Theodoric's Ancestors


Ostrogoths and Visigoths--Nations forming the Gothic Confederacy--Royal

family of the Amals--Gothic invasion in the Second Century--Hermanric

the Ostrogoth--Inroad of the Huns--Defeat of the Ostrogoths--Defeat of

the Visigoths--The Visigoths within the Empire--Battle of

Adrianople--Alaric in Rome.







Towards the end of the second century of the Christian Era a great

confederacy of
Teutonic nations occupied those vast plains in the south

of Russia which are now, and have been for more than a thousand years,

the homes of Sclavonic peoples. These nations were the Ostrogoths, the

Visigoths, and the Gepidae. Approximately we may say that the Ostrogoths

(or East Goths) dwelt from the Don to the Dnieper, the Visigoths (or

West Goths) from the Dnieper to the Pruth, and the Gepidae to the north

of both, in the district which has since been known as Little Russia.

These three nations were, as has been said, Teutons, and they belonged

to that division of the Teutonic race which is called Low-German, man;

that is to say, that they were more nearly allied to the Frisians, the

Dutch, and to our own Saxon forefathers than they were to the ancestors

of the modern Swabian, Bavarian, and Austrian. They worshipped Odin and

Thunnor; they wrote the scanty records of their race in Runic

characters; they were probably chiefly a pastoral folk, but may have

begun to practise agriculture in the rich cornlands of the Ukraine. They

were essentially a monarchic people, following their kings, whom they

believed to be sprung from the seed of gods, loyally to the field, and

shedding their blood with readiness at their command; but their monarchy

was of the early Teutonic type, always more or less limited by the

deliberations of the great armed assembly of the nation, which (in some

tribes at least) was called the Folc-mote or the Folc-thing; and there

were no strict rules of hereditary succession, the crown being elective

but limited in practice to the members of one ruling and

heaven-descended family.



This family, sprung from the seed of gods, but ruling by the popular

will over the Ostrogothic people, was known as the family of the Amals.

It is true that the divine and exclusive prerogatives of the family have

been somewhat magnified by the minstrels who sang in the courts of their

descendants, for there are manifest traces of kings ruling over the

Ostrogothic people, who are not included in the Amal genealogy. Still,

as far as we can peer through the obscurity of the early history of the

people, we may safely say that there was no other family of higher

position than the Amals, and that gradually all that consciousness of

national life and determination to cherish national unity, which among

the Germanic peoples was inseparably connected with the institution of

royalty, centred round the race of the divine Amala.



The following is the pedigree of this royal clan, as given by the

historian of the Goths,[5] and with those epithets which the secretary

of Theodoric[6] attached to the names of some of the ancestors of his

lord. (The names of those who wore the crown are marked in italics.)





Gapt (possibly=Gaut, the eponymous

hero of the Gothic nation)

Hulmul



Augis



Amal (the fortunate)



Hisarna (=the man of iron)



OSTROGOTHA (the patient)



Hunuil



Athal (the mild)





Achiulf Odwulf







Ansila Ediulf Vultwulf Hermanric



Walaravans Hunimund

(the beautiful)



Winithar (the just) Thorismund

(the chaste)

Wideric



Wandalar





Walamir Theudemir Widemir

(the faithful) (the affectionate)



THEODORIC.









These fifteen generations, which should carry back the Amal ancestry

four hundred and fifty years, or almost precisely to the Christian Era,

seem to have marked the utmost limit to which the memory of the Gothic

heralds, aided by the songs of the Gothic minstrels, could reach. The

forms of many of the names, the initial Wala and Theude, the

terminal wulf, mir, and mund will be at once recognised as purely

Teutonic, recalling many similar names in the royal lines of the Franks,

the Visigoths and the Vandals, and the West Saxons.



In the great, loosely knit confederacy which has been described as

filling the regions of Southern Russia in the third and fourth centuries

of our Era, the predominant power seems to have been held by the

Ostrogothic nation. In the third century, when a succession of weak

ephemeral emperors ruled and all but ruined the Roman State, the Goths

swarmed forth in their myriads, both by sea and land, to ravage the

coast of the Euxine and the AEgean, to cross the passes of the Balkans,

to make their desolating presence felt at Ephesus and at Athens. Two

great Emperors of Illyrian origin, Claudius and Aurelian, succeeded, at

a fearful cost of life, in repelling the invasion and driving back the

human torrent. But it was impossible to recover from the barbarians

Trajan's province of Dacia, which they had overrun, and the Emperors

wisely compromised the dispute by abandoning to the Goths and their

allies all the territory north of the Danube. This abandoned province

was chiefly occupied by the Visigoths, the Western members of the

confederacy, who for the century from 275 to 375 were the neighbours,

generally the allies, by fitful impulses the enemies, of Rome. With

Constantine the Great especially the Visigoths came powerfully in

contact, first as invaders and then as allies (foederati) bound to

furnish a certain number of auxiliaries to serve under the eagles of the

Empire.



Meanwhile the Ostrogoths, with their faces turned for the time northward

instead of southward, were battling daily with the nations of Finnish or

Sclavonic stock that dwelt by the upper waters of the Dnieper, the Don,

and the Volga, and were extending their dominion over the greater part

of what we now call Russia-in-Europe. The lord of this wide but most

loosely compacted kingdom, in the middle of the fourth century, was a

certain Hermanric, whom his flatterers, with some slight knowledge of

the names held in highest repute among their Southern neighbours,

likened to Alexander the Great for the magnitude of his conquests.

However shadowy some of these conquests may appear in the light of

modern criticism, there can be little doubt that the Visigoths owned his

over-lordship, and that when Constantius and Julian were reigning in

Constantinople, the greatest name over a wide extent of territory north

of the Black Sea was that of Hermanric the Ostrogoth.



When this warrior was in extreme old age, a terrible disaster befell his

nation and himself. It was probably about the year 374 that a horde of

Asiatic savages made their appearance in the south-eastern corner of his

dominions, having, so it is said, crossed the Sea of Azof in its

shallowest part by a ford. These men rode upon little ponies of great

speed and endurance, each of which seemed to be incorporated with its

rider, so perfect was the understanding between the horseman, who spent

his days and nights in the saddle, and the steed which he bestrode.

Little black restless eyes gleamed beneath their low foreheads and

matted hair; no beard or whisker adorned their uncouth yellow faces; the

Turanian type in its ugliest form was displayed by these Mongolian sons

of the wilderness. They bore a name destined to be of disastrous and yet

also indirectly of most beneficent import in the history of the world;

for these are the true shatterers of the Roman Empire. They were the

terrible Huns.



Before the impact of this new and strange enemy the Empire of

Hermanric--an Empire which rested probably rather on the reputation of

warlike prowess than on any great inherent strength, military or

political--went down with a terrible crash. Dissimilar as are the times

and the circumstances, we are reminded of the collapse of the military

systems of Austria and Prussia under the onset of the ragged Jacobins of

France, shivering and shoeless, but full of demonic energy, when we read

of the humiliating discomfiture of this stately Ostrogothic

monarchy--doubtless possessing an ordered hierarchy of nobles, free

warriors, and slaves--by the squalid, hard-faring and, so to say,

democratic savages from Asia.



The death of Hermanric, which was evidently due to the Hunnish victory,

is assigned by the Gothic historian to a cause less humiliating to the

national vanity. The king of the Rosomones, a perfidious nation, had

taken the opportunity of the appearance of the savage invaders to

renounce his allegiance, perhaps to desert his master treacherously on

the field of battle. The enraged Hermanric, unable to vent his fury on

the king himself, caused his wife, Swanhilda, to be torn asunder by wild

horses to whom she was tied by the hands and feet. Her brothers, Sarus

and Ammius, avenged her cruel death by a spear-thrust, which wounded the

aged monarch, but did not kill him outright. Then came the crisis of the

invasion of the Huns under their King Balamber. The Visigoths, who had

some cause of complaint against Hermanric, left him to fight his battle

without their aid; and the old king, in sore pain with his wound and

deeply mortified by the incursion of the Huns, breathed out his life in

the one hundred and tenth year of his age. All of which is probably a

judicious veiling of the fact,[7] that the great Hermanric was defeated

by the Hunnish invaders, and in his despair laid violent hands on

himself.





The huge and savage horde rolled on over the wide plains of Russia. The

Ostrogothic resistance was at an end; and soon the invaders were on the

banks of the Dniester threatening the kindred nation of the Visigoths.

Athanaric, Judge (as he was called) of the Visigoths, a brave, old

soldier, but not a very skilful general, was soon out-manoeuvred by these

wild nomads from the desert, who crossed the rivers by unexpected fords,

and by rapid night-marches turned the flank of his most carefully

chosen positions. The line of the Dniester was abandoned; the line of

the Pruth was lost. It was plain that the Visigoths, like their Eastern

brethren, if they remained in the land, must bow their heads beneath the

Hunnish yoke. To avoid so degrading a necessity, and if they must lose

their independence, to lose it to the stately Emperors of Rome rather

than to the chief of a filthy Tartar horde, the great majority of the

Visigothic nation flocked southward through the region which is now

called Wallachia, and, standing on the northern shore of the Danube,

prayed for admission within the province of Moesia and the Empire of

Rome. In 376 an evil hour for himself Valens, the then reigning Emperor

of the East, granted this petition and received into his dominions the

Visigothic fugitives, a great and warlike nation, without taking any

proper precautions, on the one hand, that they should be disarmed, on

the other, that they should be supplied with food for their present

necessities and enabled for the future to become peaceful cultivators of

the soil. The inevitable result followed. Before many months had elapsed

the Visigoths were in arms against the Empire, and under the leadership

of their hereditary chiefs were wandering up and down through the

provinces of Moesia and Thrace, wresting from the terror-stricken

provincials not only the food which the parsimony of Valens had failed

to supply them with, but the treasures which centuries of peace had

stored up in villa and unwalled town. In 378 they achieved a brilliant,

and perhaps unexpected, triumph, defeating a large army commanded by

the Roman Emperor Valens in person, in a pitched battle near Adrianople.

Valens himself perished on the field of battle, and his unburied corpse

disappeared among the embers of a Thracian hut which had been set fire

to by the barbarians. That fatal day (August 9, 378) was admitted to be

more disastrous for Rome than any which had befallen her since the

terrible defeat of Cannae, and from it we may fitly date the beginning of

that long process of dissolution, lasting, in a certain sense, more than

a thousand years, which we call the Fall of the Roman Empire.



In this long tragedy the part of chief actor fell, during the first act,

to the Visigothic nation. With their doings we have here no special

concern. It is enough to say that for one generation they remained in

the lands south of the Danube, first warring against Rome, then, by the

wise policy of their conqueror, Theodosius, incorporated in her armies

under the title of foederati and serving her in the main with zeal and

fidelity. In 395[8] a Visigothic chief, Alaric by name, of the

god-descended seed of Balthae, was raised upon the shield by the warriors

of his tribe and hailed as their king. His elevation seems to have been

understood as a defiance to the Empire and a re-assertion of the old

national freedom which had prevailed on the other side of the Danube. At

any rate the rest of his life was spent either in hostility to the

Empire or in a pretence of friendship almost more menacing than

hostility. He began by invading Greece and penetrated far south into

the Peloponnesus. He then took up a position in the province of

Illyricum--probably in the countries now known as Bosnia and

Servia--from which he could threaten the Eastern or Western Empire at

pleasure. Finally, with the beginning of the fifth century after Christ,

he descended into Italy, and though at first successful only in ravage,

in the second invasion he penetrated to the very heart of the Empire.

His three sieges of Rome, ending in the awful event of the capture and

sack of the Eternal City in 410, are events in the history of the world

with which every student is familiar. Only it may be remarked that the

word awful, which is here used designedly, is not meant to imply that

the loss of life was unusually large or the cruelty of the captors

outrageous; in both respects Alaric and his Goths would compare

favourably with some generals and some armies making much higher

pretensions to civilisation. Nor is it meant that the destruction of the

public buildings of the city was extensive. There can be little doubt

that Paris, on the day after the suppression of the Commune in 1871,

presented a far greater appearance of desolation and ruin than Rome in

410, when she lay trembling in the hand of Alaric. But the bare fact

that Rome herself, the Roma AEterna, the Roma Invicta of a thousand coins

of a hundred Emperors,--Rome, whose name for centuries on the shores of

the Mediterranean had been synonymous with worldwide dominion,--should

herself be taken, sacked, dishonoured by the presence of a flaxen-haired

barbarian conqueror from the North, was one of those events apparently

so contrary to the very course of Nature itself, that the nations which

heard the tidings, many of them old and bitter enemies of Rome, now her

subjects and her friends, held their breath with awe at the terrible

recital.





Alaric died shortly after his sack of Rome, and after a few years of

aimless fighting his nation quitted Italy, disappearing over the

north-western Alpine boundary to win for themselves new settlements by

the banks of the Garonne and the Ebro. Their leader was that Ataulfus

whose truly statesmanlike reflections on the unwisdom of destroying the

Roman Empire and the necessity of incorporating the barbarians with its

polity have been already quoted. There, in the south-western corner of

Gaul and the northern regions of Spain, we must for the present leave

the Western branch of the great Gothic nationality, while our narrative

returns to its Eastern representatives.



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