The result of all these invasions was a progressive barbarization of Italy, which was not altogether unfortunate, because fraught with some renewal of strength. The Teutons brought their customs; and at least one Teuton people, the Lombards, maintained them masterfully. The Ostrogoth, Theodoric, had preserved the Italian municipal organization, and had drawn his code for all from Roman sources. But the first Lombard Code, that of King Rothari, promulgated about 643, ignored Roman law, and apparently the very existence of Romans. Though written in barbarous Latin, it is Lombard through and through. So, to a scarcely less degree, is the Code of King Liutprand, promulgated about 725.[136] Even then the Lombards looked upon themselves as distinct from the “Romans.” Their laws were still those of the Lombards, yet of Lombards settling down to urban life. Within Lombard territories the “Romans” were subjects. In Liutprand’s Code they seem to be referred to under the name of aldii and aldiae, male and female persons, who were not slaves and yet not free. Instead of surrendering one-third of the land, the Romans were obliged to furnish one-third of its produce. Hence their Lombard masters were interested in keeping them fixed to the soil, perhaps in a state of serfdom. Little is known as to the intermarriage of the stocks, or when the Lombards adopted a Latin speech.[137]
It is difficult, either in Italy or elsewhere, to follow the changes and reciprocal working of Roman and Teutonic institutions through these obscure centuries. They wrought upon each other universally, and became what neither had been before. The Roman State was there no longer; where the names of its officials survived they stood for altered functions. The Roman law prevailed within the dominions of the eastern Empire and the popes. Everywhere the crass barbarian law and the pure Roman institution was passing away, or changing into something new. In Italy another pregnant change was taking place, the passing of the functions of government to the bishops of Rome. Its stages are marked by the names of great men upon whose shoulders fell the authority no longer held by a remote ruler. Leo the Great heads the embassy which turns back the Hun; a century and a half afterwards Gregory the Great leads the opposition to the Lombards, still somewhat unkempt savages. Thereafter each succeeding pope, in fact the papacy by necessity of its position and its aspirations, opposes the Lombards when they have ceased to be either savage or Arian. It is an absent supporter that the papacy desires, and not a rival close at hand: Charlemagne, not Desiderius.
When the Visigoths under Ataulf left Italy they passed into southern Gaul, and there established themselves with Toulouse as the centre of the Visigothic kingdom. They soon extended their rule to Spain, with the connivance of sundry Roman rulers. Some time before them Vandals, Suevi and Alans, having crossed the Rhine into Gaul, had been drawn across the Pyrenees by half-traitorous invitations of rival Roman governors. The Visigoths now attacked these peoples, with the result that the Suevi retreated to the north-west of the peninsula, and at length the restless Vandals accepted the invitation of the traitor Count Boniface, and crossed to Africa. Visigothic fortunes varied under an irregular succession of non-hereditary and occasionally murdered kings. Their kingdom reached its farthest limit in the reign of Euric (466-486), who extended its boundaries northward to the Loire and southward over nearly all of Spain.[138]
Under the Visigoths the lot of the Latinized provincials, who with their ancestors had long been Roman citizens, was not a hard one. The Roman system of quartering soldiers upon provincials, with a right to one-third of the house, afforded precedent for the manner of settlement of the Visigoths and other Teuton invaders after them. The Visigoths received two-thirds not only of the houses but also of the lands, which indeed were bare of cultivators. The municipal organization of the towns was left intact, and in general the nomenclature and structure of Roman officialdom were preserved. As the Romans were the more numerous and the cleverer, they regained their wealth and social consideration. In 506, Alaric II. promulgated his famous code, the Lex Romana Visigothorum, usually called the “Breviarium,” for his Roman subjects. Although the next year Clovis broke down the Visigothic kingdom in Gaul, and confined it to narrow limits around Narbonne, this code remained in force, a lasting source of Roman law for the inhabitants of the south and west of Gaul.[139]
Throughout Visigothic Spain there existed, in conflict if not in force, a complex mass of diverse laws and customs, written and unwritten, Roman, Gothic, ecclesiastical. Soon after the middle of the seventh century a general code was compiled for both Goths and Roman provincials, between whom marriages were formally sanctioned. This codification was the legal expression of a national unity, which however had no great political vigour. For what with its inheritance of intolerable taxation, of dwindling agriculture, of enfeebled institutions and social degeneracy, the Visigothic state fell an easy victim before the Arabs in 711. It had been subject to all manner of administrative abuse. In name the government was secular. But in fact the bishops of the great sees were all-powerful to clog, if not to administer, justice and the affairs of State within their domains; the nobles abetted them in their misgovernment. So it came that instead of a united Government supported by a strong military power, there was divided misrule, and an army without discipline or valour. This misrule was also cruelly intolerant. The bitter persecution of the Jews, and the law that none but a Catholic should live in Spain, if not causes, were at least symptoms, of a fatal impotence, and prophetic of like measures taken by later rulers in that chosen land of religious persecution.[140]
In Gaul, contact between Latinized provincials and Teutonic invaders produced interesting results. Mingled peoples came into being, whose polity and institutions were neither Roman nor Teutonic, and whose literature and intellectual achievement were to unite the racial qualities of both. The hybrid political and social phenomena of the Frankish period were engendered by a series of events which may be outlined as follows. The Franks, Salic and Ripuarian, were clustered in the region of the lower and middle Rhine. Like other Teutonic groups dwelling near the boundaries of the weakening Empire, they were alternately plunderers of Roman territory and auxiliaries in the imperial army, or its independent allies against Huns or Saxons or Alans. One Childeric, whose career opens in saga and ends in history, was king or hereditary leader of a part of the Salian Franks. This active man appears in frequent relations with Aegidius, the half-independent Roman ruler of that north-western portion of Gaul which was not held by Visigoths or Burgundians. If Childeric’s forefathers had oftener been enemies than allies of the Empire, he was its ally, and perhaps commander of the forces which helped to preserve this outlying portion of its territory.
Aegidius died in 463, and the territories ruled by him passed to his son Syagrius practically as an independent kingdom. Childeric in the next eighteen years increased his power among the Salian Franks, and extended his territories through victories over other Teutonic groups. Upon his death in 481 his kingdom passed to his son Chlodoweg, or, as it is easier to call him, Clovis, then in his sixteenth year. The next five years were employed by this precocious genius of barbarian craft in strengthening his kingship among the Salians. At the age of twenty he attacked Syagrius, and overthrew his power at Soissons. The last Roman ruler of a part of Gaul fled to the Visigoths for refuge: their king delivered him to Clovis, who had him killed. So Clovis’s realm was extended first to the Seine and then to the Loire. The Gallo-Romans were not driven out or dispossessed, but received a new master, who on his part treated them forbearingly and accepted them as subjects. The royal domains of Syagrius perhaps were large enough to satisfy the cupidity of the victors.
Clovis was now king of Gallo-Romans as well as Salian Franks. Thus strengthened he could fight other Franks with success, and carry on a great war against the Alemanni to the south-east. At the “battle of Tolbiac,” in which he finally overthrew these people, the heathen Frank invoked the Christian God (so tells Gregory of Tours), and vowed to accept the Faith if Christ gave him the victory. This is like the legend of Constantine at the battle of the Malvern Bridge, nor is the probability of its essential truth lessened because of this resemblance. Both Roman emperor and Frankish king turned from heathenism to Christianity as to the stronger supernatural support. And if ever man received tenfold reward in this world from his faith it was this treacherous and bloody Frank.
Hitherto the Teuton tribes, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, Burgundians who had accepted Christianity, were Arians by reason of the circumstances of their “conversion.” On the other hand, the Romanized inhabitants of Italy, Spain, and Gaul were Catholics, and the influence of their Arian-hating clergy was enormous. Evidently when Clovis, under the influence of Catholic bishops and a Catholic wife, became a Catholic, the power of the Church and the sympathy of the laity would make his power irresistible. For the Catholic population was greatly in the majority, even in the countries held by Burgundian or Visigothic kings. The Burgundian rulers had half turned to Catholicism, and the Visigothic monarchy treated it with respect. Yet the Burgundian kings did not win the Church’s confidence, nor did the Visigoths disarm its active hostility. With such ability as Clovis and his sons possessed, their conversion to Catholicism ensured victory over their rivals, and made a bond of friendship between them and their Gallo-Roman subjects.[141]
The extension of Clovis’s kingdom, his overthrow of the Visigothic power, his partial conquest of the Burgundians, would have been even more rapid and decisive but for the opposing diplomacy of the great Arian ruler, Theodoric the Ostrogoth, whose prestige and power even the bold Frank dared not defy. Moreover, the Burgundians stood well with their Roman subjects, whom they treated generously, and permitted to live under a code of Roman law. When it came to war between them and Clovis, the advantage rested with the latter; but possibly the fear of Theodoric, or the pressure of war with the Alemanni, deferred the final conquest of the Burgundian kingdom for another generation.