Europe and the Faith Part 7

We have seen that such a picture is fantastic and, when it is accepted, destroys a man's historic sense of Europe.

We have seen that the barbarians who burst through the defence of civilization at various times (from before the beginnings of recorded history; through the pagan period prefacing Our Lord's birth; during the height of the Empire proper, in the third century; again in the fourth and the fifth) never had the power to affect that civilization seriously, and therefore were invariably conquered and easily absorbed. It was in the natural course of things this should be so.

I say "in the natural course of things." Dreadful as the irruption of barbarians into civilized places must always be, even on a small scale, the _conquest_ of civilization by barbarians is always and necessarily impossible. Barbarians may have the weight to _destroy_ the civilization they enter, and in so doing to destroy themselves with it. But it is inconceivable that they should impose their view and manner upon civilized men. Now to impose one's view and manner, _dare leges_ (to give laws), is to conquer.

Moreover, save under the most exceptional conditions, a civilized army with its training, discipline and scientific traditions of war, can always ultimately have the better of a horde. In the case of the Roman Empire the armies of civilization did, as a fact, always have the better of the barbarian hordes. Marius had the better of the barbarians a hundred years before Our Lord was born, though their horde was not broken until it had suffered the loss of 200,000 dead. Five hundred years later the Roman armies had the better of another similar horde of barbarians, the host of Radagasius, in their rush upon Italy; and here again the vast mult.i.tude lost some 200,000 killed or sold into slavery. We have seen how the Roman generals, Alaric and the others, destroyed them.

But we have also seen that within the Roman Army itself certain auxiliary troops (which may have preserved to some slight extent traces of their original tribal character, and probably preserved for a generation or so a mixture of Roman speech, camp slang, and the original barbaric tongues) a.s.sumed greater and greater importance in the Roman Army towards the end of the imperial period--that is, towards the end of the fourth, and in the beginning of the fifth, centuries (say, 350-450).

We have seen why these auxiliary forces continued to increase in importance within the Roman Army, and we have seen how it was only as Roman soldiers, and as part of the regular forces of civilization, that they had that importance, or that their officers and generals, acting as _Roman_ officers and generals, could play the part they did.

The heads of these auxiliary forces were invariably men trained as Romans.

They knew of no life save that civilized life which the Empire enjoyed.

They regarded themselves as soldiers and politicians of the State _in_ which--not _against_ which--they warred. They acted wholly within the framework of Roman things. The auxiliaries had no memory or tradition of a barbaric life beyond the Empire, though their stock in some part sprang from it; they had no liking for barbarism, and no living communication with it. The auxiliary soldiers and their generals lived and thought entirely within those imperial boundaries which guarded paved roads, a regular and stately architecture, great and populous cities, the vine, the olive, the Roman law and the bishoprics of the Catholic Church. Outside was a wilderness with which they had nothing to do.

Armed with this knowledge (which puts an end to any fantastic theory of barbarian "conquest"), let us set out to explain that state of affairs which a man born, say, a hundred years after the last of the mere raids into the Empire was destroyed under Radagasius, would have observed in middle age.

Sidonius Apollinaris, the famous Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand, lived and wrote his cla.s.sical work at such a date after Alaric's Roman adventure and Radagasius' defeat that the life of a man would span the distance between them; it was a matter of nearly seventy years between those events and his maturity. A grandson of his would correspond to such a spectator as we are imagining; a grandson of that generation might be born before the year 500. Such a man would have stood towards Radagasius' raid, the last futile irruption of the barbarian, much as men, old today, in England, stand to the Indian Mutiny and the Crimean War, to the second Napoleon in France, to the Civil War in the United States. Had a grandson of Sidonius traveled in Italy, Spain and Gaul in his later years, this is what he would have seen:

In all the great towns Roman life was going on as it had always gone on, so far as externals were concerned. The same Latin speech, now somewhat degraded, the same dress, the same division into a minority of free men, a majority of slaves, and a few very rich masters round whom not only the slaves but the ma.s.s of the free men also were grouped as dependents.

In every city, again, he would have found a Bishop of the Catholic Church, a member of that hierarchy which acknowledged its centre and heads.h.i.+p to be at Rome. Everywhere religion, and especially the settlement of divisions and doubts in religion, would have been the main popular preoccupation. And everywhere _save in Northern Gaul_ he would have perceived small groups of men, wealthy, connected with government, often bearing barbaric names, and sometimes (perhaps) still partly acquainted with barbaric tongues. Now these few men were as a rule of a special set in religion. They were called _Arians_; heretics who differed in religion from the ma.s.s of their fellow citizens very much as the minority of Protestants in an Irish county today differ from the great ma.s.s of their Catholic fellows; and that was a point of capital importance.

The little provincial courts were headed by men who, though Christian (with the Ma.s.s, the Sacraments and all Christian things), were yet out of communion with the bulk of their officials, and all their taxpayers. They had inherited that odd position from an accident in the Imperial history.

At the moment when their grandfathers had received Baptism the Imperial Court had supported this heresy. They had come, therefore, by family tradition, to regard their separate sect (with its attempt to rationalize the doctrine of the Incarnation) as a "swagger." They thought it an odd t.i.tle to eminence. And this little vanity had two effects. It cut them off from the ma.s.s of their fellow citizens in the Empire. It made their tenure of power uncertain and destined to disappear very soon at the hands of men in sympathy with the great Catholic body--the troops led by the local governors of Northern France.

We shall return to this matter of Arianism. But just let us follow the state of society as our grandson of Sidonius would have seen it at the beginning of the Dark Ages.

The armed forces he might have met upon the roads as he traveled would have been rare; their accoutrements, their discipline, their words of command, were still, though in a degraded form, those of the old Roman Army. There had been no breach in the traditions of that Army or in its corporate life.

Many of the bodies he met would still have borne the old imperial insignia.

The money which he handled and with which he paid his bills at the inns, was stamped with the effigy of the reigning Emperor at Byzantium, or one of his predecessors, just as the traveler in a distant British colony today, though that province is virtually independent, will handle coins stamped with the effigies of English Kings. But though the coinage was entirely imperial, he would, upon a pa.s.sport or a receipt for toll and many another official doc.u.ment he handled, often see side by side with and subordinate to the imperial name, the name of _the chief of the local government_.

This phrase leads me to a feature in the surrounding society which we must not exaggerate, but which made it very different from that united and truly "Imperial" form of government which had covered all civilization two hundred to one hundred years before.

_The descendants of those officers who from two hundred to one hundred years before had only commanded regular or auxiliary forces in the Roman Army, were now seated as almost independent local administrators in the capitals of the Roman provinces_.

They still thought of themselves, in 550, say, as mere provincial powers within the one great Empire of Rome. But there was now no positive central power remaining in Rome to control them. The central power was far off in Constantinople. It was universally accepted, but it made no attempt to act.

Let us suppose our traveler to be concerned in some commerce which brought him to the centres of local government throughout the Western Empire.

Let him have to visit Paris, Toledo, Ravenna, Arles. He has, let us say, successfully negotiated some business in Spain, which has necessitated his obtaining official doc.u.ments. He must, that is, come into touch with _officials_ and with the actual _Government_ in Spain. Two hundred years before he would have seen the officials of, and got his papers from, a government directly dependent upon Rome. The name of the Emperor alone would have appeared on all the papers and his effigy on the seals. Now, in the sixth century, the papers are made out in the old official way and (of course) in Latin, all the public forces are still Roman, all the civilization has still the same unaltered Roman character; has anything changed at all?

Let us see.

To get his papers in the Capital he will be directed to the "_Palatium_."

This word does not mean "Palace."

When we say "palace" today we mean the house in which lives the real or nominal ruler of a monarchical state. We talk of Buckingham Palace, St.

James' Palace, the Palace in Madrid, and so on.

But the original word _Palatium_ had a very different meaning in late Roman society. It signified the _official seat_ of Government, and in particular the centre from which the writs for Imperial taxation were issued, and to which the proceeds of that taxation were paid. The name was originally taken from the Palatine Hill in Rome, on which the Caesars had their private house. As the mask of private citizens.h.i.+p was gradually thrown off by the Emperors, six hundred to five hundred years before, and as the commanders-in-chief of the Roman Army became more and more true and absolute sovereigns, their house became more and more the official centre of the Empire.

The term "_Palatium_" thus became consecrated to a particular use. When the centre of Imperial power was transferred to Byzantium the word "_Palatium_"

followed it; and at last it was applied to _local centres_ as well as to the Imperial city. In the laws of the Empire then, in its dignities and honors, in the whole of its official life, the _Palatium_ means the machine of government, local or imperial. Such a traveler as we have imagined in the middle of the sixth century comes, then, to that Spanish _Palatium_ from which, throughout the five centuries of Imperial rule, the Spanish Peninsular had been locally governed. What would he find?

He would find, to begin with, a great staff of clerks and officials, of exactly the same sort as had always inhabited the place, drawing up the same sort of doc.u.ments as they had drawn up for generations, using certain fixed formulae, and doing everything in the Latin tongue. No local dialect was yet of the least importance. But he would also find that the building was used for acts of authority, and that these acts were performed in the name of a _certain person_ (who was no longer the old Roman Governor) _and his Council_. It was this local person's name, rather than the Emperor's, which usually--or at any rate more and more frequently--appeared on the doc.u.ments.

Let us look closely at this new person seated in authority over Spain, and at his Council: for from such men as he, and from the districts they ruled, the nations of our time and their royal families were to spring.

The first thing that would be noticed on entering the presence of this person who governed Spain, would be that he still had all the insignia and manner of Roman Government.

He sat upon a formal throne as the Emperor's delegate had sat: the provincial delegate of the Emperor. On official occasions he would wear the official Roman garments: the orb and the sceptre were already his symbols (we may presume) as they had been those of the Emperor and the Emperor's local subordinates before him. But in two points this central official differed from the old local Governor whom he exactly succeeded, and upon whose machinery of taxation he relief for power.

These two points were, first, that he was surrounded by a very powerful and somewhat jealous body of Great Men; secondly, that he did not habitually give himself an imperial Roman t.i.tle, but was called _Rex_.

Let us consider these points separately.

As to the first point, the Emperor in Byzantium, and before that in Rome or at Ravenna, worked, as even absolute power must work, through a mult.i.tude of men. He was surrounded by high dignitaries, and there devolved from him a whole hierarchy of officials, with the most important of whom he continually consulted. But the Emperor had not been officially and regularly bound in with such a Council. His formulae of administration were personal formulae. Now and then he mentioned his great officials, but he only mentioned them if he chose.

This new local person, who had been very gradually and almost unconsciously subst.i.tuted for the old Roman Governors, the _Rex_, was, on the contrary, a part of his own Council, and all his formulae of administration mentioned the Council as his coadjutors and a.s.sessors in administration. This was necessary above all (a most important point) in anything that regarded the public funds.

It must not be imagined for a moment that the _Rex_ issued laws or edicts, or (what was much more common and much more vital) levied taxation under the dominion of, or subject to the consent of, these great men about him.

On the contrary, he spoke as absolutely as ever the Imperial Governors had done in the past, and indeed he could not do otherwise because the whole machinery he had inherited presupposed absolute power. But some things were already said to be done "with" these great men: and it is of capital importance that we should note this word "with." The phrases of the official doc.u.ments from that time run more and more in one of half-a-dozen regular formulae, all of which are based upon this idea of the Council and are in general such words as these: "So and so, _Rex_, ordered and commanded (_with his chief men_) that so and so ... should be done."

As to the second point: we note the change of t.i.tle. The authority of the Palatium is a _Rex_; not a Legate nor a Governor, nor a man sent from the Emperor, nor a man directly and necessarily nominated by him, but a _Rex_.

Now what is the meaning of that word _Rex_?

It is usually translated by our word "King." But it does not here mean anything like what our word "King" means when we apply it today--or as we have applied it for many centuries. It does not mean the ruler of a large independent territory. It means a combination of two things when it is used to name these local rulers in the later Roman Empire. It means (1) The _chieftain_ of an auxiliary _group of soldiers_ who holds an Imperial commission: and it means (2) That man acting as a local governor.

Centuries and centuries before, indeed a thousand years before, the word _Rex_ had meant the chieftain of the little town and petty surrounding district of Rome or of some similar neighboring and small state. It had in the Latin language always retained some such connotation. The word "_Rex_"

was often used in Latin literature as we use the word "King" in English: _i.e._, to describe the head of a state great or small. But as applied to the local rulers of the fifth century in Western Europe, it was not so used. It meant, as I have said, Chieftain or Chief officer of auxiliaries.

A _Rex_ was not then, in Spain, or in Gaul, a King in our modern sense of the word: he was only the military head of a particular armed force. He was originally the commander (hereditary or chosen or nominated by the Emperor) of an auxiliary force serving as part of the Roman Army. Later, when these troops--originally recruited perhaps from some one barbaric district--changed by slow degrees into a body half police, half n.o.ble, their original name would extend to the whole local army. The "Rex" of, say, Batavian auxiliaries, the commander of the Batavian Corps, would probably be a man of Batavian blood, with hereditary position and would be called "_Rex Bataviorum_." Afterwards, when the recruiting was mixed, he still kept that t.i.tle and later still, when the _Batavii_, as such, had disappeared, his fixed t.i.tle would remain.

There was no similarity possible between the word _Rex_ and the word _Imperator_, any more than there is between the words "Miners' Union" or "Trade Conference" and the word "England." There was, of course, no sort of equality. A Roman General in the early part of the process planning a battle would think of a _Rex_ as we think of a Divisionary General. He might say: "I shall put my regulars here in the centre. My auxiliaries (Huns or Goths or Franks or what not) I shall put here. Send for their 'Rex' and I will give him his orders."

A _Rex_ in this sense was a subject and often an unimportant subject of the _Imperator_ or Emperor: the _Imperator_ being, as we remember, the Commander-in-Chief of the Roman Army, upon which inst.i.tution the Roman State or Empire or civilization had depended for so many centuries.

When the Roman Army began to add to itself auxiliary troops (drilled of course after the Roman fas.h.i.+on and forming one body with the Roman forces, but contracted for "in bulk," as it were) the chieftains of these barbaric and often small bodies were called in the official language, _Reges_. Thus Alaric, a Roman officer and nothing more, was the _Rex_ of his officially appointed auxiliary force; and since the nucleus of that force had _once_ been a small body of Goths, and since Alaric held his position as an officer of that auxiliary force because he had once been, by inheritance, a chieftain of the Goths, the word _Rex_ was attached to his Imperial Commission in the Roman Army, and there was added to it the name of that particular barbaric tribe with which his command had originally been connected. He was _Rex_ of the Roman auxiliary troops called "Goths."

The "_Rex_" in Spain was "_Rex Gotorum_," not "_Rex Hispaniae_"--that was altogether a later idea. The Rex in Northern France was not _Rex Galliae_, he was "_Rex Francorum_." In each case he was the _Rex_ of the particular auxiliary troop from which his ancestors--sometimes generations before--had originally drawn their Imperial Commission and their right to be officers in the Roman Army.

Thus you will have the _Rex Francorum_, or King of the Franks, so styled in the Palatium at Paris, as late as, say, 700 A.D. Not because any body of "Franks" still survived as a separate corps--they had been but a couple of regiments or so [Footnote: We have doc.u.mentary record. The greater part of the Frankish auxiliaries under Clovis were baptized with their General. They came to 4,000 men.] two hundred years before and had long disappeared--but because the original t.i.tle had derived from a Roman auxiliary force of Franks.

In other words, the old Roman local legislative and taxing power, the reality of which lay in the old surviving Roman machinery of a hierarchy of officials with their t.i.tles, writs, etc., was vested in the hands of a man called "_Rex_," that is, "Commander" of such and such an auxiliary force; Commander of the Franks, for instance, or Commander of the Goths. He still commanded in the year 550 a not very large military force on which local government depended, and in this little army the barbarians were still probably predominant because, as we have seen, towards the end of the Empire the stuff of the army had become barbaric and the armed force was mainly of barbaric recruitment. But that small military force was also, and as certainly, very mixed indeed; many a slave or broken Roman freedman would enlist, for it had privileges and advantages of great value; [Footnote: Hence the "leges" or codes specially regulating the status of these Roman troops and called in doc.u.ments the laws of the "Goths" or "Burgundians," as the case may he. There is a trace of old barbaric customs in some of these, sometimes of an exclusive rule of marriage; but the ma.s.s of them are obviously Roman privileges.] no one cared in the least whether the members of the armed forces which sustained society were Roman, Gallic, Italian or German in racial origin. They were of all races and origins.

Very shortly after--by, say, 600, at latest--the Army had become a universal rough levy of all sorts and kinds, and the restriction of race was forgotten save in a few customs still clinging by hereditary right to certain families and called their "laws."

Again, there was no conception of rebellion against the Empire in the mind of a _Rex_. All these _Reges_ without exception held their military office and power originally by a commission from the Empire. All of them derived their authority from men who had been regularly established as Imperial functionaries. When the central power of the Emperor had, as a fact, broken down, the _Rex_ as a fact administered the whole machinery without control.

But no _Rex_ ever tried to emanc.i.p.ate himself from the Empire or warred for independence against the Emperor. The _Rex_, the local man, undertook all government simply because the old Government above him, the central Government, had failed. No _Rex_ ever called himself a local _Imperator_ or dreamed of calling himself so; and that is the most significant thing in all the transition between the full civilization of the old Empire and the Dark Ages. The original Roman armies invading Gaul, Spain, the western Germanies and Hungary, fought to conquer, to absorb, to be masters of and makers of the land they seized. No local governor of the later transition, no _Rex_ of Vandal, Goth, Hun, Frank or Berber or Moor troop ever dreamt of such a thing. He might fight another local _Rex_ to get part of his taxing-power or his treasure. He might take part in the great religious quarrels (as in Africa) and act tyrannically against a dissident majority, but to fight against the _Empire_ as such or to attempt _conquest_ and _rule_ over a "subject population" would have meant nothing to him; in theory the Empire was still under one control.