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I.6 This text has not yet been proofread. If you find a mistake though, please let me know! II.1

H. B. Cotterill
Medieval Italy

p103 CHAPTER VII

GAISERIC* TO ODOVACAR

It will be remembered that in the year 429 the Vandals under their king Gaiseric, perhaps invited2 by the Roman governor Boniface, the great rival of Aëtius, crossed over from Spain to Africa. The invasion of the rich and fruitful provinces of North Africa scarcely needed to be incited by a treasonable offer. In Spain the Vandals had been much harassed by the Visigoths, whose king Wallia (p86) had subjugated the greater part of the country, but Gaiseric, or Genseric, who, like the famous Spartan king Agesilaus, was small and crippled (by a fall from his horse, it is said), seems to have reorganized their army and even to have ventured (428) a campaign against the Suevi, in what is now Northern Portugal. In the next year we find him landing on the coast of Africa, with a large force of fighting men and a multitude of women and children — in all perhaps 80,000. This landing of the Vandals on the coast of Africa is vividly, if rather too [imaginatively] (Susan note) pictured by Gibbon. 'The wandering Moors,' he says, 'as they gradually ventured to approach the seashore and the camp of the Vandals, must have viewed with terror and astonishment the dress, the arms, the martial pride and discipline of the unknown strangers who had landed on their coast, and the fair complexions of the blue-eyed p106warriors of Germany formed a very singular contrast with the swarthy or olive hue which is derived from the neighbourhood of the torrid zone. After the first difficulties had in some measure been removed which arose from the mutual ignorance of their respective language, the Moors, regardless of any future consequence, embraced the alliance of the enemies of Rome, and a crowd of naked savages rushed from the woods and valleys of Mount Atlas to satiate their revenge on the polished tyrants who had injuriously expelled them from the native sovereignty of the land.'

The most ghastly stories are told of the devastations and inhumanities of the Vandals in Africa during the ten years or so that elapsed before Gaiseric had overrun the whole of the provinces of North-west Africa and had concentrated his power in Carthage, whence with his powerful fleet he swept the Western Mediterranean and annexed the Balearic Isles, Corsica, Sardinia, and finally Sicily. Vandalism has become a symbol for barbarism and atrocity, but it is just possible that the contemporary account of the heretic Gaiseric and his Vandals given by a friend and biographer of St. Augustine and repeated by later writers may be exaggerated. It is scarcely credible that invaders who meant to settle in a country should burn and extirpate vines and fruit-trees and olive-groves, and the pictures of them piling up the corpses of slaughtered captives in order to scale the walls of a besieged town, or leaving them to putrefy and cause pestilence, appear somewhat imaginative.3

If Boniface really did incite the Vandals to cross over to Africa, he must have done so during the brief madness of anger, or must have made some very serious miscalculation, seeing that a year after their landing we find him fighting desperately against them. Being defeated, he retired into the maritime stronghold of Hippo, best known to many of us as the city of p107St. Augustine. Here he was beleaguered by the Vandals. In the third month of the siege St. Augustine died (August 28, 430), at the age of seventy-six.4 After fourteen months the besiegers began to suffer more from want of food than did the besieged, who had free access to the sea. Troops moreover were sent from Constantinople under the command of Aspar, who with Boniface ventured to assail the Vandals. But they suffered a severe repulse. Thereupon they embarked all their troops and sailed off — Aspar to Constantinople and Boniface to Ravenna, where, strangely enough, he was received in a most friendly way by Galla Placidia, and even honoured by medals, on which he was represented in a triumphal car with a palm in one hand and a scourge in the other. But soon afterwards he died, as has been related, from a wound received in a duel with Aëtius. The inhabitants of Hippo were then massacred and enslaved by the Vandals and the city was burnt.

What deterred Gaiseric from attempting at once the capture of Carthage herself is not very apparent. Perhaps one does not fully realize the immense extent of these African provinces, nor the small number of the Vandal warriors in comparison with the vanquished but still hostile population. Moreover Carthage, risen anew from the ancient ashes left by Scipio some six centuries before (if I may thus expand and modify Dante's phrase), had become once more the first city — the 'Rome' as she was called — of North Africa, and, although of the gigantic Byrsa and the other fortifications of the old Phoenician city only a few questionable relics have survived to our day, it is not improbable that enough still remained in this age to render the place5 difficult of capture in spite of p108the unwarlike effeminacy of its inhabitants, who are described by contemporary writers as wallowing in a quagmire of luxury, irreligion, and vice. Possibly therefore Gaiseric wished before assailing this stronghold to rest his warriors and to build up a permanent state.

In this connexion it is interesting to note that there are statements in the chroniclers which seem to show that Vandal policy was characterized by features which we should call socialistic. The dominant race did indeed assume a feudal lordship over the soil and did enslave many of their captives, and were themselves immune from taxation, but those of the native populations who were workers were favoured as against the inactive classes. Of the wealthy nobles, the clerics, and the large landowners many were severely taxed and mulcted, when not banished or otherwise suppressed, while agriculture, industry, and trade were encouraged by exemption from heavy taxation.

During the last years of this period of inaction the Vandals were nominally at peace with the Empire, for a truce was signed three years after the sack of Hippo. But it was of short duration, and in 439 Carthage fell. The next three years saw the conquest by Gaiseric's fleet of all the islands of the Western Mediterranean, the devastation of Sicily, and descents even on the shores of Italy. In 442 Valentinian III, who had lately come of age and had begun to free himself from the regency of his mother Placidia, made a humiliating treaty with the Vandal king, acknowledging him to be the ruler of all the dominions he had conquered — not merely a 'federated' ally, as had been so often the case when the Empire acknowledged p109the kingship of a barbarian chief, but an absolute independent monarch. Thus the Western Empire was now shorn of most of its African diocese, of all the western islands, including Sicily, of most of Spain and Southern Gaul, and of Britain, while Attila was at this time lord of Dacia and was already devastating Moesia and Pannonia and Noricum and Rhaetia and much of Illyricum and Thrace.

During the next thirteen years — which were the last thirteen of the reign of Valentinian III and witnessed the meteoric career of Attila — Gaiseric seems to have been fairly quiet. He was doubtless consolidating his empire and waiting for an opportunity of extending his conquests beyond Africa, while his fleets swept the Mediterranean and his army was constantly adding to his territory towards Tripoli and the Great Syrtis.

In 455, the twenty-seventh of the forty-nine years of his reign, Gaiseric, with6 or without the invitation of the Empress Eudoxia, assembled a fleet and landed a band of his Vandals and Moors at the mouth of the Tiber. Rome was defenceless. There was no organized military force, and the whole city was in a state of frenzied and impotent excitement. Maximus, the successor of the murdered Valentinian, when attempting to flee was stoned to death by the mob, and his body was torn to pieces and thrown into the Tiber; and when three days later the column of Vandal warriors and their African auxiliaries approached the gates of the city it was met, not by a desperate populace determined to defend its hearths and homes, nor by a phalanx of trained fighters, but by a group of unarmed priests headed by a venerable bishop — the same Leo who three years ago had faced the savage Attila near the shores of ocean-waved Benacus, with what results we know. Gaiseric is said to have listened respectfully to the dignified and fearless eloquence of Leo and to have promised p110— what perhaps he could not wholly perform — that he would spare Rome's buildings from fire and the unresisting Romans from slaughter or torture. But no such marvel happened as in the case of Attila; no supernatural influence made Gaiseric recall his Vandals to their ships and set sail for Sicily or Carthage: he gave his word for plunder, and during the next fourteen days all the transportable treasures of Rome were continually being carried to the vessels that lay at the mouth of the Tiber.

The Vandals seem to have destroyed but little in Rome, but to their wholesale plundering may be attributed the disappearance of many celebrated works of Greek and Roman art, which, together with immense quantities of precious objects, such as jewels, gold and silver and bronzen decorations, furniture and costly broideries and vestments, were transported to Carthage — all except one shipload, which is said to have gone to the bottom. Much of this plunder found its way to Constantinople when, seventy-eight years later, Justinian's general Belisarius, captured Carthage, and its final destruction was due, not to Vandals, but to the French and Flemish and Venetian crusaders who sacked Constantinople in 1204. Perhaps, however, this fate was escaped (though a worse was suffered) by what to many may seem the most interesting of these treasures, namely, the spoils of the Jewish Temple. Nearly four hundred years earlier Titus had brought these from Jerusalem, and sculptured images7 of some of them may still be seen upon his triumphal arch at Rome. The seven-branched candlestick, the golden shewbread table, the silver trumpets, and numerous consecrated golden vases had been deposited (according to Josephus) in the Temple of Peace at Rome, and the Great Veil of the Temple together with the sacred Books of the Law were preserved in the Palace of the Caesars. A tradition asserts that these spoils were thrown into the Tiber when Maxentius was drowned at the Milvian p111Bridge. However, they probably did not suffer this fate, but were taken to Carthage, and some of them at least were transported by Belisarius to Constantinople. And their strange fortunes did not end there, if we may believe the contemporary historian Procopius, who asserts that Justinian, overcome by religious scruples, sent the 'utensils of the Jewish Temple' back to Jerusalem, where they were put in the treasure-chamber of a Christian church — perhaps the Church of the Resurrection ('Anastasis') which Helena or Constantine had built. If this be true, then we must fear that they fell later into the hands of the Saracens, and may be now in some remote Arabian or Syrian mosque. Scarcely less interesting is the fact that the Vandals carried off to Carthage (unless it went to the bottom of the sea) half — if not the whole — of the so‑called golden roof of Jupiter's temple on the Capitol, which was made of tiles of gilded bronze, and doubtless also the gilded statues and quadrigae — decorations which are said to have cost the Emperor Domitian as much as two and a half million pounds of our money.

Among the thousands of Roman captives, most of whom were sold into slavery, were three of special importance. 'The Empress Eudoxia,' Gibbon tells us, 'advanced to meet her friend and deliverer, but soon bewailed the imprudence of her own conduct. She was rudely stripped of her jewels, and together with her two daughters, the only surviving descendants of the great Theodosius [Pulcheria having died two years before], she was compelled to follow the haughty Vandal.'

It will be remembered (p14) that the elder of these daughters, Eudocia, married Hunneric, who succeeded his father Gaiseric in 477 — for the little crippled founder of the Vandal Empire reigned for just upon fifty years. The Empress herself with her younger daughter, Placidia, was ultimately (c. 463) sent to Constantinople, where the Eastern Emperor, Leo the Thracian, seems to have received her well — a proof, one might think, that she was not believed, or not known, to have invited Gaiseric to Rome. And a further proof would seem to be offered by the fact that her daughter Placidia p112was the wife of that Olybrius who was afterwards (472) Roman Emperor for a few weeks.

A year after the capture of Rome the Vandal fleet suffered a crushing defeat near Sardinia in a battle against the Roman fleet commanded by Ricimer, but the disaster does not seem to have affected Gaiseric seriously, for some twelve years later (468) a great crusade which was organized against him by both parts of the Empire proved a total failure, many of the 1113 vessels that formed the imperial fleet being destroyed by Gaiseric's fire-ships. The son of Gaiseric, Hunneric, who married the Theodosian princess Eudocia, maintained his father's empire on land and sea, and distinguished himself by his fierce persecution of Catholics — or perhaps of clerics of both parties, for he burnt the Arian patriarch of Carthage in the Carthaginian forum. As will be narrated in a later chapter, Gaiseric's empire came to an end in 533, when a successor of Hunneric, Gelimer by name, was vanquished by Justinian's general, Belisarius, who was so dramatically rapid and successful that on his capture of Carthage, it is said, he was able to sit down to the dinner prepared for the Vandal king.

The following passages, translated from Gregorovius (Die Geschichte der Stadt Rom, i.6), give some further interesting details connected with the capture of Rome by Gaiseric. After relating how the Empress Eudoxia and her two daughters were carried over to Africa by Genseric [Gaiseric] he adds: 'One of these, Eudocia, was compelled to give her hand to Hunnic, the son of Genseric, but after living at Carthage for sixteen years in hateful wedlock she managed to escape and, joining a company of pilgrims, after manifold adventures she reached Jerusalem. Here she soon afterwards dies, and was buried near her renowned grandmother of like name [i.e. Eudocia, originally Athenais, for whom see p95 n.]. The other daughter, Placidia, was liberated, and in Constantinople once more met her husband Olybrius, who was then a fugitive.' p113There is a church in Rome that is much visited on account of the wonderful statue of Moses — one of the figures of the gigantic monument of Pope Julius II which Michelangelo was never able to finish, and which he used to call 'the tragedy of my life.' This church is now called S. Pietro ad Vincula (in Vincoli). It was built by the Empress Eudoxia and originally called the Basilica Eudoxiana. Its second name refers to the following legend. 'Eudocia, the mother of the Empress Eudoxia,' says Gregorovius, 'brought from Jerusalem the chain of St. Peter (see Acts xii), of which she presented one half to Constantinople and sent the other half to her daughter in Rome. Here existed already the chain with which the apostle had been fettered before his martyrdom, and when Pope Leo [the same Pope Leo who faced Attila and Gaiseric] happened to hold the two chains close to each other they attached themselves insolubly together, forming a single chain of thirty-eight links. The miracle induced Eudoxia, then the consort of Valentinian III, to build this church, in which the chains8 are still preserved and revered.'

The spoliation of Rome by Gaiseric's followers, says Gregorovius, certainly seems to justify the proverbial use of the word 'vandalism,' for a great number of citizens were utterly ruined and thousands were enslaved. But the almost unanimous testimony of writers goes to prove that Gaiseric was no such 'vandal' as the modern Prussian. He kept his word in regard to the destruction by fire or other means of the churches and palaces and ancient monuments.

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THE END OF ROMULUS AUGUSTULUS

In the period between 455 and the deposition of Romulus Augustulus there are few events of any importance except perhaps Ricimer's naval victory over the Vandals, already related, and his sack of Rome in 472 — the third time it had been plundered in about sixty years. The contemporary p114chronicles consist almost entirely of continual tumults and insurrections and depositions and elections, the imperial puppets of the military dictators Ricimer, Gundobald, and Orestes following each other, with intervals of interregnum, so rapidly that in twenty years no less than nine so‑called Emperors assume the purple. The brief narrative given in the Historical Outline will therefore suffice, and I shall here only add a lively passage from Gibbon descriptive of the fate of the deposed Emperor, and a few words about the earlier life of Odovacar.

'In the space of twenty years since the death of Valentinian nine Emperors had successively disappeared, and the son of Orestes, a youth recommended only for his beauty, would be the least entitled to the notice of posterity, if his reign, which was marked by the extinction of the Roman Empire in the West, did not leave a memorable era in the history of mankind. . . . The son of Orestes assumed and disgraced the names of Romulus and Augustus. . . . The life of this inoffensive youth was spared by the generous clemency of Odoacer, who dismissed him with his whole family from the imperial palace, fixed his allowance at six thousand pieces of gold, and assigned the castle of Lucullus in Campania for the place of his exile or retirement. . . . The delicious shores of the Bay of Naples were [in earlier days] crowded with villas, and Sylla applauded the masterly skill of his rival [Marius], who had seated himself on the lofty promontory of Misenum, which commands on every side the sea and land as far as the boundaries of the horizon. The villa of Marius was purchased within a few years by Lucullus, and the price had increased from two thousand five hundred to more than fourscore thousand pounds sterling. It was adorned by the new proprietor with Grecian arts and Asiatic treasures, and the houses and gardens of Lucullus obtained a distinguished rank in the list of imperial palaces.9 When the Vandals p115became formidable to the sea-coast the Lucullan villa gradually assumed the strength and appellation of a strong castle, the obscure retreat of the last Emperor of the West. About twenty years after that great revolution it was converted into a church and monastery to receive the bones of St. Severinus.10 They securely reposed amidst the broken trophies of Cimbric and Armenian victories till the beginning of the tenth century, when the fortifications, which might afford a dangerous shelter to the Saracens, were demolished by the people of Naples.' (Gibbon, ch. xxxvi.)

Some believe this villa of Lucullus to have stood on Pizzofalcone, now an elevated quarter of Naples. But on Cape Misenum, which forms the Bay of Pozzuoli (Puteoli), are still to be seen relics of a great villa — doubtless the Lucullan villa in which the Emperor Tiberius was smothered, and probably the one in which also Romulus Augustulus ended his days.

Of Odovacar's earlier life some interesting details, more or less trustworthy, are given by Gibbon, Villari, and others — drawn from Jordanes and various old writers, one of whom was a disciple and biographer of St. Severinus.

The father of Odovacar and of his brother Onulf was, as we have seen, probably the Scirian or Herulian chieftain Edeco, who was sent by Attila to Constantinople as the fellow-envoy of Orestes, the father of Romulus Augustulus. After the death of Attila and the dispersion of the Huns the young Odovacar led a wandering life and may possibly, says Gibbon, have been the sea-rover of similar name who commanded a fleet of Saxon pirates on the northern seas. Anyhow, the scenes of his early adventures seem to have been in northern regions, for we hear of him, about 460, traversing Noricum (Styria, Salzburg, etc.) at the head of a band of barbarian soldiers of fortune who were bound for Italy, to seek service under Ricimer. Noricum had not yet recovered p116from the devastations of Attila and was in a state of anarchy. The only recognized authority was that of a hermit, St. Severinus, who from his cell seems to have upheld order in the country. The saint was visited, it is said, by Odovacar, who wished to learn the fortunes that awaited him in Italy. As the tall young warrior stooped to enter the lowly doorway, he was greeted by the holy man with these words: Vade ad Italiam. Vade, vilissimus nunc pellibus coopertus, sed multis cito plurima largiturus — 'Go on to Italy! Go on! Though now clad in this mean vesture of skins, thou wilt ere long ravish riches on many.' Not much later Odovacar was fighting in the ranks of Ricimer's army under the walls of Rome, and seems to have risen to high command and to popularity, for in 476 his soldiers — Herulians and other barbarians who formed the chief strength of the imperial army — formally elected him as their king by raising him on a shield (as was so often done when the army chose a new Emperor). It was as a king of barbarian warriors that he constituted himself supreme ruler of Italy. Thus he did not appropriate, but abolished, the imperial dignity and title.

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The Author's Notes:

1 For this name see note on Coin 16 of Plate I.

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2 This is stated by Procopius, the (Greek) writer to whom we shall soon be indebted for much information. Such charges easily arise. Stilicho, Boniface, Eudoxia, and Narses are all accused of this form of treason. Possibly the Vandals, who were Arians, were invited by the Donatists (a kind of Puritan sect) and other unorthodox Christians of Africa, who were fiercely persecuted by the Catholics — an act which I fear St. Augustine, so tolerant in early life, tried to justify.

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3 And yet I remember something of the kind in Central Africa, where I happened once to be in a stockade besieged by several thousand Machinga. They threw numbers of dead bodies in the stream (the Ruaha) which supplied us with water, and the stench of the decaying corpses of captives whom they massacred around the stockade was sickening.

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4 His writings — some hundreds in number, and some of considerable length, such as the Confessions and the City of God — were saved when Hippo was sacked.

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5 The new city (Colonia Carthago), built by Julius Caesar and Augustus did not stand, as some assert, at a distance from the old site (e.g. on the site of modern Tunis), for the extant Roman remains — the amphitheatre (with a column recording the martyrdom of SS. Perpetua and Felicitas), the great Thermae, the circus, and the reservoirs, which were supplied by the gigantic aqueduct that brought water from the hills •sixty miles distant — all lie within the ancient walls and close under the Byrsa, the hill of the acropolis (on which St. Louis died), and near the harbour and the old naval port (Cothon). This Roman city of Carthage, which was captured by Gaiseric and was the Vandal capital for nearly a century, is briefly described by several old writers, who speak of its magnificent buildings and its splendid circensian games, and also of a new harbour — perhaps that of the Stagnum, inside the tongue of land (like Porto Venere at Spezia) on which the Oppidum Ligulae or Taeniae stood. See Gibbon, ch. xxxiii, and Bosworth Smith's Carthage; and perhaps I may also refer to the Appendix on Carthage in my edition of Virgil's Aeneid, Book I (Blackie and Son).

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6 As Valentinian was killed early in 455 and Gaiseric landed at Ostia in June 455, Muratori, the great Italian archaeologist and historian (c. 1700), questioned the possibility of this; but Gibbon reminds us of Cato's figs, which he threw down on the floor of the Roman Senate-house, exclaiming: 'These were picked but three days ago at Carthage.' Moreover, Gaiseric doubtless had naval and land forces already close at hand, in Sicily.

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7 Rather roughly outlines. The candlestick has reliefs or engravings of animals, which is said by Gregorovius to be an infringement of Jewish rules (in spite of Solomon's lions and oxen and cherubim?)

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8 In the Calendar the first of August is the festival of 'St. Peter's Chains.' Filings from the chains were used by the Popes as very precious gifts.

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9 Lucullus had other villas of equal, though various, magnificence at Baiae, Naples, Tusculum, etc. He boasted that he changed his climate with the storks and cranes.

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10 For Severinus see next page. He died in 482. Six years later, says Gibbon, his body was brought to Italy, and 'the devotion of a Neapolitan lady invited it to the Lucullan villa, in the place of Augustulus, who was probably no more.'