Fig. 34.—German and Gallic Auxiliaries, one wearing Trousers (Braccæ), and the other a Tunic.—From a Roman Monument of the Second Century.
The whole West was stirred up at the tidings of this terrible invasion. Ætius, the Roman leader among the Gauls, had called to his aid the confederates of Amorica, the Frank-Salians, whose leader was Merovius, the Burgundians, the Saxons, and the southern Visigoths, whose king was Theodoric. This numerous army, composed of excellent troops under the orders of Ætius, marched to meet the barbarians, and encountered them in the neighbourhood of Châlons-sur-Marne. The battle lasted three days, and the defeat of the Huns was complete.
The ferocious Attila, who had called himself the Scourge of God, and who had run his course like some fatal meteor, leaving in his track nothing but conflagrations and ruins, expired in the midst of an orgie in 455. A truceless, unceasing war was still being waged all over Europe, a sanguinary and implacable war of race and of party. Political chaos, a chaos that Christianity alone was destined to regenerate, was at its height in the old world, when, towards the close of the sixth century, Theodoric, King of the Eastern Goths, who had protected Byzantium when threatened by the Bulgarians, and who had remained in the pay of the Emperor Zeno, determined to find occupation for his warlike and restless subjects by leading them against Odoacer, the sovereign of the Herulians, who at that time united under his sway Sicily and the Italian peninsula, but whose subjects were at best but a ferocious and turbulent mob. The young King of the Goths (he was only thirty-four years of age) started from the depths of Mœsia (now Servia), with the consent of the chief of the empire, at the head of an entire warlike population, to whom he promised the conquest of Italy. He easily overcame the King of the Herulians; and, having conquered Italy, he posted his soldiers in the various provinces of the peninsula, in such a manner that their pay and their rations might continue to be supplied to them as regularly in peace as in war.
The system of government and administration established by Theodoric had the advantage of distributing two hundred thousand excellent troops in the midst of a population which, glad to find itself uncalled upon for military service, and but little taxed, allowed the work of the conquest to be consolidated. The millénaires (soldiers of a battalion numbering a thousand men) occupied with their families distinct portions of territory, and were bound to hold themselves under arms, and ready to march, whenever the defence of the country required it (Fig. 35). Theodoric had already recognised the utility of urban garrisons. The flower of the country’s youth, organized in a military manner, flocked to the gymnasium of Ravenna, and the king himself presided over their exercises. His levies, as regards their discipline, their instruction, and their equipment, resembled the ancient legions of Rome. The iron cap, the shield, the broadsword, and the arrow of the Goths had been replaced by the spear, the javelin, the helmet, and the cuirass of the Romans. The old soldiers received from the royal treasury for their services as instructors a particular grant, which was annually paid to them till they retired altogether from the profession of arms. When the troops were about to take the field, the intendants, under the orders of the counts, superintended the commissariat and the gathering and the march of the different army corps. The provincial officers had to distribute arms, food, and hay on the different points of the road that the troops were expected to follow, and the inhabitants had to provide lodgings—this was the only military service expected of them, but none could escape it.
Fig. 35.—Military Costume from the Sixth to the Tenth Centuries.—From a Miniature in the “Dialogues de Saint Grégoire,” Manuscript of the Eleventh Century (National Library of Paris).]
The towns were at this time almost always fortified, and entrenched camps covered nearly the whole of Italy. The castles in the rural districts, constructed to protect the frontiers, were usually full of troops, whose support was part of the duty of the pretorial prefect, and whose insubordination often necessitated severe measures of repression. “Keep up a spirit of military discipline; it is often difficult to enforce it under civil rule,” said Theodoric to Servatus, one of his generals.
If it is a matter of surprise to meet with such a right moral feeling in the sovereign of reputed barbarians, barbarians half civilised, however, by their contact with the Latin race, it is not the less so to find, in the wars which occurred in the years 507, 508, and 509, other barbarian kings, namely, Alaric, Clovis, Gondebaud, and Thierry, make use of and apply with skill the rules of Greco-Roman strategy, either in executing long military manœuvres, or in displaying all the strategic science that sieges then required, in attacking or defending the fortified towns of Avignon, of Carcassonne, and of Arles.
