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H. B. Cotterill
Medieval Italy

p21 CHAPTER I
WHY THE EMPIRE FELL

The subject of this volume divides itself naturally into five parts. The first extends to the fall of the so‑called Western Roman Empire — that is to the deposition of the Romulus Augustulus in the year 476 and the extinction in Italy, for over three centuries, if not for ever, of that title of Roman Emperor which had been borne, rather discontinuously it might be allowed, and often with no lineal or legal right, by about seventy successors of the great Augustus, not counting numerous and sometimes simultaneous usurpers both in Italy and in other parts of the West.

But when we speak of the fall of the Western Empire it must be remembered that by the year 476 the Empire of the West, which in the time of Constantine had comprised half the Roman world — namely, the six vast 'dioceses' of Britain, the two Gauls, Spain, Italy, North-West Africa — now no longer existed.1 Britain had been abandoned to the Picts and Scots and Angles and Saxons, the fifteen provinces of Gaul were occupied by independent kingdoms of Franks and Visigoths and Burgundians and Alemanni, Spain was ruled by Visigoths and Suevi, and Africa together with Sardinia and Sicily was in the power of Gaiseric the Vandal. Therefore when Odovacar deposed the boy-emperor Augustus the so‑called Western Empire consisted only of Italy, with the provinces of Noricum and Rhaetia to the north of the Alps; to which perhaps we may add the tract of Dalmatia, on the east coast of the Adriatic, whither an expelled Roman Emperor (Nepos) had retired, and where he was supported in his little imperium in p22imperio by the then ruling power in Constantinople, the Dowager-Empress Verina.

The deposition of Augustulus may thus be regarded as the abolition of the name of what had in reality already ceased to exist — that mighty Empire of which Rome was the centre and which in the days of Trajan (c. 100) extended from the Caspian to the Atlantic and from the deserts of Libya to the highlands of Caledonia, and included also a great province, that of Dacia, beyond the Danube, although Augustus, a century earlier, had wisely chosen this river as the north-eastern boundary of the Roman world.

And it was from this quarter that trouble came. Trajan's annexation of Dacia (the country between the Theiss and the Pruth) created an artificial frontier of great extent which proved indefensible against the innumerable hordes of barbarians ever urged westward and southward by fresh waves of hostile migration from the far East. The Emperor Aurelian (c. 272) found it necessary to surrender the province to the Visigoths on the condition that they should not pass the Danube. He thus purchased a precarious truce of about a hundred years, interrupted by several campaigns in the time of Constantine, who on one occasion inflicted a crushing defeat on the barbarians and a loss, it is said, of 100,000 men. About 370 these Dacian Visigoths, as we have already seen (p7), were driven by the advancing hosts of the Huns across the Danube and were allowed to settle in Thrace; but shortly afterwards they rebelled and routed the imperial army in a great battle near Hadrianople, in which the Eastern Emperor, Valens, disappeared.

This was the serious beginning2 of those barbarian invasions which were the immediate cause of the downfall of Rome and which play such a large part in the early history of medieval Italy. In another chapter I shall speak of the origin and the character of these northern and eastern races. Here I shall p23touch briefly on certain characteristics of the later Roman Empire which seem to have accelerated its dissolution by making it more and more incapable of resisting the tide of barbarian conquest.

A world-empire, such as was the dream of Alexander and such as Rome seemed at one time not unlikely to realize, must ever be a construction doomed to collapse under its own super-incumbent mass. It is true that the Romans were, if we except Germany, practically the masters of the world — terrarum domini — for some five centuries, from the sack of Carthage in 146 B.C. to the battle of Hadrianople in A.D. 378; but for how many centuries has stood the Colosseum since Rome fell?

The dream of a permanent world-empire may one day be realized in some such form as the Federation of the great nations and the Parliament of Man, but freedom and self-rule combined with voluntary submission to a central government in matters of common interest must doubtless be the essential characteristic of any such system; and this characteristic was conspicuously absent in the cast of the Roman Empire.3 The whole structure, composed of many and diverse races, was held together solely by the military and administrative authority of a single city, and existed mainly for the advantage of that one city, into whose treasuries from all quarters of the known world continually poured tribute and taxes and spoils of war. Hither from three continents Rome's triumphant generals were wont to bring countless captives home to grace their chariot-wheels and to fill the public coffers or the purses of their captors with the proceeds of their ransom or of their sale as slaves; for the social system of Imperial Rome — indeed, of the whole Empire — was built up to a very large extent on the perilous foundation of domestic slavery. Gibbon asserts that in the time of the Emperor Claudius the population of the Empire amounted to about 120 millions, of whom about sixty millions were slaves; and in the time of Diocletian, according to Bryce, p24two-thirds of the whole population of the Empire were of servile origin.

The plunder and tribute of foreign countries and the importation of innumerable slaves tended more and more to the elimination of the Roman middle class, and, while favouring enormously the enrichment of the home and provincial official, the army contractor, and the great landowner, caused the formation of a huge class of dependents and serfs on the vast estates in the country and of a poverty-stricken city-rabble ever more miserably enslaved by the richer classes, more hopelessly entangled in the toils of usurers and more eager but more powerless to rise against their oppressors, who knew full well how to gain their acquiescence and their applause by the largess of bread and circus games. At the head of this social system stood a monarch invested with powers almost absolute, surrounded by a dense phalanx of hereditary land-proprietors and officials and with a great army at his beck and call.

And the nature of this army afforded yet another danger to the Empire. In the days of the ancient monarchy and the early Republic the whole male population formed the 'exercitus' and almost every adult male citizen was a soldier. In later days too, in the days when Cannae was fought and Carthage was sacked, as also in the days of Caesar, the army of Rome was composed exclusively of Roman citizens — of the Romans themselves or their allies — of citizens who owned and cultivated Italian soil, who took part in the great assemblies which gave laws to the Roman world, and who might be called from the plough or the workshop to die for Rome or to lead her army to victory.

As the bounds of the Empire extended it became ever more difficult to find enough recruits. By Marius the riff-raff of the Roman plebs and the off-scourings of the allies were enlisted as mercenaries; by Marcus Aurelius the privilege of serving was extended to the free population of all the Roman world;4 p25soon slaves were admitted, and finally barbarians, and these ere long formed the greater part of the standing armies which Rome had to support, and on which she had to rely for the maintenance of her authority in the distant provinces of three continents.

To pay for these great mercenary armies taxes were constantly increased until the burden became almost intolerable, and until the one apparent function of the Government was to extort money.

Lastly, one of the chief causes which conduced to the dissolution of the Empire was the marvellous growth and the final triumph of Christianity, the deep-lying and vital principles of which were subversive not only of paganism as a recognized religion but of the very foundations on which was built up the whole social system, perhaps one might say the whole civilization, material and intellectual, of the Roman world. In his great work on the City of God St. Augustine doubtless voiced the feelings of Christendom when he spoke with awe of the sack of Rome by Alaric as an act of God's wrath against the pagans who trusted still in their idols. Nor did he speak with awe alone, but almost with exultation; and it is indeed true that, as in the days of Noé, some great deluge of disaster was sorely needed. Not only did both peasant and high-born senator, as we shall later see, cling tenaciously to the old superstitions and the old worship of i dei falsi e bugiardi long past the times of Julian the Apostate and even up to the days of St. Benedict, but the moral sense as well as the religious instincts had sunk, in spite of the example of many noble characters and the well-meaning but ill-directed efforts of Stoicism, even of such Stoicism as that of Epictetus and of Marcus Aurelius, to a level from which nothing could rescue them but that new order of things which had been foretold not only by Jewish prophets but perhaps by a sibylline utterance of Virgil himself.5 And doubtless many besides Virgil, even if they did not dimly foresee the coming of the New Age, p26longed for a better state of things. This is very plainly seen in the case of Tacitus, who in his Germania describes with enthusiasm the nobler traits in the character and life of the Germani and seem to forbode the coming downfall of the Empire.

And however terrible were the sufferings brought upon Italy by foreign invasion and domination, some at least of her so‑called barbarian invaders were of noble and virile stock, and although they probably did not influence the future Italians as much as is sometimes supposed, having been in most cases a body of warriors and officials numerically small in comparison with the native population, they infused new blood and invigorating energy and instituted the beginnings of the new order of things, thus laying the foundation of the political, artistic, intellectual, and religious civilization of modern Christian Europe, whereas the Eastern Empire, though its existence was prolonged for nearly a thousand years, sank ever lower into degeneracy and finally fell prey to the Turk.6

It is indeed true that, ere this new order of things could prevail, Italy had to pass through dark ages compared with which the age of Hadrian and the Antonines, or even the age described by the Satires of Juvenal, was enlightened and humane; and it is true that the discords between the various schools of the new religion surpassed in violence and virulence everything of the kind in classical times and that the persecutions of Christians by Christians proved more terrible and revolting than all the martyrdoms from the time of Nero to that of Diocletian. But perhaps in order to reach a higher stage of evolution it is ever needful to revert for a time to a lower.

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The Author's Notes:

1 See Maps I and II.

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2 The first invasion of Italy by a Germanic people was the Quadi and Marcomanni, who after years of conflict were repelled by M. Aurelius in 174. They were probably driven south by the Goths from Scandinavia.

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3 As I had lived many years in Germany, and was still living there, I necessarily thought while writing this passage (in May 1914) of the fictitious and temporary fabric of the modern German (or rather, Prussian) Empire.

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4 Claudius II (268‑70) incorporated in the legions a large body of vanquished Goths, and a few years later the Emperor Probus distributed 16,000 Germans among the imperial forces.

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5 Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo . . . — The great order [series] of the ages is born anew . . . '

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6 With whom that self-styled Caesar, the pious lord of the modern Huns, is at present leagued against European Christendom.