| PAGE | ||
|---|---|---|
| CHAPTER I | ||
| The Empire and the Barbarians | [3] | |
| CHAPTER II | ||
| The Huns and Attila | [21] | |
| CHAPTER III | ||
| Attila and the Eastern Empire | [37] | |
| CHAPTER IV | ||
| The Imperial Embassy at the Court of Attila | [61] | |
| CHAPTER V | ||
| The Attack upon the West | [77] | |
| CHAPTER VI | ||
| Attila’s Advance from the Rhine to Orleans | [93] | |
| CHAPTER VII | ||
| The Retreat of Attila and the Battle ofthe Catalaunian Plains | [111] | |
| CHAPTER VIII | ||
| Attila’s Attack upon and Retreat fromItaly | [127] | |
| CHAPTER IX | ||
| Attila’s Home-coming | [145] | |
| MAIN SOURCES | ||
| I. | Ammiani Marcellini Rerum Gestarum,Liber XXXI | [153] |
| II. | Ex Historia Byzantina Prisci Rhetoriset Sophistae | [159] |
| Ex Historia Gothica Prisci Rhetoris etSophistae | [170] | |
| III. | Jornandes: De Rebus Geticis | [207] |
| IV. | Ex Vita MS. Sancti Aniani EpiscopiAurelianensis | [225] |
I
THE EMPIRE AND THE BARBARIANS
At the opening of the fifth century of our era the Roman Empire had long been not only the civilised world but Christendom. The four centuries which had passed since the birth of Our Lord had seen in fact the foundation of Europe, not as we know it to-day a mosaic of hostile nationalities, but as one perfect whole in which all that is worth having in the world lay like a treasure. There were born and founded that they might always endure, the culture, the civilisation and the Faith which we enjoy and by which we live. There were established for ever the great lines upon which our art was to develop, to change and yet not to die. There was erected the supremacy of the idea that it might always renew our lives, our culture, and our polity, that we might always judge everything by it and fear neither revolution, nor defeat nor decay. There we Europeans were established in the secure possession of our own souls; so that we alone in the world develop from within to change but never to die, and to be, alone in the world, Christians.
The outward and visible sign of the Empire, which above everything else distinguished it from the world which surrounded it, as an island is surrounded by an unmapped sea, was the Pax Romana. This was domestic as well as political. It ensured a complete and absolute order, the condition of civilisation, and, established through many generations, it seemed immutable and unbreakable. Along with it went a conception of law and of property more fundamental than anything we are now able to appreciate, while free exchange was assured by a complete system of communication and admirable roads. There is indeed scarcely anything that is really fundamental in our lives and in our politics that was not there created. It was there our religion, the soul of Europe, was born and little by little became the energy and the cause of all that undying but changeful principle of life and freedom which rightly understood is Europe. Our ideas of justice, our ideas of law, our conception of human dignity and the structure of our society were there conceived, and with such force that while we endure they can never die. In truth, the Empire which it had taken more than a millennium to build was the most successful and perhaps the most beneficent experiment in universal government that has ever been made.
The Empire fell. Why?
We cannot answer that question. The causes of such a catastrophe, spiritual and material, are for the most part hidden from us in the darkness that followed the catastrophe, in which civilisation in the West all but perished. All we can do is to note that the administration of this great State became so expensive that when Alaric came over the Alps in 401 it was probably already bankrupt and in consequence the population was declining; and that the military problem before the Empire, the defence of its frontiers against the outer welter of barbarism, was so expensive and so naturally insecure that it was difficult to ensure and impossible with due economy. Finally we ought to be sure that though the Empire decayed and fell, it was not overthrown by the Barbarians. As in this book we are concerned not indeed with the Barbarian invasions as a whole but nevertheless with the most frightful and perhaps the most destructive among them, we shall do well to consider more particularly here for a moment one of the causes of that fall, though not the chief one as we have said; the insecurity of the frontiers, namely, and the problem this proposed which the Empire was, alas, unable to solve.
The Empire was confined on the west by the ocean, on the south by the desert of Africa, on the east by the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf, on the north by the Rhine and the Danube, the Black Sea and the Caucasus.
It was that northern frontier which was a fundamental weakness and which at least from the middle of the third century continually occupied the mind of the Roman administration. How to hold it?
Beyond that frontier lay a world largely unknown, a mere wilderness of barbarians, tribes
always restless, always at war, always pressing upon the confines of civilisation. Within lay all that is worth having in our lives, the hope of the world. It was this which, then as now, had to be defended and against the same enemy—barbarism. For barbarism does not become less barbarous when it becomes learned, a savage is a savage even in professorial dress. For this cause it is written: change your hearts and not your garments.
The defence, then, of the frontier had been the chief problem of the Empire perhaps from its foundation by Augustus and certainly for two hundred years before Alaric crossed the Alps. Its solution was attempted in various ways, before, in the year 292, Diocletian attempted to deal with it by the revolutionary scheme of dividing the Empire. But the division he made was, and perhaps unavoidably, rather racial than strategic, the two parts of the Empire met at a critical point on the Danube and by force of geography the eastern part was inclined to an Asiatic outlook and to the neglect of the Danube, while the western was by no means strong enough to hold the tremendous line of the two rivers. Nevertheless the West made an heroic attempt to fulfil its too onerous duty. The capital of the vicariate of Italy was removed from Rome to Milan. This tremendous act was purely strategical. It was thought, and rightly, that the frontier would be more readily secured from Milan, which held, as it were, all the passes of the Alps in its hands, than from Rome in the midst of the long peninsula of Italy. It was a change more amazing than the removal of the capital of the British Empire from London to Edinburgh would be; but it was not enough. In 330, seventeen years after Christianity had become the official religion of the Empire, Constantine the Great for the same reasons of defence removed the seat of the Empire to Byzantium, the new Rome on the Bosphorus, which he renamed Constantinople.