harried the Eastern Rome as so many Teutonic hosts harried the Western. No king of a Slavonic people received an Imperial crown in Saint Sophia, as so many kings of a Teutonic people received an Imperial crown in Saint Peter’s. The utmost that such a king could do was to set up a Tzarigrad of his own, to wear a crown which he loved to call Imperial at Ochrida or at Skoupi. The Slave became in many things a disciple of the Eastern Rome, but in some things he was perhaps an imitator rather than a disciple. He always remained an outsider, in a way in which the Teuton did not remain in the West. In religious worship, above all, he never adopted either of the tongues of the Empire; he could become a disciple without becoming a subject. No new speech, no new nationality, arose in the East out of a mixture of Slavonic and Roman or Greek elements, answering to the formation of the Romance tongues and nations of the West. One cause, as we shall hereafter see, was that the Eastern Rome spoke with two tongues, while the Western Rome spoke with one only. There is a Romance nation in the East, but the Slave was not one of its component elements; the Slavonic invasion in short did not a little to hinder its growth. On many of these points I may have to speak again. The main business of the present lecture lies in the West, in the Western lands of the European mainland. Yet we must not forget that the birth of our own nation, the settlement of our forefathers in our second home, came within the bounds of the same century which saw Burgundian, Gothic, and Frankish kingdoms arise in Gaul. But we, in our island home, our alter orbis, stood largely aloof from the revolutions of the mainland. Our own tale must be told separately, and it cannot be told in all its fulness till the revolutions of the mainland are fully understood. To-day we have had to deal with the settlements of our kinsfolk in the continental provinces of the West. At the East we have simply glanced. We shall have to speak of it more fully when we come to speak of the causes which split East and West apart for ever.
LECTURE IV.
THE DIVIDED EMPIRE.
The most renowned of my predecessors in this chair, in planning that History of Rome which unhappily remained a fragment, but which gave to the world in its last finished volume the very perfection of historical narrative, designed to carry on his work to the coronation of Charles the Great. The reading and thought of forty years have ever more and more convinced me of the wisdom of Arnold’s choice. The year 800 was not, any more than the year 476, the end of the Roman Empire; it is not, any more than the year 476, a boundary between “Ancient” and “Modern” History. But it is one of the most marked turning-points in the history of the Empire and of the world, a turning-point of immeasureably greater moment than the consulship of Basiliscus and Armatus. The election of the first Charles changed the face of the world far more than the deposition of the last Romulus. Of a History of Rome such as Arnold planned, it was, as the wise instinct of Arnold saw, the fitting ending. The election of Charles did, in outward show, restore the Old Rome to her old position. She again became, if not the dwelling-place, at least the crowning-place, of Emperors. In truth the Old Rome had never before beheld the ancient Hebrew rite which, from the fifth century onwards, had become familiar in the New. For a thousand years longer the titles of her Empire went on; for seven hundred years longer they could be won only before the altar of the Vatican basilica. For full five hundred years longer the Roman Empire of the West was, as such, a living thing, a thing that influenced the minds and acts of men, a mighty fact, a still mightier theory. But in the West the Emperor of the Romans had less and less to do with the Old Rome. To his Imperial capital he gradually became a stranger, and his capital became a city of strangers to him. In short, the Roman power in the West altogether passed away, not only from the Roman city, but from the artificial Roman nation. When Rome again asserted her right to choose her sovereign, she chose, she could not fail to choose, a man who was not Roman even by adoption. She chose the Frankish king. Pippin had been Patrician; so had Ricimer; so had Odowakar. But the son of Pippin bore a loftier style. The long-abiding tradition was broken through; a barbarian received the diadem; the Roman Pontiff spoke the words, and the Roman people echoed them—“Karolo Augusto, a Deo coronato, magno et pacifico Romanorum Imperatori, vita et victoria.” The German was at last Augustus. No greater witness could there be to the moral conquest which each race had won over the other. The Empire now in form received its greatest territorial enlargement. Gaul was won back and Germany was added. Wherever the Frankish king had before ruled as king, he now ruled as Emperor. Terminus advanced to the Elbe and the Eider; he was ready to advance to the Oder and the Vistula, or, if need should be, to the world’s end. All unreal, all nominal, some objector will cry; an advance, not of Rome, but of Germany, an advance, not of the Roman Augustus, but of the Frankish king. And truly the Empire of Charles, much more the Empire of the Henries and Fredericks, was unreal in this, that it was assuredly a very different thing from the Empire of Trajan or of Diocletian. It was assuredly not Roman in the sense in which the Empire even of Theodosius was Roman. But here lies the greatest proof of the influence of Rome, of her magic power over the minds of men, that a power which had practically ceased to be Roman, should still be Roman in men’s eyes, and, as Roman, should command a reverence, a devotion, a bowing down as it were of the whole soul, which could be called forth by no other name. A name may have lost its first meaning; but, as long as men will fight and die for the name, the name is a fact indeed.
The act of 800, it must always be borne in mind, was in one sense the repetition, in another sense the undoing, of the act of 476; but it was in no case the revival of the line of Emperors which came to an end in 476. Charles, Emperor of the Romans, was not the successor after a long interval either of Romulus Augustulus or of Julius Nepos; he was the immediate successor of Constantine the Sixth. The Emperors had lost all practical authority in Rome earlier in the century; their power had passed to the Frank. Charles Augustus received no powers which he had not already exercised as Patrician; only hitherto the titles of sovereignty had been left to the Emperor beyond the sea. The name now went with the reality; the titles and badges of Empire were transferred to the new Emperor reigning at Rome, at least crowned and anointed at Rome. There was no need to depose any reigning sovereign. Rome had acknowledged Constantine; she refused to acknowledge Eirênê; the Empire could not be held by a woman, least of all by a woman who had deposed and blinded her own son. There was again an interregnum, such as had followed the death of Romulus and the death of Aurelian; that interregnum was ended by the election of Charles. In Western theory no doubt, Charles himself, and each of his successors, was elected to the sovereignty of the whole Empire; he was to reign, if he could, over the New Rome as well as over the Old. In Eastern theory no doubt the election and coronation were null and void; the Emperor anointed in Saint Sophia had a right which none could take away to reign over the Old Rome as well as over the New. Each Emperor in short asserted himself to be the one true Emperor and the other to be an impostor or a tyrant. The dispute was for some centuries stirred up afresh from time to time at some moment favourable for its discussion. To men zealous for Eastern rights the Western claimant was a mere Ἀλαμανῶν ῥήξ; to men zealous for Western rights the Eastern claimant was nothing loftier than “Rex Græciæ.” The most curious piece of discussion on the subject is the memorable controversy, waged by or invented for Basil of the East and Lewis of the West, while the grounds of the dispute were still fresh. It was a moment of pride for Charles the Great himself when Nikêphoros waived his claim to universal rule, when he admitted the Frankish king as his equal and bade his ambassadors adore him as Imperator and βασιλεύς. A conflict of claims like this, in which each of the two greatest princes of Christendom gave himself out to be the one head of Christendom, might have been expected to lead to something more than constant disputes and jealousies; it might have been expected to lead to constant wars. As a matter of fact, formal wars between the two Empires were not common; there was little to gain by them on either side. But rivalry and ill-feeling went on between the princes of the West and of the East, between the men of the West and of the East, to the great damage of Christendom in more than one hour of need.
The truest view of the event of 800 is that the existing Empire was split asunder, and that the western fragment, that which acknowledged the Frankish king as its Emperor, was in form enlarged by the addition of the territories of the Frankish king. The Empire was now really split asunder; it was split asunder between two rivals, each of whom held himself to be the one lawful representative of their common predecessors. This state of things must not be confounded with the state of things in the fifth century. The Empire was now divided in quite another way from that in which it had been divided between the sons of Theodosius. The division between the sons of Theodosius did not differ in form from the division between the sons of Constantine or the earlier division between Diocletian and Maximian. The division between Arcadius and Honorius, and the Emperors who followed them in the fifth century, was a division by consent; the administration of a single Empire was divided, as it had often been before, between two Imperial colleagues. But now it was divided between two rival potentates, each of whom was in theory bound to deny the rights of the other. Then the West was often willing to accept the prince named by the Emperor who reigned over the East; now assuredly no prince named by the lord of Constantinople, the “rex Græciæ,” would have been admitted to royal and imperial unction at Aachen, at Milan, and at Rome. But mark further that the Western division, the Western Empire, was not only parted from the Eastern, but was enlarged by the addition of new territories, over a great part of which no Emperor had ever reigned before. If Charles had kept his Frankish and Lombard kingdoms distinct from his Roman Empire, the last would have consisted only of Rome and Ravenna and the lands about those cities. No one so well deserved the somewhat grotesque title of his later successors, “zu allen Zeiten Mehrer des Reichs,” as the first Emperor who could have understood his own description in any Teutonic tongue. Charles, as I said earlier in these lectures, annexed the lands which Drusus and Germanicus had failed to annex. But to what did he annex them? Assuredly to something very different from the Empire of the first Augustus, to something very different from that western half of the Empire of Augustus which had been reigned over by Maximian and Valentinian. And the effect of the annexation was widely different from what it would have been if it had been made either by Drusus or by Valentinian. The main difference lies in this, that whatever was annexed to the Empire at either of the earlier times was forthwith added to the artificial Roman nation that was growing up, while the inclusion of the whole dominions of Charles within the Empire, though it still carried with it an extension of Roman influences, in no way carried with it any extension of an artificial Roman nation. The new subjects of the Roman Empire, the inhabitants of Gaul and Germany, assuredly did not feel that they had become Romans. The election of Charles to the Empire, the annexation of all his dominions to the Empire, did far more to make the Empire German than it did to make Germany Roman. The Roman style of the Empire is still very much more than a name; its Roman traditions are still very much more than mere words; it is still by its abiding Roman character that it keeps its influence over the minds of men. But it is now altogether divorced from any practical connexion with the Roman city and with the Roman nation. It was nothing new that Emperors should be made elsewhere than in Rome; that discovery was made before the first century of the Empire ended. But the Emperors so made were Romans, Roman in speech, Roman at one stage by real citizenship, at another by artificial nationality. It was something new that Rome should be the crowning-place, and only the crowning-place, of Emperors who were Roman in no sense but that of being Roman Emperors. The Emperor was Romanorum Imperator to the last; but who were the Romani? Were they the inhabitants of the Empire as a body? The mass of them would assuredly have disclaimed the Roman name. Or had the name fallen back on its elder and narrower senses in which it meant only the people of the Roman city? But in Rome itself the authority of the Roman Emperor passed away more thoroughly and more formally than elsewhere. The Imperator and the Pontifex Maximus had long ceased to be the same, and in Rome the Pontifex Maximus of the new faith had become the true local sovereign. For ages the Imperator came to Rome only to become Imperator, and then to go away. At last, when the succession begun by Charles was drawing near its thousandth year, an Imperator electus came to Rome, and went away without winning the right to cast aside his qualifying adjective.
The truest description of the Western Empire during the thousand years from the first Charles to the last Francis is that which sounds so like a contradiction, “the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.” It remained by the strictest continuity a Roman Empire; once accept the position of the Western Emperors as against the Eastern, and no flaw can be found in the whole succession. But the Roman Empire had become a possession of the German nation; German electors chose a German king, and the German king had a right to receive his consecration as Roman Emperor without any further questions being asked.