A Short History of Italy (476-1900). Henry Dwight Sedgwick
With Theodoric's death ended the possibility of a Gothic monarchy. Even in his reign a process of deterioration had set in among the young generation. The decadent civilization of Italy wrought with fatal effect upon the simple Goths; the luxurious ways, the idle habits, even the refinements of the Latins, robbed them of their vigour and independence of character. The conquerors became divided among themselves; some inclined to the old Gothic traditions, some to the Latin ways. The royal house affords a conspicuous instance of this deterioration; the boy king succumbed to debauchery, his mother fell a victim to her Latin sympathies, and his cousin, last of the royal line, a student of literature and philosophy, showed himself perfectly incapable of action and was deposed by his soldiers. Justinian, the spider, had been biding his opportunity; now it had surely come. The Goths were disintegrated; the Papacy and Latin people were with him; and his great general, Belisarius, fresh from the brilliant conquest of the Vandal kingdom in Africa, was ready for the task. In 535 the war for the reconquest of Italy began.
The Goths were confused, divided, and without a leader, whereas Belisarius was a man of military genius, and his army was composed of veterans. The issue could not remain long in doubt. Naples, Rome, and finally Ravenna, fell, and the reconquest would have been complete, but that Justinian, jealous of a too successful general, recalled Belisarius. The Goths improved their respite, and their king, Totila, a very valiant soldier, for a time retrieved their falling fortunes. Justinian, however, who had a remarkable knowledge of men, appointed general-in-chief an extraordinary little old man, Narses, who, devoid of all military experience, had passed his life in the Imperial civil service. Narses handled his men as if he had been born and bred in a camp, and, after a comparatively brief campaign in which Totila was killed, compelled the last remnant of the Gothic army to surrender (553).
Thus ended the first attempt to erect a Barbarian kingdom in Italy. Its failure proved that without the support of the Catholic Church it was impossible to establish a kingdom of Italy, for the Church controlled the Latin people, and though these never fought, they had an hundred ways of helping friends and hindering foes.
[2] Rome in the Middle Ages, Gregorovius, vol. i, p. 296.
[3] Le invasioni barbariche, Villari, pp. 167, 168, translated.
CHAPTER III
THE LOMBARD INVASION (568)
The Imperial dominion over all Italy had lasted scarce a dozen years before another Barbarian nation, the Lombards, came and repeated the experiment in which the Goths had failed. The period of Lombard dominion lasted two hundred years (568–774). It is rather an uninteresting time; nevertheless, like most history, it has a dramatic side. It makes a play for four characters. The Lombards occupy the larger part of the stage, but the protagonist is the Papacy. The Empire is the third character. Finally, the Franks come in and dispossess the Lombards. The plot, though it must spread over several chapters, is simple.
The scene of the play was pitiful. For nearly twenty years (535–553) Italy had been one perpetual battlefield; whichever side won, the unfortunate natives had to lodge and feed a foreign army, and endure all the insolence of a brutal soldiery. Plague, pestilence, and famine followed. The ordinary business of life came to a stop. Houses, churches, aqueducts went to ruin; roads were left unmended, rivers undiked. Great tracts of fertile land were abandoned. Cattle roamed without herdsmen, harvests withered up, grapes shrivelled on the vines. From lack of food came the pest. Mothers abandoned sick babies, sons left their fathers' bodies unburied. The inhabitants of the cities fared no better. Rome, for instance, had been captured five times. Before the war her population had been 250,000; at its close not one tenth was left. It is said that in one period every living thing deserted the city, and for forty days the ancient mistress of the world lay like a city of the dead. With peace came some respite; but the frightful squeeze of Byzantine taxation was as bad as Barbarian conquest. Italy sank into ignorance and misery. The Latin inhabitants hardly cared who their masters were. They never had spirit enough to take arms and fight, but meekly bowed their heads. Such was the scene on which these three great actors, the Lombards, the Papacy, and the Empire, played their parts. It is now time to describe the actors. We give precedence to the Empire, as is its due.
This remnant of the Roman Empire, with its capital on the confines of Europe and Asia, was an anomalous thing. It is a wonder that it continued to exist at all. In fact, there is no better evidence of the immense solidity of Roman political organization than the prolonged life of the Eastern Empire. The countries under its sway, Thrace, Illyria, Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, had no bond to hold them together, except common submission to one central authority. By the end of the sixth century, the Roman Empire was really Greek. The Greek language was spoken almost exclusively in Constantinople, Latin having dropped even from official use. Yet the Empire was still regarded as the Roman Empire, and was looked up to by the young Barbarian kingdoms of Europe with the respect which they deemed due to the Empire of Augustus and Trajan. For instance, a king of the Franks addresses the Emperor thus: "Glorious, pious, perpetual, renowned, triumphant Lord, ever Augustus, my father Maurice, Imperator," and is content to be called in return, "Childipert, glorious man, king of the Franks." Yet it must be remembered that Constantinople at this time was the chief city of Europe. Greek thought and Greek art lingered there. Justinian had just built St. Sophia. In fact, Constantinople continued for centuries to be the most civilized city in the world.
The Imperial government was an autocracy; all the reins, civil, military, ecclesiastical, were gathered into the hands of the Emperor. Its foreign policy was to repel its enemies, Persians to the east, Avars to the north, Arabs to the south; its domestic policy was to hold its provinces together and to extort money. The Emperors, many of whom were able men, usually spent such time as could be spared from questions of national defence and of finance in the study of theology, for at Constantinople the problems of government were in great measure religious. Next to the actual physical needs of life, the main interest of the people was religion. A statesman who sought to preserve the Empire whole, of necessity endeavoured to hold together its incohesive parts by means of religious unity. This political need of religious unity is the explanation, in the main, of the frequent theological edicts and enactments.
The Emperors governed Italy, after the reconquest, by an Imperial lieutenant, the Exarch, who resided at Ravenna, under a system of administration preserved in mutilated form from times prior to the fall of Romulus Augustulus. An attempt was made to keep civil and military affairs separate, but the pressure of constant war threw all the power into military hands. The peninsula, or such part of it as remained Imperial after the Lombard invasion, was divided for administrative and military purposes into dukedoms and counties, which were governed by dukes and generals. The Byzantine officials were usually Greeks, bred in Constantinople and trained in the Imperial system; they regarded themselves as foreigners, and had neither the will nor the skill to be of use to Italy. Their public business was to raise money for the Empire, their private business to raise money for themselves.
In spite of these oppressions the Latin people preferred the Greeks to the Lombards, partly because of their common Greco-Roman civilization, partly because the Empire was still the Roman Empire; and this popular support stood the Empire in good stead in the long war which it waged with the Lombards. The Latin people did not fight, but they gave food and information. The Empire, however, was ill prepared for a contest. The recall of Narses removed from Italy the last bulwark against Barbarian invasion. The Imperial army was weak, cities were poorly garrisoned, fortifications badly constructed; and, but for the control of the sea which enabled the Empire to hold the towns on