The World's Greatest Books - Volume 11 Part 18

The persecution of heresy was carried out by Constantine with all the ardour of a convert. An edict confiscated the public property of the heretics to the use either of the revenue or the Catholic Church, and the penal regulations of Diocletian against the Christians were now employed against the schismatics. The Donatists, who maintained the apostolic succession of Donatus, primate of Carthage, as opposed to Caecilian, were suppressed in Africa, and a general synod attempted to regulate the faith of the Church.

The subject of the nature of the divine Trinity had early given rise to discussion. Of the three main heretical views, that of Arius and his disciples was the most prevalent. He held in effect that the Son, by whom all things were made, though He had been begotten before all worlds, yet had not always existed. He shone only with the reflected light of His Almighty Father, and, like the sons of the Roman emperors, who were invested with the t.i.tles of Caesar or Augustus. He governed the universe.

The Tritheists advocated a system which seemed to establish three independent deities, while the Sabellian theory allowed only to the man Jesus the inspiration of the divine wisdom. The consubstantiality of the Father and of the Son had been established by the Council of Nicaea in 325, but the East ranged itself for the most part under the banner of the Arian heresy. At first indifferent, Constantine at last persecuted the Arians, who later, under Constantius, were received into favour.

Constantinople, which for forty years was the stronghold of Arianism, was converted to the orthodox faith under Theodosius by Gregory n.a.z.ianzen.

_IV.--The Conversion of the World_

The pagan religion was finally destroyed about the year 390, and the faintest vestiges of it were not visible thirty years later. Its influence, however, might be observed in many of the ceremonies which were introduced into the Church, and the wors.h.i.+p of martyrs and relics seemed to revive a system of polytheism by the wors.h.i.+p of a hierarchy of saints. Among the most famous of the dignitaries of the Church at this period was the Archbishop of Constantinople, who was distinguished by the epithet of Chrysostom, or the Golden Mouth. He attempted to purify the eastern empire, excited the animosity of the Empress Eudoxia, and died in exile in 407.

The monastic system had been founded by Antony, an illiterate youth, in the year 305, by the establishment on Mount Cobyim, near the Red Sea, of a colony of ascetics, who renounced all the business and pleasures in life as the price of eternal happiness. A long series of hermits, monks, and anach.o.r.ets propagated the system and, patronised by Athanasius, it spread to all parts of the world.

The monastic profession was an act of voluntary devotion, and the inconstant fanatic was threatened with the eternal vengeance of the G.o.d whom he deserted. The monks had to give a blind submission to the commands of their abbot, however absurd, and the freedom of the mind, the source of every generous and rational sentiment, was destroyed by the habits of credulity and submission. In their dress and diet they preserved the most rigorous simplicity, and they subsisted entirely by their own manual exertions. But in the course of time this simplicity vanished, and, enriched by the offerings of the faithful, they a.s.sumed the pride of wealth, and at last indulged in the luxury of extravagance.

The conversion of the barbarians followed upon their invasion of the Roman world; but they were involved in the Arian heresy, and from their advocacy of that cause they were characterised by the name of heretics, an epithet more odious than that of barbarian. The bitterness engendered by this reproach confirmed them in their faith, and the Vandals in Africa persecuted the orthodox Catholic with all the vigour and cruel arts of religious tyranny.

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire--IV

_I.--Theodoric the Ostrogoth_

After the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, an interval of fifty years, until the memorable reign of Justinian, is faintly marked by the obscure names and imperfect annals of Zeno, Anastasius, and Justin, who successively ascended the throne of Constantinople. During the same period Italy revived and nourished under the government of a Gothic king, who might have deserved a statue among the best and bravest of the ancient Romans.

Theodoric the Ostrogoth, the fourteenth in lineal descent of royal line of the Amali, was born (455) in the neighbourhood of Vienna two years after the death of Attila. The murmurs of the Goths, who complained that they were exposed to intolerable hards.h.i.+ps, determined Theodoric to attempt an adventure worthy of his courage and ambition. He boldly demanded the privilege of rescuing Italy and Rome from Odoacer, and at the head of his people forced his way, between the years 488 and 489, through hostile country into Italy. In three battles he triumphed over Odoacer, forced that monarch to capitulate on favourable terms at Ravenna (493), and after pretending to allow him to share his sovereignty of Italy, a.s.sa.s.sinated him in the same year.

The long reign of Theodoric (493-526) was marked by a transient return of peace and prosperity to Italy. His domestic and foreign policy were dictated alike by wisdom and necessity. His people were settled on the land, which they held by military tenure. A series of matrimonial alliances secured him the support of the Franks, the Burgundians, the Visigoths, the Vandals, and the Thuringians, and his sword preserved his territory from the incursions of rival barbarians and the two disastrous attacks (505 and 508) that envy prompted the Emperor Anastasius to attempt.

_II.--Justinian the Great_

The death of the Emperor Anastasius had raised to the throne a Dardanian peasant, who by his arts secured the suffrage of the guards, despoiled and destroyed his more powerful rivals, and reigned under the name of Justin I. from 518 to 527. He was succeeded by his nephew, the great Justinian, who for thirty-eight years directed the fortunes of the Roman Empire.

The Empress Theodora, who before her marriage had been a theatrical wanton, was seated, by the fondness of the emperor, on the throne as an equal and independent colleague in the sovereignty. Her rapacity, her cruelty, and her pride were the subject of contemporary writings, but her benevolence to her less fortunate sisters, and her courage amidst the factions and dangers of the court, justly ent.i.tle her to a certain n.o.bility of character.

Constantinople in the age of Justinian was torn by the factions of the circus. The rival bands of charioteers, who wore respectively liveries of green and blue, created in the capital of the East, as they had created in Rome, two factions among the populace. Justinian's support of the blues led to a serious sedition in the capital. The two factions were united by a common desire for vengeance, and with the watchword of "Nika" (vanquish) (January 532), raged in tumult through Constantinople for five days. At the command of Theodora 3,000 veterans who could be trusted marched through the burning streets to the Hippodrome, and there, supported by the repentant blues, ma.s.sacred the unresisting mob.

The Eastern Empire, after Rome was barbarous, still embraced the nations whom she had conquered beyond the Adriatic, and as far as the frontiers of Ethiopia and Persia. Justinian reigned over 64 provinces and 935 cities. The arts and agriculture flourished under his rule, but the avarice and profusion of Justinian oppressed the people. His expensive taste for building almost exhausted the resources of the empire. Heavy custom tolls, taxes on the food and industry of the poor, the exercise of intolerable monopolies, were not excused or compensated for by the parsimonious saving in the salaries of court officials, and even in the pay of the soldiers. His stately edifices were cemented with the blood and treasures of his people, and the rapacity and luxury of the emperor were imitated by the civil magistrates and officials.

The schools of Athens, which still kept alight the sacred flame of the ancient philosophy, were suppressed by Justinian. The academy of the Platonics, the Lyceum of the Peripatetics, the Portico of the Stoics, and the Garden of the Epicureans had long survived.

With the death of Simplicius and his six companions, who terminate the long list of Grecian philosophers, the golden chain, as it was fondly styled, of the Platonic succession was broken, and the Edict of Justinian (529) imposed a perpetual silence on the schools of Athens.

The Roman consuls.h.i.+p was also abolished by Justinian in 541; but this office, the t.i.tle of which admonished the Romans of their ancient freedom, still lived in the minds of the people. They applauded the gracious condescension of successive princes by whom it was a.s.sumed in the first year of their reign, and three centuries elapsed after the death of Justinian before that obsolete office, which had been suppressed by law, could be abolished by custom.

The usurpation by Gelimer (530) of the Vandalic crown of Africa, which belonged of right to Hilderic, first encouraged Justinian to undertake the African war. Hilderic had granted toleration to the Catholics, and for this reason was held in reproach by his Arian subjects. His compulsory abdication afforded the emperor of the East an opportunity of interfering in the cause of orthodoxy. A large army was entrusted to the command of Belisarius, one of those heroic names which are familiar to every age and to every nation. Proved in the Persian war, Belisarius was given unlimited authority. He set sail from Constantinople with a fleet of six hundred s.h.i.+ps in June 533. He landed on the coast of Africa in September, defeated the degenerate Vandals, reduced Carthage within a few days, utterly vanquished Gelimer, and completed the conquest of the ancient Roman province by 534. The Vandals in Africa fled beyond the power or even the knowledge of the Romans.

_III.--Gothic Italy_

Dissensions in Italy excited the ambition of Justinian. Belisarius was sent with another army to Sicily in 535, and after subduing that island and suppressing a revolt in Africa, he invaded Italy in 536. Policy dictated the retreat of the Goths, and Belisarius entered Rome (December 536). In March, Vitiges, the Gothic ruler, returned with a force of one hundred and fifty thousand men. The valour of the Roman general supported a siege of forty-one days and the intrigues of the Pope Silverius, who was exiled by his orders; and, finally, with the a.s.sistance of a seasonable reinforcement, Belisarius compelled the barbarians to retire in March of the following year. The conquests of Ravenna and the suppression of the invasion of the Franks completed the subjugation of the Gothic kingdom by December 539.

The success of Belisarius and the intrigues of his secret enemies had excited the jealousy of Justinian. He was recalled, and the eunuch Na.r.s.es was sent to Italy, as a powerful rival, to oppose the interests of the conqueror of Rome and Africa. The infidelity of Antonina, which excited her husband's just indignation, was excused by the Empress Theodora, and her powerful support was given to the wife of the last of the Roman heroes, who, after serving again against the Persians, returned to the capital, to be received not with honour and triumph, but with disgrace and contempt and a fine of $600,000.

The incursions of the Lombards, the Slavonians, and the Avars and the Turks, and the successful raids of the King of Persia were among the number of the important events of the reign of Justinian. To maintain his position in Africa and Italy taxed his resources to their utmost limit. The victories of Justinian were pernicious to mankind; the desolation of Africa was such that in many parts a stranger might wander whole days without meeting the face of either a friend or an enemy.

The revolts of the Goths, under their king, Totila (541), once more demanded the presence of Belisarius, and, a hero on the banks of the Euphrates, a slave in the palace of Constantinople, he accepted with reluctance the painful task of supporting his own reputation and retrieving the faults of his successors. He was too late to save Rome from the Goths, by whom it was taken in December 546; but he recovered it in the following February. After his recall by his envious sovereign in September 548, Rome was once more taken by the Goths. The successful repulse of the Franks and Alemanni finally restored the kingdom to the rule of the emperor. Belisarius died on March 13, 565.

The emperor survived his death only eight months, and pa.s.sed away, in the eighty-third year of his life and the thirty-eighth of his reign, on November 14, 565. The most lasting memorial of his reign is to be found neither in his victories nor his monuments, but in the immortal works of the Code, the Pandects, and the Inst.i.tutes, in which the civil jurisprudence of the Romans was digested, and by means of which the public reason of the Romans has been silently or studiously transfused into the domestic inst.i.tutions of the whole of Europe.

_IV.--Gregory the Great_

Justinian was succeeded by his nephew, Justin II., who lived to see the conquest of the greater part of Italy by Alboin, king of the Lombards (568-570), the disaffection of the exarch, Na.r.s.es, and the ruin of the revived glories of the Roman world.

During a period of 200 years Italy was unequally divided between the king of the Lombards and the exarchate of Ravenna. Rome relapsed into a state of misery. The Campania was reduced to the state of a dreary wilderness. The stagnation of a deluge caused by the torrential swelling of the Tiber produced a pestilential disease, and a stranger visiting Rome might contemplate with horror the solitude of the city. Gregory the Great, whose pontificate lasted from 590 to 604, reconciled the Arians of Italy and Spain to the Catholic Church, conquered Britain in the name of the Cross, and established his right to interfere in the management of the episcopal provinces of Greece, Spain, and Gaul. The merits of Gregory were treated by the Byzantine court with reproach and insult, but in the attachment of a grateful people he found the purest reward of a citizen and the best right of a sovereign.

The short and virtuous reign of Tiberius (578-582), which succeeded that of Justin, made way for that of Maurice. For twenty years Maurice ruled with honesty and honour. But the parsimony of the emperor, and his attempt to cure the inveterate evil of a military despotism, led to his undoing, and in 602 he was murdered with his children. A like fate befell the Emperor Phocas, who succ.u.mbed in 610 to the fortunes of Heraclius, the son of Crispus, exarch of Africa. For thirty-two years Heraclius ruled the Roman world. In three campaigns he chastised the rising power of Persia, drove the armies of Chosroes from Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, rescued Constantinople from the joint siege of the Avars and Persians (626), and finally reduced the Persian monarch to the defence of his hereditary kingdom. The deposition and murder of Chosroes by his son Siroes (628) concluded the successes of the emperor.

A treaty of peace was arranged, and Heraclius returned in triumph to Constantinople, where, after the exploits of six glorious campaigns, he peacefully enjoyed the sabbath of his toils. The year after his return he made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem to restore the true Cross to the Holy Sepulchre. In the last eight years of his reign Heraclius lost to the Arabs the same provinces which he had rescued from the Persians.

Heraclius died in 612. His descendants continued to fill the throne in the persons of Constantine III. (641), Heracleonas (641), Constans II.

(641), Constantine IV. (668), Justinian II. (685), until 711, when an interval of six years, divided into three reigns, made way for the rise of the Isaurian dynasty.

_V.--The New Era of Charlemagne_

Leo III. ascended the throne on March 25, 718, and the purple descended to his family, by the rights of heredity, for three generations. The Isaurian dynasty is most notable for the part it played in ecclesiastical history.

The introduction of images into the Christian Church had confused the simplicity of religious wors.h.i.+p. The education of Leo, his reason, perhaps his intercourse with Jews and Arabs, had inspired him with a hatred of images. By two edicts he proscribed the existence, as well as the use, of religious pictures. This heresy of Leo and of his successors and descendants, Constantine V. (741), Leo IV. (775), and Constantine VI. (780), whose blinding by his mother Irene is one of the most tragic stories of Roman history, justified the popes in rebelling against the authority of the emperor, and in restoring and establis.h.i.+ng the supremacy of Rome.

Gregory II. saved the city from the attacks of the Lombards, who had seized Ravenna and extinguished the series of Greek exarchs in 751. He secured the a.s.sistance of Pepin, and the real governor of the French monarchy--Charles Martel, who, by his signal victory over the Saracens, had saved Europe from the Mohammedan yoke. Twice--in 754 and 756--Pepin marched to the relief of the city. His son Charlemagne, in 774, seemed to secure the permanent safety of the ancient capital by the conquest of Lombardy, and for twenty-six years he ruled the Romans as his subjects.

The people swore allegiance to his person and his family, and the elections of the popes were examined and authorised by him. The senate exercised its rights by proclaiming him patrician and of the power of the emperor; nothing was lacking except the t.i.tle.

A doc.u.ment, known as the Forged Decretals, which a.s.signed the free and perpetual sovereignty of Rome, Italy, and the provinces of the West to the popes by Constantine, was presented by Pope Hadrian I. to Charlemagne. This doc.u.ment served to absolve the popes from their debt of grat.i.tude to the French monarch, and excused the revolt of Rome from the authority of the eastern empire.

Though Constantinople returned, under Irene, to the employment of images, and the seventh general council of Nicaea, September 24, 787, p.r.o.nounced the wors.h.i.+p of the Greeks as agreeable to scripture and reason, the division between the East and the West could not be avoided.