When the Roman Army began to add to itself auxiliary troops (drilled of course after the Roman fashion and forming one body with the Roman forces, but contracted for “in bulk,” as it were) the chieftains of these barbaric and often small bodies were called in the official language, Reges. Thus Alaric, a Roman officer and nothing more, was the Rex of his officially appointed auxiliary force; and since the nucleus of that force had once been a small body of Goths, and since Alaric held his position as an officer of that auxiliary force because he had once been, by inheritance, a chieftain of the Goths, the word Rex was attached to his Imperial Commission in the Roman Army, and there was added to it the name of that particular barbaric tribe with which his command had originally been connected. He was Rex of the Roman auxiliary troops called “Goths.” The “Rex” in Spain was “Rex Gotorum,” not “Rex Hispaniæ”—that was altogether a later idea. The Rex in Northern France was not Rex Galliæ, he was “Rex Francorum.” In each case he was the Rex of the particular auxiliary troop from which his ancestors—sometimes generations before—had originally drawn their Imperial Commission and their right to be officers in the Roman Army.
Thus you will have the Rex Francorum, or King of the Franks, so styled in the Palatium at Paris, as late as, say, 700 A.D. Not because any body of “Franks” still survived as a separate corps—they had been but a couple of regiments or so [Footnote: We have documentary record. The greater part of the Frankish auxiliaries under Clovis were baptized with their General. They came to 4,000 men.] two hundred years before and had long disappeared—but because the original title had derived from a Roman auxiliary force of Franks.
In other words, the old Roman local legislative and taxing power, the reality of which lay in the old surviving Roman machinery of a hierarchy of officials with their titles, writs, etc., was vested in the hands of a man called “Rex,” that is, “Commander” of such and such an auxiliary force; Commander of the Franks, for instance, or Commander of the Goths. He still commanded in the year 550 a not very large military force on which local government depended, and in this little army the barbarians were still probably predominant because, as we have seen, towards the end of the Empire the stuff of the army had become barbaric and the armed force was mainly of barbaric recruitment. But that small military force was also, and as certainly, very mixed indeed; many a slave or broken Roman freedman would enlist, for it had privileges and advantages of great value; [Footnote: Hence the “leges” or codes specially regulating the status of these Roman troops and called in documents the laws of the “Goths” or “Burgundians,” as the case may he. There is a trace of old barbaric customs in some of these, sometimes of an exclusive rule of marriage; but the mass of them are obviously Roman privileges.] no one cared in the least whether the members of the armed forces which sustained society were Roman, Gallic, Italian or German in racial origin. They were of all races and origins. Very shortly after—by, say, 600, at latest—the Army had become a universal rough levy of all sorts and kinds, and the restriction of race was forgotten save in a few customs still clinging by hereditary right to certain families and called their “laws.”
Again, there was no conception of rebellion against the Empire in the mind of a Rex. All these Reges without exception held their military office and power originally by a commission from the Empire. All of them derived their authority from men who had been regularly established as Imperial functionaries. When the central power of the Emperor had, as a fact, broken down, the Rex as a fact administered the whole machinery without control.
But no Rex ever tried to emancipate himself from the Empire or warred for independence against the Emperor. The Rex, the local man, undertook all government simply because the old Government above him, the central Government, had failed. No Rex ever called himself a local Imperator or dreamed of calling himself so; and that is the most significant thing in all the transition between the full civilization of the old Empire and the Dark Ages. The original Roman armies invading Gaul, Spain, the western Germanies and Hungary, fought to conquer, to absorb, to be masters of and makers of the land they seized. No local governor of the later transition, no Rex of Vandal, Goth, Hun, Frank or Berber or Moor troop ever dreamt of such a thing. He might fight another local Rex to get part of his taxing-power or his treasure. He might take part in the great religious quarrels (as in Africa) and act tyrannically against a dissident majority, but to fight against the Empire as such or to attempt conquest and rule over a “subject population” would have meant nothing to him; in theory the Empire was still under one control.
There, then, you have the picture of what held the levers of the machine of government during the period of its degradation and transformation, which followed the breakdown of central authority. Clovis, in the north of France, the Burgundian chieftain at Arles, Theodoric in Italy, Athanagild later at Toledo in Spain, were all of them men who had stepped into the shoes of an unbroken local Roman administration, who worked entirely by it, and whose machinery of administration wherever they went was called by the Roman and official name of Palatium.
Their families were originally of barbaric stock: they had for their small armed forces a military institution descended and derived from the Roman auxiliary forces; often, especially in the early years of their power, they spoke a mixed and partly barbaric tongue [Footnote: The barbaric dialects outside the Empire were already largely latinized through commerce with the Empire and by its influence, and, of course, what we call “Teutonic Languages” are in reality half Roman, long before we get our first full documents in the eighth and ninth centuries.] more easily than pure Latin; but every one of them was a soldier of the declining Empire and regarded himself as a part of it, not as even conceivably an enemy of it.
When we appreciate this we can understand how insignificant were those changes of frontier which make so great a show in historical atlases.
The Rex of such and such an auxiliary force dies and divides his “kingdom” between two sons. What does that mean? Not that a nation with its customs and its whole form of administration was suddenly divided into two, still less that there has been what today we call “annexation” or “partition” of states. It simply means that the honor and advantage of administration are divided between the two heirs, who take, the one the one area, the other the other, over which to gather taxes and to receive personal profit. It must always be remembered that the personal privilege so received was very small in comparison with the total revenue to be administrated, and that the vast mass of public work as carried on by the judiciary, the officers of the Treasury and so forth, continued to be quite impersonal and fundamentally imperial. This governmental world of clerks and civil servants lived its own life and was only in theory dependent upon the Rex, and the Rex was no more than the successor of the chief local Roman official. [Footnote: Our popular historical atlases render a very bad service to education by their way of coloring these districts as though they were separate modern nations. The real division right up to full tide of feudalism was Christian and Pagan, and, within the former, Eastern and Western: Greek and Latin.]
The Rex, by the way, called himself always by some definite inferior Roman title, such as Vir Illuster, as an Englishman today might be called “Sir Charles So and So” or “Lord So and So,” never anything more; and often (as in the case of Clovis), he not only accepted directly from the Roman Emperor a particular office, but observed the old popular Roman customs, such as largesse and procession, upon his induction into that office.