The Story of Milan

by Ella Noyes

We must take up our story at the beginning of that barbarian inrush through the yielding barriers of the Empire, which by mingling the vigour of new blood with the effete products of Roman civilisation, generated the travail of mediæval Italy, and out of that travail a nation. Milan had already a great past, closely bound up with the vicissitudes of the later Empire. From Diocletian and Constantine downwards she was honoured almost constantly by the presence of emperors. Julian was proclaimed Cæsar within her walls. Many edicts of Constantius were published there, Valentinian made his residence in the city, and there Theodosius spent long periods, and there died and was buried. The Empress Justina and her young son, Valentinian II., had their seat in Milan, and the slothful and degenerate Honorius ruled from its palace the Empire of the West, till frightened out by the Goths. The wealth and luxury of the city in the fourth century, her culture, her innumerable fine houses, her magnificent walls, built by Maximian, her circus, temples, theatres, baths, are celebrated in a famous epigram by the Latin poet Ausonius, who proclaims her the paragon of Rome.

But at the end of this century the imperial era was rapidly declining and giving way to a new order of things. A fresh period of irruptions from the North was at hand, and within the ancient polity itself a new organisation, the Christian Church, had arisen and was usurping spiritual authority. Milan had been early conspicuous in the history of Christianity. Legend names S. Barnabas himself as the founder and first occupant of her See, and she had testified to the new faith in the days of persecution by the blood of many martyrs. SS. Gervasio and Protasio, the youthful warrior pair, SS. Nazaro and Celso, master and faithful disciple, SS. Felix and Nabor, S. Valeria, San Vittore, and many others, are recorded with picturesque and touching details in Milanese legends and art. And in Milan the triumph of Christianity was first proclaimed, since here Constantine subscribed his edict of toleration in 313. But Christianity, established soon after as the State religion, had yet to struggle with the difficulty of conflicting counsels and doctrines within its own body. The tenets promulgated by the Council of Nicœa in 532 were by no means universally accepted by Christians in the fourth century, and in North Italy the teachings of Arius were widely followed, especially by the Gothic subjects of the Empire. Under the Empress Regent Justina they were the religion of the imperial Court in Milan, and the whole population was divided into fiercely hostile parties by the doctrinal question.

It was at this critical point of her political and ecclesiastical destinies that there appeared in Milan one of those epoch-making characters who from time to time arise at moments of hesitation in the history of human communities, and apparently initiate and determine their subsequent course. The great figure of her Bishop Ambrose, Saint and Doctor of the Church, scourge of the Arians, subduer of emperors, stands for Milan at the opening of a new era, to which his dominant mind gives impress, direction and inspiration. From this time forward, Milan is no more the imperial, but the Ambrosian city. Throughout her mediæval existence the consecrating memory of St. Ambrogio, her patron and protector, set like a spiritual jewel in a hundred exquisite and devoutly fantastic legends, is present in her government, her struggles for liberty, her art and peaceful industry, her daily life and the peculiar ritual of her religious worship.

In 374 Auxentius, Bishop of Milan, died. He had been an Arian. A great contention arose between the two doctrinal parties over the choice of his successor. The city was in a state of uproar, and it became necessary to summon the Prefect of the province to restore peace. A brilliant young advocate named Ambrosius, of a Roman family of high standing in the official world, had been lately appointed Prefect. He came to the capital and convoked a public assembly in the chief church, to assist at the election of a bishop. It was impossible, however, for the two parties to agree in a selection; the powerful Court influence of the Arians being balanced by a preponderance of orthodox Catholics among the people. Suddenly, above the angry noise of dispute which filled the church, a clear voice, as of a child, was heard to pronounce distinctly three times over the words, Ambrose is Bishop. The nolo episcopari of the young governor, vigorously expressed, and emphasised, according to legend, by his flight from the city, nothing availed to save him from the dignity which the unanimous will of the people now forced upon him, and Ambrose, as yet unbaptized, was made Bishop of Milan. Whether the apparent finger of Providence had been directed by some hidden terrestrial agency, it is ungrateful to inquire. Ambrose, in deserting the service of the decaying Empire for the government of the metropolitan See of Lombardy, had undoubtedly found the right field for his mighty energies. He was a great Christian, a man of profound doctrine, of pure life and loftiest spiritual qualities. He was also the most able of statesmen. None knew so well the power of this new polity of the Christian Church amid the struggling confusion of forces in the moribund Empire. He became paramount with his pupil, the young Emperor Gratian, and used his influence to stamp mercilessly upon the last embers of Paganism, overthrowing with unsparing arguments all the pleas of the patrician Symmachus and the Conservative party in the Roman Senate in favour of the preservation of the stately faith and customs of their forefathers. The doctrinal unity of the Church itself was his next great task. The Arian heresy was, as we have seen, strongly entrenched in the palace of the Empress and her son, Valentinian II. Nevertheless, Ambrose decreed a uniform orthodox worship in all the numerous churches in the city. Justina protested, and demanded the use of the New Basilica within the walls—the principal church in fact—for the Arians. This being refused, she ordered the bishop to give up the Basilica Porciana, outside the city. Ambrose meekly offered her his life and all his possessions, everything except what she wanted, the church. “A temple of God could not be given up by a priest.” Temporal arms were then moved against him. But all the forces of the Empire together would have been helpless against the martyr spirit of the Bishop. The Cathedral was his fortress, and there he entrenched himself in the strength of his holiness, surrounded by excited multitudes, whose ardour he inflamed by fiery discourses, in which he likened the Empress to Eve bringing ruin upon Adam, to Jezebel fighting Elijah, Salome destroying John Baptist, till they vowed to die with him rather than suffer the temporal authority to prevail over the spiritual. The very soldiers investing the church, terrified by the dreadful anathemas pronounced upon them, rushed in, not to do battle against the faithful, but to pray with them. For days the people continued in the church with the Bishop, and on this occasion, St. Augustine says, ‘It was first instituted that after the manner of the Eastern Churches, hymns and psalms should be sung, lest the people should faint through the weariness of sorrow’—a famous evidence of the fact that St. Ambrose was the first to introduce the use of music into the services of the Western Church.

It is interesting to note in the midst of that vast crowd of now nameless and forgotten individuals a figure well known to all times since, the small quiet African mother, Monica, who had followed her son across the terrible winter seas, resolved in her invincible spirit to guide his seeking soul into the haven of the true faith. And Augustine himself, the young professor just appointed to the chair of rhetoric in Milan, must have been present too, gazing upon the surprising scene of this persecuted but dauntless pastor and his devoted flock. Every vestige of the basilica nova intramurana, where the great struggle took place, is now long gone. But its place is still the place of Milan’s Cathedral, the great Gothic Duomo of later times. And the episcopal palace of to-day occupies the same site—or near it—of the dwelling of Ambrose, where Augustine, his heart swelling with eager questions, would often enter uninvited, as all might freely do, and watch the holy man in silence, restrained from speaking by the fear of disturbing him as he sat reading in his moments of leisure and preparing himself to expound to the people.

But it would be vain to seek to-day even for the place of that fourth-century house upon the walls—Maximian’s walls—where Augustine lodged with his mother and the marvellous boy Adeodatus, his son, fated so early to die. Or for the little garden where he hid himself one day, even from his faithful follower Alypius, and amid the throes of a terrible spiritual anguish heard the unseen child’s voice chanting in pure, untroubled tones, ‘Take up and read, take up and read,’ and opening the volume of the Apostle saw the words which lifted his soul out of the torture of conflicting desire into the serenity of faith at last. Nor is any trace left of the original baptistery for males, on the south side of the Cathedral, where the subsequent baptism of Augustine, Adeodatus and Alypius, at the hands of Ambrose, was in all probability performed. The place is occupied now by the Church of San Gottardo.

The conflict between Empress and Bishop was won by Ambrose. Justina’s efforts to depose him and set up a new bishop were completely frustrated by his timely discovery of the bodies of the Milanese martyrs, SS. Gervasio and Protasio, a miraculous event which raised him to an invincible position in the opinion of all Christendom. The triumph of the great bishop, though it savours now of bigotry, was of deep and far-reaching significance. It was the revolt of the new and as yet hardly tried Church against the ancient imperial authority. It pointed to the future. It initiated that obstinate and long-continued struggle between the temporal and spiritual powers which makes the history of the Middle Ages in Italy. For Milan and for Lombardy it meant more; it was a protest against the influence of the foreigner, against a strange domination in thought. The Arian heresy was alien and unnatural to Italian sentiment; its followers were chiefly among the large population of Goths settled by this time in Italy. Ambrose, in rallying round him the masses of the people and conquering the established powers, was in fact appealing to the elements out of which the Commune of later days was to develop—to those instincts of liberty and nationality of which the Mediæval Church was to be the glorious guide and champion.

The later and more famous triumph of Ambrose—when, before the doors of the same Basilica Nova, he stood, armed only with the insignia of his sacerdotal office, and barred the entrance of the sanctuary to the blood-stained Emperor Theodosius, till, awed by his spiritual dignity, the wearer of the purple sank before the white-robed priest and did public penance for the massacre of Thessalonica—was another and greater proof of the ascendency of the ecclesiastical over the imperial power. But the significance of the scene reaches further, and embraces the whole sphere of humanity. In standing bishop and kneeling king we see, not the individuals and their immediate motives, ambitious, despotic, superstitious, as they may partly have been, not even the struggle of great transitory interests, but a wider, deeper, more enduring principle—the recognition of the supremacy of spirit over brute force, the victory of the Christian ideal of love and pity over the earthly lusts of blood and revenge, of the religion which adores the helpless Mother and Child over the deified Force of the ancient creeds.

Ambrose was now the most powerful man in the Empire, ruling the minds of men by the sheer strength of character and lofty virtue. The Barbarians in their distant lands testified to the might of his saintliness—this man who, as a Frankish king asserted with awe, says to the sun, ‘Stand still,’ and it stands. The two young Emperors, Gratian and Valentinian, were tools in his hands, and Theodosius himself had to acknowledge the Church in the person of Ambrose as a twin power in the realm. When the Bishop died in 397, he bequeathed to his successors an episcopal dominion so strengthened by his powerful personality, and glorified by the sanctity of his life and doctrine, that it was ever after associated with his name, and known as the Ambrosian Church. With its numerous and wealthy dependent bishoprics, its Arch-Pontiff or Pope, its cardinals, as the chief clergy were called later, and immense hierarchy, its peculiar liturgy and ritual, this Church was accorded the title of Holy—Santa Chiesa—and acknowledged as self-governing by Gregory the Great himself.

The Milan of Ambrose and Augustine still belonged in outward aspect to the imperial past. But a general decay, hastened by exorbitant taxation and bad administration, was visible at this time throughout North Italy, where many of the chief towns were, in Ambrose’s own words, Corpses of half-ruined cities. At the opening of the fifth century the simulacrum of Empire was attacked by the Goths under Alaric (402), and half a century later (450) Attila, Flagellum Dei, passed with his Huns over the face of Italy, uprooting the useless remains of the ancient world, as a plough furrows a field for the new sowing. Milan came within his course, but how deep and extensive was the ruin wrought by him there we do not know. His was but the first operation in God’s tilling of that rank soil for the new life it was to bear. In 538 the city suffered a second and apparently more complete destruction, during the war of Narses and Belisarius for the recovery of Italy from the Ostrogothic dynasty established by Theodoric. Milan revolted from the Gothic King Vitige and allied herself with the Eastern generals. Vitige despatched a portion of his army, swelled by a host of Burgundians from the mountains, ancestors, probably, of those Swiss who were to plague the Milanese in later history. The city was closely invested, and after some months, deceived in the expectation of succour from Belisarius, she fell a victim to the revenge of the Goths. The historian Procopius describes the three hundred thousand slain, the women sold as slaves, the habitations razed to the ground, and his statement, in spite of obvious exaggeration, is an indication of the awful havoc and desolation inflicted upon the still soft, corrupt and luxurious city.