The Roman Empire in the West had virtually run its course by the end of the fifth century AD, not so much conquered as absorbed by the barbarians. In the East, Constantinople, although at times no more than a city-state, held out for more than one thousand years.
■ Ancient Authorities
Our knowledge of the later Roman Empire depends appreciably on Christian writers. Some of them were well placed to write with authority. Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, to whom we have already referred, was on familiar terms with Constantine himself. Christian accounts, in their efforts to reconcile pagan history with Biblical chronology and theology, sometimes appear tortuous, though the coincidence of Christ’s birth with the Golden Age of Augustus and the foundation of the Empire suggested a providential interpretation for which no Christian writer could be blamed. In any case, we must not underestimate these ancient Christian historians by classing them with medieval chroniclers of ancient events. Jerome and Orosius, writing at the end of the fourth and beginning of the fifth century, were fully acquainted with the traditions of pagan culture and learning, which they criticized and adapted to their own purposes. They were living in a still substantially pagan world and were by no means isolated from its habits of thought.
Paganism did not, of course, end abruptly with the conversion of Constantine. A generation after his death, another pagan emperor, Flavius Claudius Julianus (Julian the Apostate) presided over the Roman world. His attempt to revive paganism can only be seen as a vain attempt to put the clock back, but his sentiments and attitudes are reflected in the work of pagan writers contemporary with him, notably in the History of Ammianus Marcellinus. Ammianus served under Julian both in Gaul and in the Persian campaign of AD 363, in which the Emperor died. Ammianus was a Greek of Antioch, but he eventually settled in Rome and wrote his History of Rome for Roman readers in Latin. The History, if it still existed in its entirety, would have begun with events of the year AD 96, where Tacitus left off. As it is, the surviving portion begins in 353 in the reign of Constantius II, the third son of Constantine the Great. The account of Julian’s Persian campaign is very detailed, but it is not wholly based on personal experiences; Ammianus shares at least one important source with Zosimus, whose narrative of the campaign is also detailed.
Apart from historical accounts, mention should also be made of the work of Vegetius Renatus, a fourth century civil servant who wrote a treatise on Roman military techniques. Vegetius, however, though an important source of military information, is chronologically imprecise. Also valuable is an extant copy of the Notitia Dignitatum, a list of civil and military appointments as they existed in the Eastern and Western partitions of the Empire at the end of the fourth century AD.
For later times, when Rome and the Western Empire had been transformed out of recognition by the infusion of barbarous populations, and particularly for the epoch of the great Byzantine Emperor Justinian (527–565), our main authority is the Greek historian Procopius. Procopius served in a logistic capacity on the staff of Belisarius, Justinian’s invincible general, and wrote a History of the Wars of Justinian, which is extant. In this work, he made use both of his own contact with eyewitnesses and of earlier historical sources.
A question now arises as to the chronological limits of our enquiry. Procopius’ History was continued by the poet Agathias. But Agathias died before he could proceed very far. For further records we have to depend on later Byzantine Greeks such as Genesius and Theophanes and a number of anonymous historians. Among the lost sources of later extant writers must be reckoned Olympiodorus and Priscus, whose diplomatic careers had brought them into close contact with the Huns.
In the West, the scholar and administrator Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus (490–583) has left us a summary of Roman history in Latin. His History of the Goths, though lost, was summarized in the extant account of Jordanes, probably a Romanized Goth himself, who lived about 550. This work also contains much information about the Huns, deriving, through Cassiodorus, from Priscus.
■ The End of the Roman Empire
The boy Romulus Augustulus is commonly said to have been the last Roman emperor in the West. He was deposed and superseded in AD 476 by a German officer called Odoacer, who had served under various Roman commanders. Odoacer was content to rule as king of Italy, recognizing the suzerainty of the eastern emperor in Constantinople, and unconcerned to claim the traditional imperial titles and honours for himself. Romulus, in any case, had been a usurper, raised to power by his father’s coup d’ état, and he was not recognized by the eastern emperor. However, the abandonment of the imperial title has a symbolic significance and provides historians of ancient Rome with a pretext for closing their account.
There is no obvious valedictory date for Roman history. Any event identified as terminal must in reality be a symbolic ending. For Graeco-Roman civilization did not collapse or explode. It was simply transmuted, by a gradual process, out of recognition; in many ways its institutions, assumptions and attitudes are still with us, having survived and revived in disguised and undisguised forms during the passage of the centuries. However, it is increasingly difficult, as time advances, for any history to be a world history, and our sense of form decrees that every story should have a beginning, middle and end. Apart from Romulus Augustulus, there are various possible stopping places for the historian of ancient civilization.
In 395, the great if somewhat bigoted Christian Emperor Theodosius died, bequeathing the Roman world to his two ineffectual sons Arcadius and Honorius, the first of whom exercised imperial power in the East, the second in the West: a situation which perpetuated discord between the two halves of the Empire. The administrative distinction foreshadowed in Diocletian’s arrangements gave political expression to the pre-existing cultural and linguistic difference between the Greek East and the Latin West. The difference has left its mark on ecclesiastical history. Perhaps, therefore, we might assign “the end of the Roman Empire” to the point at which it ceased to be a unity: ie, the death of Theodosius the Great.
On the other hand, the dignity and power of the Roman Empire were astonishingly restored by the conquests of the inspired eastern Emperor Justinian, who reigned as Flavius Petrus Sabbatius Justinianus, assuming the title of “Augustus” at his coronation in 527. Justinian extended his authority into Africa, Italy and Spain, where his armies prevailed against the Vandal and Gothic invaders. He also maintained alternating war and diplomatic relations with the Persians on his eastern frontier. Justinian’s services to the arts of peace were also outstanding. He initiated many works of architecture and civil engineering; his most magnificent achievement in this respect was, of course, the building of Constantinople’s great cathedral Santa Sophia (“The Holy Wisdom”). Justinian has also been immortalized by his contribution to the legal faculty. His codification of Roman Law was at least as monumental a work as the building of Santa Sophia. Unfortunately, his reign, like that of many Byzantine emperors, was troubled by theological disputes which obsessed not only the clergy but the population at large. As often in history, religious differences provided rallying points for political ambitions and aspirations. In Constantinople, opinions became war-cries, indicative of allegiance. If you backed the green charioteer in the circus, you believed certain things about the relationship of the Father to the Son and at the same time favoured one branch of the imperial family rather than another. Allegiances, on analysis, are always “package deals”, but Constantinople produced a reductio ad absurdum of the incorrigible human tendency to faction.
After Justinian’s death in 565, his far-flung Empire soon collapsed, and for a time Constantinople was well content only to defend its own walls. But again, great emperors like Heraclius (610–641) and Leo the Isaurian (717–740) saved civilization. The last of the western provinces to survive was the “exarchate” of Ravenna. This finally fell to the Lombards (Longobards), a Germanic people who had for long occupied the north Italian territory which still bears their name. Perhaps the fall of Ravenna in 751 is another suitable terminus for Roman history. It is, of course, equally possible to propose a much earlier date, and as such, the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410 suggests itself. But this again must be regarded as a purely symbolic event. Rome at this time was not even the capital of a prefecture or its subdivision, a diocese, as the civil departments of Diocletian’s and Constantine’s Empire had been termed. It was certainly not a city of any military consequence. It was simply, as ancient Athens had long ago become, a venerated tourist centre, almost a kind of museum.
■ The Eastern Front
Justinian was one of many emperors who would have been glad to live on terms of peaceful coexistence with the Persians – even if he had to pay for the privilege. But the Persians were not so minded. They well understood the manpower difficulties of their old adversaries, and while the eastern and western Empires were assailed by a multitude of barbarians on other frontiers, the Sassanid rulers saw fit to take their opportunity.
Since the defeat of Valerian and the retribution exacted in the name of Rome by Odenatus, the tide of war on the Euphrates frontier had ebbed and flowed recurrently. Galerius, Diocletian’s faithful “Caesar”, had at first suffered defeat (near Carrhae again) at the hands of the Persian king Narses. However, he amply avenged the disaster, and in the following year (AD 298) Rome’s eastern frontier was pushed still farther eastward, across Mesopotamia as far as the Tigris.
In the year 359, Shapur II, bent on restoring Persian fortunes, led his armies into Mesopotamia and captured several Roman frontier fortresses. Reacting to the eastern emergency, Constantius II was obliged to recall troops from Gaul, and the resentful army there proclaimed Julian, his “Caesar” on the western front, as “Augustus”. But frontier pressures being what they were, before the imperial rivals could find leisure to fight each other, Constantius died, and Julian was left as sole emperor to vindicate Roman power and prestige in the East. He led his army along the Euphrates, assisted by river transport, and at a point some 50 miles (80km) from Babylon, taking advantage of an ancient canal, conveyed his ships across to the Tigris. Here, however, instead of investing the Persian capital of Ctesiphon, he was lured into a further eastern march, in which lengthening lines of communication produced horrible privations for his troops. Even where the country was fertile, the enemy had devastated it. The Persians harassed him as the Parthians had harassed Roman armies in earlier times. In this campaign, Julian died of a wound, and the Persians soon recovered Mesopotamia from the inadequate officer whom his bereaved troops acclaimed as an imperial successor. Perhaps in this long story of border warfare, the Romans – or at any rate their Byzantine representatives – may he regarded as having the last word. For the Emperor Heraclius, after a protracted series of campaigns, overcoming a formidable alliance between the Persians and the barbarian Avars north of the Black Sea (626), finally destroyed the army of the Persian king Khusru (Chosroes II) in a battle near Nineveh.
The Persian Empire was by this time thoroughly weakened and already confronted by other enemies than Rome. In 454, the Persians had to meet an invasion of the White Huns, a branch of the Central Asiatic horde which already menaced a great part of the Eurasian continent. Perhaps if the Sassanids had not squandered their energies in futile wars with Rome for very limited gains, they would have been better able to resist the Arabs who, early in the seventh century, fired by the message of their Prophet, defied Persian Zoroastrianism with a fanaticism greater than its own.
Yet while it is possible to regard the wars of Romans and Persians as having a merely exhausting effect on both sides, these wars provided a training ground and were the source of many military lessons. The Romans conducted their frontier defence in the East with great sophistication, and the small fortress garrisons of the Euphrates frontier on more than one occasion showed their heroism. The Romans also learned much from Persian methods of fighting. Chain-mailed and plate-armoured horsemen, at the time when theNotitia Dignitatum was compiled, formed a regular part of the Roman army, a development which had started with Trajan. There seems to have been even an attempt to evolve a hybrid from the light mounted bowman and heavily armed lancer. For we learn of armoured archers on horseback (equites sagittarii clibanarii). There is, however, no record of their successful application in action.
■ Hostile and Friendly Goths
Of all the barbarian peoples who penetrated the Roman Empire in the later centuries of its history, the Goths made the deepest impression. They were a Germanic people of Scandinavian origin, who had begun their southward migration about the beginning of the Christian era. Evicted by Claudius “Gothicus” in the third century AD, they again exerted pressure in the fourth. Aurelian had allowed the West Goths (Visigoths) to settle north of the Danube in what had previously been the Roman province of Dacia. The East Goths (Ostrogoths), who had formed another group, had occupied the region of the Ukraine.
At the end of the fourth century, the Goths were under heavy pressure from the migratory movements of east European and Asiatic peoples, and sought the right to settle within Roman territory. The Roman Emperor Valens, then occupied in war against Persia, strove to ensure, through his commanders on the Balkan front, that the Goths should be disarmed before they were admitted as settlers, but he was unable to enforce this precaution. The unrelenting eastern pressures were driving successive waves of barbarian tribes across the Danube and the Rhine, and Valens was eventually obliged to return from the East in order to take command himself. In a violent battle near Adrianople (378) he was defeated by the immigrants and killed. His body was never recovered. Imperial prestige suffered badly. The Emperor’s cavalry had fled and his infantry been annihilated.
Even after this great Roman disaster, however, the Goths did not overrun the Empire. In the first place, they were unable to capture Roman fortified points, lacking both the skill and the equipment requisite for assault on fortifications. Secondly, the Romans were saved, as often in the past, by a great general who rallied their armies when the situation seemed desperate. The saviour on this occasion was Theodosius, a gifted officer raised to the imperial power by the surviving “Augustus”, Flavius Gratianus (Gratian), in order to cope with the emergency. Theodosius solved the manpower problem by enrolling friendly Christian Goths, already settled within the Empire, to resist the invaders. A treaty was at last made with the immigrants, according to which they were allowed to settle within the Empire, south of the lower Danube, as a confederate people under their own rulers, but serving under Roman officers in time of war. This was very much what they had wanted in the first place.
For Theodosius’ policy of absorbing the barbarians whom he could not evict, there was an ample precedent. Such absorption was in the essence of Roman political instinct; it can be instanced in the earliest days of the Republic and in the later recognition of client kingdoms. Faced with everlengthening numerical odds, caused not only by migratory pressure but also by expanding barbarian populations, the Roman Emperor could hardly have done better. It was indeed an imaginative solution. However, the point had been reached when absorption of barbarians could more appropriately be described as dilution of Romans among barbarians.
This situation, like the Persian Wars, led increasingly to the adoption of alien arms and armour by the imperial forces. In the time of Theodosius, the legionary, with his characteristic crested helmet and cuirass, was still a recognizable Roman type. But at the same time, legions were beginning to use exotic weapons such as the spatha – a long broadsword – which had in Tacitus’ day been employed only by foreign auxiliaries in the Roman army. Instead of the pilum, some infantry units were now armed with the lancea, a lighter javelin, to which extra precision and impetus could be given by the use of an attached sling strap. The terms spiculum and vericulum also indicate new types of missile weapons. The general tendency was towards lighter kinds of throwing spears.
■ Goths in Revolt
In AD 388, with the help of a German general, Theodosius had suppressed the rebellion of Magnus Maximus, a military pretender based on Britain, who had extended his power to Gaul and Spain and finally invaded the central provinces of the Empire. Theodosius’ German general then turned against him and supported another pretender in Rome, but the Emperor promptly marched from Constantinople into Italy and extinguished both the Roman rival and his German supporter. Events took this course because Theodosius was a strong emperor, able to fight his own wars. Under weak or pusillanimous emperors, the real power lay with their commanders-in-chief, and these commanders-in-chief were frequently of Germanic barbarian origin.
The Goths whom Theodosius had settled south of the Danube remained loyal to him during his lifetime. But their chief, Alaric, who had commanded a Gothic contingent during the Italian campaign, aspired to a higher appointment, and after Theodosius’ death he led his people in revolt. Under Alaric’s leadership, the Goths from the Danube settlement (Lower Moesia), after briefly threatening the walls of Constantinople, marched southward through Thrace and ravaged Macedonia and north Greece. They were checked, however, by the very able Western commander-in-chief, Stilicho, the only officer who was able to cope with Alaric. As a result of political intrigue, the Emperor Arcadius at Constantinople ordered Stilicho off Eastern territory. Stilicho obeyed, and Alaric was then free to continue his march southwards.
Athens paid the Goths to go away, but they invaded the Peloponnese. Arcadius, having had time to think again, appealed to Stilicho to come back – and Stilicho came. He reached Corinth with his army by sea, outmanoeuvred the Goths in the Peloponnese and forced Alaric to make peace. By a new treaty, the Goths received land to the east of the Adriatic, and Alaric was proclaimed king of Illyria. It was not a solution which was expected to last, and it did not.
Alaric’s attitude seems to have been in some ways ambiguous. He had at first been ambitious for promotion in the Roman army, but when disappointed had eagerly espoused the cause of nationalistic Gothic independence, which enjoyed a considerable vogue among the Balkan Visigoths over whom he ruled. The agreement which he reached with Stilicho seems temporarily to have satisfied both his Roman and his Gothic aspirations, for while recognized as king by the Gothic population, he was also granted the title of Master of the Armed Forces in Illyricum – a top Roman appointment.
“Master of the Armed Forces” was a title which had become important under Theodosius. In the time of Constantine the Great, the Master of the Horse (Magister Equitum) and Master of Foot (Magister Peditum) had been separate appointments. But Theodosius combined the two into a single command (Magister utrius quo militiae). Officers so ranking might be attached to the emperor’s staff or given authority over specified regions, as Alaric was in Illyricum. In the West, the divided command of horse and foot persisted until a later date, but under an emperor like Theodosius’ son Honorius, who was no soldier himself, the need for a unified command became imperative, and the commander-in-chief, who automatically received patrician social status on appointment, came to be known, curiously, as the Patrician. The old term patricius, originally applied to aristocratic members of the early Republic, had been revived by Constantine as an honorary title, but in the fifth century AD it was often held by successful barbarian officers and indicated supreme military command.
■ The Vandals
Stilicho, like Alaric, was an officer of barbarian origin. He differed in being not a Goth, but a Vandal. In the fifth century AD, the Vandals were a very active Germanic people, but in comparison with other barbarian nations, they were not numerous. Their earliest recorded homeland was in south Scandinavia but, migrating southwards, by the end of the second century AD they had become the restless western neighbours of Gothic settlements north of the Danube. A further migration was made as a result of pressure from the Huns, and in 406 the Vandals crossed the Rhine, ravaged and plundered Gaul, then made their way into Spain. In these wanderings, they were accompanied by the Alans from south Russia, but the Visigoths in Spain, acting under Roman influence, attacked them fiercely and virtually exterminated one section of their community.
In 429, under the most celebrated of their kings, Gaiseric, the Vandals, with their Alan associates, crossed into Africa. Their entire population is reported at this time to have been only 80,000 strong. Probably, not more than 30,000 of these will have been fighting men. The number is small when one remembers Ammianus Marcellinus’ instance of a single German tribe which in the course of 60 years had increased its population from 6,000 to 59,000. Gaiseric soon exerted full control over north Africa. Like other Germanic nations, the Vandals had made contact with Christianity before they entered Roman imperial territory. Like many other Germans, also, they had been converted to an heretical form of Christianity (Arianism). Gaiseric was an ardent Arian and persecuted the Catholic Christians of north Africa with fanatical zeal.
The Vandals were notable as a seagoing nation. Perhaps the experience of the African immigration opened their eyes to the further possibilities of water transport. Gaiseric acquired a fleet and used it for the purpose of widespread piracy, against which the western Mediterranean, by the end of the fifth century, had absolutely no protection. It may seem surprising that a nation with a long history of overland migration should have developed in this way, but the Goths, who had similarly reached the Mediterranean in the third century, had quickly adapted themselves to maritime conditions and launched sea-borne raids on the Black Sea and further south into the Aegean.
Certainly, the seafaring habit seems to have taken deep root among the Vandals and it perhaps antedates even the Vandal occupation of Africa. At the end of the fourth century, Stilicho, adhering to the traditional methods of his compatriots, transported his army to Corinth by sea. After he had come to terms with Alaric in 397, he dispatched another sea-borne force to north Africa to quell a rebellion in that province. Clearly, Rome’s great Vandal generalissimo was in undisputed command of central and western Mediterranean waters. History suggests that Stilicho and Gaiseric studied in the same strategic school.
The weakness of the Vandals, of course, lay in the paucity of their numbers, and in this they may be contrasted sharply with many other barbarian nations, who could rely on numbers to compensate for lack of military skill and sophisticated armament. For this reason, the renowned Byzantine general, Belisarius, acting on behalf of the Emperor Justinian, was able in the sixth century to cross with a fleet into Africa and crush the Vandal kingdom completely. It never revived. We should also notice, in this context, that Greek seafaring tradition in the East, given full support from Constantinople, was still able to provide a bulwark against organized piracy during centuries when the seas and shores of the West were hopelessly exposed to such attackers.
■ The Invasion of Italy
Stilicho, by his treaty with Alaric in Greece, had bought himself time to deal with other enemies – notably some north African rebels. Alaric, for his part, had obtained an excellent springboard for attack on Italy. In addition, Illyricum contained mines and arsenals from which his troops could be supplied. His offensive in the year AD 400 was well planned and had been preceded by negotiations with Ostrogothic settlers north of the Alps. As Alaric advanced round the Adriatic his allies descended from the mountains. But Stilicho was able to deflect this pincer movement, which was perhaps mistimed, and by prompt action compelled the northern enemies to retire before he confronted Alaric.
Like other barbarians, the Goths found difficulty in penetrating fortifications. Even so, the Emperor Honorius, placing little reliance on his fortress of Asta (Asti), abandoned the area of Milan and took up residence in Ravenna, where the marshes provided additional security. Stilicho, after a campaign of much manoeuvring and a fierce battle at Pollentia, inflicted a final defeat on Alaric near Verona in 403, thus securing the return of the Gothic commander and his army to Illyricum. In the following year, the Ostrogoths again attacked from the north, and on this occasion Stilicho defeated them decisively, sold many of the survivors into slavery and enrolled others in his own army.
In 407, another military usurper emerged from Britain, while the activities of Vandals and other barbarians in Gaul occupied Stilicho’s attention. Alaric, alive to his opportunity, supported by fresh Danubian allies, led his people round to Noricum (Austria), north of the Alps, and received from the Emperor that territory, with a substantial payment in gold, as the price of quiescence at a difficult moment. The Emperor was closely connected by marriage with Stilicho, who virtually controlled the Western Empire during these years. But the great general suddenly fell from power, and Honorius foolishly had him executed.
There was now no commander in the West capable of placing any restraint upon Alaric, who at once asked for more gold and more land. When these were refused, he invaded Italy and marched on Rome. He raised the siege of the city when the Emperor temporized, but soon renewed it when negotiations broke down. He was thus enabled to impose an emperor of his own choosing in Rome, but quickly became disappointed with his choice and impatiently deposed the puppet. Further attempts to negotiate with Honorius at Ravenna proved fruitless, and after a third siege Alaric’s men were surreptitiously admitted to Rome by some Gothic slaves within the walls. The Gothic army plundered the city for three days, but did comparatively little damage. With Stilicho gone, the sea was open to Alaric, and he aimed at North Africa. Unfortunately for his purpose, the fleet which he had assembled at Rhegium was destroyed by a storm, and he himself died soon after (410). He was buried in a river bed to ensure that his last resting place should not be disturbed.
The Gothic capture of Rome hardly amounted to a “sack”. There was certainly enough booty left to reward the efforts of Gaiseric’s Vandal raiders when they arrived by sea and captured the city in 455. Gaiseric carried away the Jewish temple treasures which Titus had appropriated four centuries earlier. Ships, as the Vandals well understood, were useful for the transport of moveables. The Vandal king also made prisoner the two daughters of the Emperor Valentinian III, one of whom he married to his son. The other, apparently not required, was sent home.
Imaginative illustrations of Rome’s barbarian invaders easily leave the impression that they swept into the Empire with irresistible verve in a series of cavalry charges. Consideration of the foregoing facts, however, suggests a different view. Stilicho and Alaric, in their wars, were extremely cautious, frequently preferring manoeuvre and negotiated peace to pitched battle and bloody victory. Alaric, like Stilicho, was one of Theodosius’ old officers, and his outlook on warfare was that of a professional soldier. Moreover, the people over whom he ruled, though they invaded Italy, as the legions of rebellious Roman generals had often done in the past, were not invaders of the Empire. They were simply a dissatisfied immigrant community, asserting what they considered their rights as members of the Roman world.
■ The Fate of Roman Britain
In considering these years, when chaos engulfed the centre of the Empire, we may understandably feel curiosity as to the fate of Britain, situated at the circumference. In AD 410, answering a request for military aid against barbarian invaders, Honorius advised the Roman community of Britain to arrange for its own defence. Like other parts of the Empire, Britain was under attack, and the attackers were no longer merely the Picts (Painted-men). They were Germanic tribes from Frisia and the mouth of the Rhine. The term “Saxon” at first denoted a particular tribe; later, it was applied with little discrimination to Germanic peoples who inhabited the regions around the mouth of the Rhine and the North Sea coast.
At the end of the third century, Constantius, father of Constantine the Great, after eliminating Carausius and his successor, improved a chain of forts, which Carausius and other commanders had established, to defend the “Saxon Shore” – ie, the south and east coasts of Britain and the Channel coast of Gaul. The idea of such a defence may indeed have originated with Carausius. The Saxon-shore forts were much bigger than earlier Roman forts in Britain, and they relied upon massive masonry, not merely stone-faced earthworks. Imposing ruins are still visible and nine British forts are listed in the Notitia Dignitatum. Ammianus Marcellinus mentions that these defences were placed under the command of a “Count of the Saxon Shore” (Comes litoris Saxonici), while in the north, the Wall was the responsibility of the “Duke” (dux) of Britain who had his headquarters at York. In the time of Diocletian and Constantine, dux, that general term for a leader or guide, had become the specific title of an officer in charge of frontier defence. It was later applied to the chiefs of barbarian tribal groupings too small to qualify for rule by kings. Similarly, comes, meaning literally a “companion”, had denoted membership of the emperor’s staff. Under Constantine, it became a title for high-ranking officers and officials.
In 367, Saxons, acting in collusion with Scots (who came originally from Ireland) and Picts, overran Britain. Like other barbarians, they failed to capture the strongly fortified towns, but damage done to a previously flourishing rural community was severe, and the Duke of Britain and the Count of the Saxon Shore were both killed. The situation was restored by the valiant Roman general Theodosius (father of the Emperor Theodosius the Great), who drove out the barbarians, rebuilt fortifications, and established a valuable line of signal stations on the Yorkshire coast to give advance warning of sea-borne attack.
After two imperial pretenders, Magnus Maximus (385) and the upstart Flavius Claudius Constantinus (407) had drafted troops away from the island in support of their southward adventures, Britain was again left virtually undefended, though in the intervening period (395) Stilicho had done something to reorganize garrison forces. After Honorius’ negative reaction in 410, we can rely on little but archaeological evidence for our knowledge of Roman military administration in the island.
To this obscure epoch must be assigned the exploits of the legendary King Arthur – in so far as they have any real historical basis. A Romano-British chief named Artorius perhaps resisted the Saxon invaders. Gildas, the Celtic monk, writing in Latin in the sixth century, records a great British victory in the Wessex area in about AD 500, and Nennius, a ninth-century chronicler, associates this victory with the name of Arthur, which he gives as that of a victorious general, not a king.
■ The Defeat of the Huns
In AD 446, Roman Britain made its last known appeal for imperial help to Flavius Aëtius, the commander-in-chief (Patrician) of the Emperor Valentinian III, grandson of the great Theodosius. But Aëtius was already heavily engaged against other barbarians – who were soon to include the Huns. It was, of course, inevitable that the Huns, whose westward progress had precipitated the migration of other peoples, should sooner or later appear in their own persons. The reputation of the Huns is well known. Their cruelty was often without malice, and their malice was too terrible to contemplate. Nevertheless, in their early contacts with the Roman world, they had sometimes been enrolled in the imperial service, and Stilicho had been served by a very faithful Hunnish bodyguard.
The boastful menaces of Attila, who became sole king of the Huns in 445, suggest something of a buffoon but, far from that, he must have been a commander of very shrewd ability. Under his rule, the Huns dominated and terrorized wide tracts of Europe and Asia, but their power collapsed after his death. Apart from Attila’s leadership, the main strength of the Huns, as of other barbarians, lay in their immense number, swollen as it was in their case by the addition of many subject peoples. They were a Mongoloid nation of hunters and shepherds from the steppes of central Asia and, as one might expect, they extensively employed the horse and the bow for warlike as well as peaceful purposes. But the trappings of their horses were of gold and their sword hilts were inlaid with gold and precious stones. Indeed, they had an insatiable appetite for gold, and were usually willing to refrain from hostilities if offered sufficient of it. Attila had inherited from his father a royal capital “city” in Pannonia (Hungary). It was built of wood but contained a stone bath-house. From this base, Attila was able to threaten the Bosphorus. The Emperor paid him gold and ceded him territory, but though the Huns had ravaged the Eastern Empire, they could not hope to prevail against the impregnable walls of Constantinople.
Meanwhile. the Western Emperor’s sister, Honoria, who for her past sins had been relegated by pious relatives to a condition of perpetual chastity, for which she had no vocation, offered herself secretly to Attila, and he would have been willing to concede her the status of concubine in return for a dowry of half the Western Empire. But these terms were rejected and Attila unleashed an attack against Gaul and Western Europe.
Aëtius, the Patrician, as commander-in-chief, now formed an alliance with his old Visigothic enemies in Gaul, and halted Attila’s advance at Orléans, The combined Imperial and Gothic forces then inflicted a bloody defeat upon the Huns in the “Catalaunian Plain”, somewhere near Châlons. This battle has been reckoned as one of the most decisive in the world’s history, but considering its violence, it decided very little. The defeated enemy was not pursued. Attila retreated to his wooden capital in Pannonia and the next year launched a major offensive into Italy. He requisitioned siege-engines with their operators, and after a three-month investment utterly destroyed Aquileia. Some fugitives escaped to the Adriatic lagoons, where their refugee settlement eventually gave rise to the city of Venice.
Attila was now met near Lake Garda by Pope Leo (the Great) who dissuaded him from marching southward against Rome. The Huns, though not Christians, tended to regard any religion with awe, and much was due to the personality of Leo, whose deterrent influence was again successfully exercised three years later when Gaiseric’s Vandals entered Rome. At the same time, Attila exacted a promise that Honoria and the treasure which constituted the moveable portion of her dowry should be surrendered to him, failing which, hostilities would be renewed. However, before the promise could be fully carried out, he died suddenly, having burst a blood vessel on his first night with a new concubine (453). Without their leader, the Huns ceased to be a serious menace and were soon annihilated, dispersed or expelled by the combined efforts of Goths and other Germanic barbarians who opposed them.
Aëtius, who defeated Attila in Gaul, was the son of a Count (comes) of Africa. In his youth, he had been a hostage among the Huns and during his sojourn among them learnt much of their customs, establishing some friendship with them. Indeed, Aëtius originally imposed his power at Ravenna with the help of Hunnish auxiliaries, and expectation that he might again need their aid explains his reluctance to pursue them after his great victory in Gaul.
Aëtius was a colourful character. History credits him, during the confused civil strife that followed Honorius’ death, with having killed one of his professional rivals in single combat. He was eventually stabbed to death by his imperial master, Valentinian, whose jealousy recalls that of Honorius for Stilicho.
■ The Defences of Constantinople
Although the Goths and the Huns were able to exact ever-increasing payments in gold as an inducement to spare the territories of the Eastern Empire, both Alaric and Attila realized that they had little prospect of capturing Constantinople itself, and they did not waste time and effort in the attempt. We have already drawn attention to the ideal strategic position of the city. A plan of Constantinople will show it to be built on a roughly triangular promontory: the profile of a vulture-like beak, across the landward base of which a heavily fortified wall extends from the Sea of Marmara in the south to an arm of the Bosphorus (The Golden Horn) in the north.
The original wall of Constantine, damaged by an earthquake in AD 401, was promptly repaired by Arcadius, but during the minority of his son and successor Theodosius II, the Praetorian Prefect Anthemius demolished the old walls and built new (413). These ramparts were again ruined by an earthquake, but in the year 447 they were rebuilt in three months. Situated one mile to the west of the line traced by Constantine, Theodosius’ walls enclosed a city of double the area, and in the space between the old and the new walls the Imperial Gothic guard was stationed.
The outer face of the fortifications was protected by a broad, deep moat. An attacker who overcame this obstacle would then be confronted by a breastwork approximately equal to his own height, and some 40 feet (12m) behind this, as an inner defence, stood a chain of towers, linked by a curtain wall 26 feet (8m) high. The fourth line of defence was the main city wall itself, lying back at a further distance of 66 feet (20m), 43 feet (13m) in height, and fortified by great towers from which enfilading showers of missiles could be directed into the flanks of the assailants. Other walls of solid masonry defended the perimeter of the city where it was adjacent to the sea. These embraced the whole headland and connected with the land walls at either end. They consisted, like the land walls, of a double rampart, fortified by towers at brief intervals. The Golden Horn itself was guarded against enemy naval attack by a chain boom.
However, the walls of the capital might not have been enough to defend its inhabitants, if they had not given a high priority to naval strength. The Byzantine fleet made use mainly of light galleys (dromones in Greek), the equivalent of theliburnae used by Augustus. Clearly, with their ever-pressing need to conserve manpower, the Eastern emperors could not have afforded to develop the multireme leviathans of earlier times. The Byzantine vessels also made considerable use of sails, and they often featured several masts, which – contrary to earlier Roman and Greek practice – were not dismounted during action. From their Arab enemies of a later date, the Byzantines also adopted the triangular lateen sail.
Relying, in the tradition of Graeco-Roman civilization, on science and technique to defeat overwhelming enemy odds, the Byzantines produced a secret weapon, which for many centuries gave them a decisive advantage. This was a type of flame missile, which was used with devastating effect against enemy ships. Many combustible mixtures employed in the Middle Ages were loosely termed “Greek Fire”. The precise Byzantine compound was based on ingredients which are unknown, for it was a well-kept secret, but the characteristic of the original Greek Fire was that it ignited – or was at least not quenched – on contact with water. This suggests that quicklime was an element, and it must also be remembered that petroleum, known to the Greeks as naphtha (Persian naft), was available in surface deposits in Babylonia. The invention of Greek Fire was attributed to Callinicus, a Greek engineer from Heliopolis in Syria, who lived in the reign of the Emperor Constantine Pogonatus (668-685). Greek Fire was sometimes projected in containers in the manner of grenades, but it was also released through tubes, with which Byzantine warships were specially fitted.
Apart from the defence of Constantinople itself, the Byzantines maintained a flotilla to patrol the Danube, and behind this river frontier Justinian built a four-line system of nearly 300 fortresses and watchtowers to defend the Empire at what had for many centuries proved to be its most vulnerable point.
It should be noticed that even in Justinian’s day, when Constantinople was the focus of an expansionist strategy which emulated the era of the first Augustus and his immediate successors, war on some fronts remained defensive. While Africa was being won from the Vandals, Italy from the Ostrogoths, and southern Spain from the Visigoths, repeated military efforts in the East were necessary to hold the Sassanid Persians at bay. Inevitably, with the death of Justinian, the Byzantines, deprived of dynamic leadership, reverted to a defensive strategy, which in the centuries that followed was often barely enough to save the city itself from occupation by invading forces.
Despite Justinian’s Roman sentiments and aspirations, the army which manned his defences and fought his wars was far from being Roman in character. It was not any longer primarily an army of legionary foot soldiers, but of heavily mailed cavalry on the Persian model, and the weapons on which it chiefly relied were the lance and the bow. Even in the infantry, archers and javelin-throwers predominated. Light cavalry was supplied by Huns and Arabs. There was, of course, nothing un-Roman in using barbarian auxiliaries to combat barbarian enemies. Julius Caesar had done as much. It was simply a question of degree. Indeed, many of the gradual changes in equipment may be traced back to the second century AD.
■ What Happened in the West
No “Dark Age” closed the history of the Eastern Roman Empire. When Turkish cannon at last breached the walls of Constantinople in 1453, the traditions of the ancient world, which had until then in many ways persisted, were suddenly obliterated by the forces of medieval Islam. Historians can point to no hiatus between the continuation of antiquity and the dawn of the Middle Ages in this area. In the West, the story was quite different. Odoacer, the first king of Italy, was a moderately enlightened ruler. But in 489, Theodoric the Ostrogothic chief, ambiguously encouraged by the Eastern Emperor Zeno, invaded Italy, besieged Ravenna for three years, came to terms with Odoacer, and then had him treacherously murdered. Theodoric, despite this, was a beneficent if illiterate ruler. He believed in the vigour of the Germanic nations and deplored their disunity. At the same time, he felt that the older inhabitants of the Empire were necessary for administrative duties. He employed the philosopher Boethius as a top civil servant and, after executing him on ill-founded suspicions, filled his place with the historian Cassiodorus. Theodoric’s attitude, in so far as it divorced power from education, foreshadowed the medieval situation in which unlettered rulers employed clerics – as the word indicates – as clerks.
The Gothic kingdom of Italy fell a prey to family dissension after Theodoric’s death, and Justinian had a pretext for intervention. The conquest of Italy by Belisarius was followed by a period of Gothic resurgence which lasted for about 13 years, but the Ostrogoths were finally driven out by Justinian’s Armenian general Narses (553). Nobody knows where they went. Italy was now governed by one of Justinian’s “exarchs” (exarchoi), as Byzantine provincial governors were called, and even when the briefly reestablished Roman Empire had crumbled after Justinian’s death, Ravenna and its adjacent territory remained under imperial control, while the Pope still acted as an imperial officer, governing the “duchy” of Rome. The Lombards, who in 568 had settled in north Italy, already aspired to dominate the whole peninsula, and for a long time the Popes, in self-defence, maintained close ties with Constantinople. However, the inevitable dispute about secular and spiritual power arose, and, after a Byzantine fleet, dispatched in 732 to reconquer Italy and effect the arrest of Pope Gregory III, had been wrecked, the Bishops of Rome, still threatened by the Lombards, found new protectors in the kings of the Franks. The Franks were northern Germanic barbarians who had remained pagan for longer than other Germanic peoples farther south. The latter, however, as Arians, were converts to an heretical form of Christianity. The Franks, when at last they became Christians, were received into the Catholic Church, in communion with Rome, and their political ties with Rome were correspondingly close. Consequently, when neither oppression nor protection was any longer to be expected from Constantinople, when Ravenna had fallen to the Lombards, and when Papal authority was assailed by strangely anachronistic revivalist movements in Rome itself, Pope Leo III, on Christmas Day, AD 800, in Rome, crowned his champion, the Frankish king Karl (Charlemagne), as Holy Roman Emperor, adding the title “Caesar Augustus”. One is familiar with the observation that the Holy Roman Empire was in no sense holy, Roman, nor an Empire. Indeed, few temporal authorities can convincingly lay claim to holiness, but the remaining two-thirds of Voltaire’s epigram may equally be applied to the Ravenna régime, in the years when Honorius or Valentinian III pretended to imperial sovereignty in the name of Rome.
Who, indeed, was a Roman? Not merely a citizen of that little town on the Tiber which in the sixth century BC had sided with Etruria against Latin compatriots; not, perhaps, even the Italian ally who had received Roman citizenship after the Social War in the first century BC. Again, it is hard to identify Roman nationality with the wide imperial community which had been admitted to citizenship by the enactment of Caracalla, let alone that same community when it had been permeated by barbarian invaders and immigrants.
Just as it is difficult to say who was a Roman, so it is hard to identify a Roman army, or name a date at which Roman armies ceased to exist. The “dukes” and “counts” who had been imperial officers under Constantine the Great, or under barbarian allied kings and war-lords, gradually bequeathed their titles to the hereditary aristocracies of the Middle Ages. But the old forms and the old ways of thinking died slowly. Theodoric, before his invasion of Italy, had been invested with the ranks of Patrician and consul. As late as 754, the Pope, acting in effect as an imperial officer, conferred on the Frankish king Pepin the title of Patrician.
If we choose to look back, the whole history of the Graeco-Roman world may be regarded as one long war against barbarism, in which the internecine conflicts of Greek city states, of Roman generals and imperial pretenders are merely frustrating and debilitating interludes. The Greeks and Romans sometimes saw war against barbarism as a war for liberty, yet liberty was necessarily sacrificed in order to wage it. It was, in fact, a war for literacy rather than for liberty, and were it not for the Romanized Christian clergy and the barbarian awe of religion in general, it would, in the West, have been completely lost. However, protraction of the struggle until such time as barbarism, like civilization, had been diluted, suggests a kind of victory – at any rate, a draw.