The chronicles tell the true story of the first beginnings, and how the people of the pillaged cities found a precarious refuge in the little archipelago. They crossed in their light boats and landed safely,
Rom. i. 56-57.
554-564 A.D.
568 A.D.
and forthwith made huts and tabernacles of branches to shelter the relics of the saints which they had saved as possessions more precious than their household goods or little hoards of gold and silver. But the people themselves beached their boats high and dry and lived in them, sheltered from the weather only by awnings, just as the last of the sailor traders still live wherever they find a market on the Calabrian shore; for they hoped to go back to their homes. And so indeed they did, when the Huns departed at last; they returned to their cities and rebuilt the battered walls of Aquileia and Altinum, trusting to dwell in peace. But the second destruction was not far off: the Ostrogoths came, and the Lombards, and the people fled once more, never to return.
The unknown author of the Chronicle of Altinum carries on the tale in a most amazing compound of history, fiction, poetry and statistics. More than one scholar has indeed been tempted to surmise that this document is the work of several writers.
From them, or from the one, we learn something of the circumstances which drove the inhabitants of Altinum to take to their boats and seek a final refuge in the lagoons; and the story of the second flight, like that of the first, is fantastically illuminated by the writer’s poetic imagination.
‘In the days of the Bishop Paul’ is the only date the Chronicle gives, and doubtless that was very clear to the first monk who took down the manuscript
Chron. Altin.
from its place in the convent library and first pored over its contents. In the days, therefore, when Paul was bishop in Altinum, there came out of the west a pestilence of cruel pagans, fierce Lombards, who destroyed cities in their path as the flame licks up dry grass, and who would surely have made an end of the peaceful people of Altinum if Heaven had not sent signs warning them to escape.