Italy Under Odovacar


Condition of Italy--End of the line of Theodosius--Ricimer the

Patrician--Struggles with the Vandals--Orestes the Patrician makes his

son Emperor, who is called Augustulus--The fall of the Western Empire

and elevation of Odovacar--Embassies to Constantinople.



In former chapters I have very briefly sketched the

fortunes of the Italian peninsula during two great barbarian

invasions--that of Alaric (407-410)
and that of Attila (452). The

monarch who ruled the Western Empire at the date of the last invasion

was Valentinian III., grandson of the great Theodosius. He dwelt

sometimes at Rome, sometimes at Ravenna, which latter city, protected by

the waves of the Adriatic and by the innumerable canals and pools

through which the waters of two rivers [42] flowed lazily to the sea,

was all but impregnable by the barbarians. A selfish and indolent

voluptuary, Valentinian III. made no valuable contribution to the

defence of the menaced Empire, some stones of which were being shaken

down every year by the tremendous blows of the Teutonic invaders. Any

wisdom that might be shown in the councils of the State was due to his

mother, Galla Placidia, who, till her death in 451, was the real ruler

of the Empire. Any strength and valour that was displayed in its defence

was due to the great minister and general, Aetius, a man who had

himself, probably, many drops of barbarian blood in his veins, though he

has been not unfitly styled the last of the Romans. It was Aetius who,

as we have seen, in concert with the Visigothic king, fought the fight

of civilisation against Hunnish barbarism on the Catalaunian

battle-plain. It was to Aetius, thrice Consul, that the groans of the

Britons were addressed when the Barbarians drove them to the sea, and

the sea drove them back on the Barbarians.



When Attila was dead, the weak and worthless Emperor seems to have

thought that he might safely dispense with the services of this too

powerful subject. Inviting Aetius to his palace, he debated with him a

scheme for the marriage of their children (the son of the general was to

wed the daughter of the Emperor), and when the debate grew warm, with

calculated passion he snatched a sword from one of his guardsmen, and

with it pierced the body of Aetius. The bloody work was finished by the

courtiers standing by, and the most eminent of the friends and

counsellors of the deceased statesman were murdered at the same time.



The foul assassination of this great defender of the Roman State was

requited next year by two barbarians of his train, men who no doubt

cherished for Aetius the same feelings of personal loyalty which bound

the members of a Teutonic Comitatus to their chief, and who deemed

life a dishonour while their leader's blood remained unavenged. On a day

in March, while Valentinian was watching intently the games in the

Campus Martius of Rome, these two barbarians rushed upon him and stabbed

him, slaying at the same time the eunuch, who had been his chief

confederate in the murder of Aetius.



With Valentinian III. the line of Theodosius, which had swayed the Roman

sceptre for eighty-six years, came to an end. None of the men who after

him bore the great title of Augustus in Rome (I am speaking, of course,

of the fifth century only) succeeded in founding a dynasty. Not only was

no one of them followed by a son: scarcely one of them was suffered to

end his own reign in peace. Of the nine Emperors who wore the purple in

Italy after the death of Valentinian, only two ended their reigns in the

course of nature, four were deposed, and three met their death by

violence. Only one reigned for more than five years; several could only

measure the duration of their royalty by months. Even the short period

(455-476) which these nine reigns occupy is not entirely filled by them,

for there were frequent interregna, one lasting for a year and eight

months. And the men were as feeble as their kingly life was short and

precarious. With the single exception of Majorian, (457-461), a brave

and strong man, and one who, if fair play had been given him, would have

assuredly done something to stay the ruin of the Empire, all of these

nine men (with whose names there is no need to burden the reader's

memory) are fitly named by a German historian the Shadow Emperors.



During sixteen years of this time (456-472), supreme power in the Empire

was virtually wielded by a nobleman of barbarian origin, but naturalised

in the Roman State, the proud and stern Patrician Ricimer. This man,

descended from the chiefs of the Suevi,[43] grandson of a Visigothic

king, and brother-in-law of a king of the Burgundians, was doubtless

able to bring much barbaric influence to support the cause which, from

whatever motives, he had espoused,--the cause of the defence of that

which was left to Rome of her Empire in the West of Europe.



Many Teutonic tribes had by this time settled themselves in the Imperial

lands. Spain was quite lost to the Empire: some fragments of Gaul were

still bound to it by a most precarious tie; but the loss which

threatened the life of the State most nearly was the loss of Africa. For

this province, the capital of which was the restored and Romanised city

of Carthage, had been for generations the chief exporter of corn to feed

the pauperised population of Rome, and here now dwelt and ruled, and

from hence (428-432) sallied forth to his piratical raids against

Italy, the deadliest enemy of the Roman name, the king of the Vandals,

Gaiseric.[44] The Vandal conquest of Africa was, at the time which we

have now reached, a somewhat old story, nearly a generation having

elapsed since it occurred,[45] but the Vandal sack of Rome, which came

to pass immediately after the death of Valentinian III., and which

marked the beginning of the period of the Shadow Emperors was still

near and terrible to the memories of men. No Roman but remembered in

bitterness of soul how in June, 455, the long ships of the Vandals

appeared at the mouth of the Tiber, how Gaiseric and his men landed,

marched to the Eternal City, and entered it unopposed, how they remained

there for a fortnight, not perhaps slaying or ravishing, but with calm

insolence plundering the city of all that they cared to carry away,

stripping off what they supposed to be the golden roof of the Capitol,

removing the statues from their pedestals, transporting everything that

seemed beautiful or costly, and stowing away all their spoils in the

holds of those insatiable vessels of theirs which lay at anchor at

Ostia.



The remembrance of this humiliating capture and the fear that it might

at any moment be repeated, probably with circumstances of greater

atrocity, were the dominant emotions in the hearts of the Roman Senate

and people during the twenty-one years which we are now rapidly

surveying. It was doubtless these feelings which induced them to submit

more patiently than they would otherwise have done to the scarcely

veiled autocracy of an imperfectly Romanised Teuton such as Ricimer. He

was a barbarian, it was true; probably he could not even speak Latin

grammatically; but he was mighty with the barbarian kings, mighty with

the foederati the rough soldiers gathered from every German tribe on

the other side of the Alps, who now formed the bulk of the Imperial

army; let him be as arrogant as he would to the Senate, let him set up

and pull down one Shadow Emperor after another, if only he would keep

the streets of Rome from being again profaned by the tread of the

terrible Vandal.



(456-468) To a certain extent the confidence reposed in Ricimer was not

misplaced. He inflicted a severe defeat on the Vandals in a naval

engagement near the island of Corsica; he raised to the throne the young

and valiant Majorian, who repelled a Vandal invasion of Campania; he

planned, in conjunction with the Eastern Emperor, a great expedition

against Carthage, which failed through no fault of his, but by the bad

generalship of Basiliscus, whose brother-in-law, Leo, had appointed him

to the command. But the rule of a barbarian like Ricimer exercised on

the sacred soil of Italy, and the brutal arrogance with which he dashed

down one of his puppet-Emperors after another when they had served his

purpose, must have done much to break the spirit of the Roman nobles and

the Roman commonalty, and to prepare the way for the Teutonic revolution

which occurred soon after his death. Above all, we have reason to think

that, during the whole time of Ricimer's ascendancy, the barbarian

foederati were becoming more absolutely dominant in the Roman army, and

with waxing numbers were growing more insolent in their demeanour, and

more intolerable In their demands.



The ranks of the foederati were at this time recruited, not from one of

the great historic nationalities--Visigoth, Ostrogoth, Frank, or

Burgundian,--but chiefly from a number of petty tribes, known as the

Rugii, Scyri, Heruli, and Turcilingi, who have failed to make any

enduring mark in history. These tribes, which upon the break-up of

Attila's Empire had established themselves on the shore of the Middle

Danube, north and west of the lands occupied by the Ostrogoths, were

continually sending their young warriors over the passes of Noricum

(Salzburg, Styria, and Carinthia) to seek their fortune in Italy.

One of these recruits, on his southward journey, stepped into the cave

of a holy hermit named Severinus, and stooping his lofty stature in the

lowly cell, asked the saint's blessing. When the blessing was given, the

youth said: Farewell. Not farewell, but fare forward,[46] answered

Severinus. Onward into Italy: skin-clothed now, but destined before

long to enrich many men with costly gifts. The name of this young

recruit was Odovacar.[47]





Odovacar probably entered Italy about 465. He attached himself to the

party of Ricimer, and before long became a conspicuous captain of

foederati After the death of Ricimer (18th August, 472), there was a

series of rapid revolutions in the Roman State. Olybrius, the then

reigning nonentity, died in October of the same year.



(June, 474) After five months' interregnum, a yet more shadowy shadow,

Glycerius, succeeded him, and after fifteen months of rule was thrust

from the throne by Julius Nepos, who had married the niece of Verina,

the mischief-making Augusta of the East, and who was, therefore,

supported by all the moral influence of Constantinople.



Nepos, after fourteen months of Empire, in which he distinguished

himself only by the loss of some (Oct.,475) Gaulish provinces to the

Visigoths, was in his turn dethroned by the Master of the Soldiery,

Orestes, who had once held a subordinate situation in the court of

Attila. Nepos fled to Dalmatia, which was probably his native land, and

lived there for four years after his dethronement, still keeping up some

at least of the state which belonged to a Roman Emperor.



We know very little of the pretexts for these rapid revolutions, or the

circumstances attending them, but there cannot be much doubt that the

army was the chief agent in what, to borrow a phrase from modern

Spanish politics, were a series of pronunciamentos. For some reason

which is dim to us, Orestes, though a full-blooded Roman citizen, did

not set the diadem on his own head, but placed it on that of his son, a

handsome boy of some fourteen or fifteen years, named Romulus, and

nicknamed the little Augustus. For himself, he took the dignity of

Patrician, which had been so long worn by Ricimer, and was associated

in men's minds with the practical mastery of the Empire. But a ruler who

has been raised to the throne by military sedition soon finds that the

authors of his elevation are the most exacting of masters. The

foederati, who knew themselves now absolute arbiters of the destiny of

the Empire, and who had the same craving for a settlement within its

borders which we have met with more than once among the followers of

Theodoric, presented themselves before the Patrician Orestes, and

demanded that one-third of the lands of Italy should be assigned to them

as a perpetual inheritance. This was more than Orestes dared to grant,

and, on his refusal, Odovacar said to the mercenaries: Make me king and

I will obtain for you your desire.



(23d Aug., 476) The offer was accepted; Odovacar was lifted high on a

shield by the arms of stalwart barbarians, and saluted as king by their

unanimous acclamations.



When the foederati were gathered out of the Roman army, there seems

to have been nothing left that was capable of making any real defence of

the Empire. The campaign, if such it may be called, between Odovacar

and Orestes was of the shortest and most perfunctory kind. Ticinum

(Pavia), in which Orestes had taken refuge, was taken, sacked, and

partly burnt by the barbarians. The Master of the Soldiery himself fled

to Placentia, but was there taken prisoner and beheaded, only five days

after the elevation of Odovacar. A week later his brother Paulus, who

had not men enough to hold even the strong city of Ravenna, was taken

prisoner, and slain in the great pine-forest outside that city. At

Ravenna the young puppet-Emperor, Romulus, was also taken prisoner. The

barbarian showed himself more merciful, perhaps also more contemptuous,

towards his boy-rival than was the custom of the Emperors of Rome and

Constantinople towards the sons of their competitors. Odovacar, who

pitied the tender years of Augustulus, and looked with admiration on his

beautiful countenance, spared his life and assigned to him for a

residence the palace and gardens of Lucullus, the conqueror of

Mithridates, who five and a half centuries before had prepared for

himself this beautiful home (the Lucullanum) in the very heart of the

lovely Bay of Naples. The building and the fortifying of a great

commercial city have utterly altered the whole aspect of the bay, but in

the long egg-shaped peninsula, on which stands to-day the Castel dell'

Ovo, we can still see the outlines of the famous Lucullanum, in which

the last Roman Emperor of Rome ended his inglorious days. His conqueror

generously allowed him a pension of L3,600 per annum, but for how long

this pension continued to be a charge on the revenues of the new

kingdom we are unable to say. There is one doubtful indication of his

having survived his abdication by about thirty years,[48] but clear

historical notices of his subsequent life and of the date of his death

are denied us; a striking proof of the absolute nullity of his

character.



[Footnote 48: I allude here to a letter in the Vanarum of Cassiodorus

(iii., 35), written between 504 and 525, and addressed to Romulus and

his mother. But we can by no means prove that this is Romulus

Augustulus.]



This then was the event which stands out in the history of Europe as the

Fall of the Western Empire The reader will perceive that it was no

great and terrible invasion of a conquering host like the Fall of the

Eastern Empire in 1453; no sudden overthrow of a national polity like

the Norman Conquest of 1066; not even a bloody overturning of the

existing order by demagogic force like the French Revolution of 1792. It

was but the continuance of a process which had been going forward more

or less manifestly for nearly a century,--the recognition of the fact

that the foederati, the so-called barbarian mercenaries of Rome, were

really her masters. If we had to seek a parallel for the event of 476,

we should find it rather in the deposition of the last Mogul Emperor at

Delhi, and the public assumption by the British Queen of the Raj over

the greater part of India, than in any of the other events to which we

have alluded.



Reflecting on this fact, and seeing that the Roman Empire still lived on

in the East for nearly a thousand years, that the Eastern Caesar never

for many generations reliquished his claim to be considered the

legitimate ruler of the Old Rome, as well as of the New, and sometimes

asserted that claim in a very real and effective manner, and considering

too that Charles the Great, when he (in modern phrase) restored the

Western Empire in 800, never professed to be the successor of Romulus

Augustulus, but of Constantine VI., the then recently deposed Emperor of

the East; the latest school of historical investigators, with scarcely

an exception, minimise the importance of the event of 476, and some even

object to the expression Fall of the Western Empire as fitly

describing it. The protest is a sound one and was greatly needed.

Perhaps now the danger is in the other direction, and there is a risk of

our making too little of an event in which after all the sceptre did

manifestly depart from Rome. During the whole interval between

Odovacar's accession and Belisarius' occupation of Rome (476-536), no

Roman, however proud or patriotic, could blind himself to the fact that

a man of barbarian blood was the real, and in a certain sense the

supreme, ruler of his country. Ricimer might be looked upon as an

eminent servant of the Emperor who had the misfortune to be of barbarian

birth. Odovacar and Theodoric were, without all contradiction, kings; if

not kings of Italy, at any rate kings in Italy, sometimes actually

making war on the Caesar of Byzantium, and not caring, when they did so,

to set up the phantom of a rival Emperor in order to legitimise their

opposition. But in a matter so greatly debated as this it will be safer

not to use our own or any modern words, This is how Count Marcellinus,

an official of the Eastern Empire, writing his annals about fifty-eight

years after the deposition of Romulus, describes the event: Odovacar

killed Orestes and condemned his son Augustulus to the punishment of

exile in the Lucullanum, a castle of Campania. The Hesperian (Western)

Empire of the Roman people, which Octavianus Augustus first of the

Augusti began to hold in the 709th year of the building of the city

(B.C. 44), perished with this Augustulus in the 522d year of his

predecessors (A.D. 476), the kings of the Goths thenceforward holding

both Rome and Italy.[49]



[Footnote 49: Orestem Odoacer llico trucidavit, Augustulum filium

Orestis Odoacer in Lucullano Campania castello exilii poena damnavit.

Hesperium Romana gentis imperium, quod septingentesimo nono urbis

condita anno primus Augustorum Octavianus Augustus tenere coepit, cum hoc

Augustulo periit, anno decessorum regni Imperatorum DXXII. Gothorum

dehinc regibus Romam tenentibus. It will be seen that there is an error

of two years in the calculation.]



Of the details of Odovacar's rule in Italy we know very little. Of

course the foederati had their will, at any rate in some measure, with

reference to the assignment of land in Italy, but no historian has told

us anything as to the social disorganisation which such a redistribution

of property must have produced. There are some indications that it was

not thoroughly carried into effect, at any rate in the South of Italy,

and that the settlements of the foederati were chiefly in the valley of

the Po, and in the districts since known as the Romagna.



The old Imperial machinery of government was taken over by the new

ruler, and in all outward appearance things probably went on under King

Odovacar much as they had done under Count Ricimer. No great act of

cruelty or oppression stains the memory of Odovacar. He lost Provence to

the Visigoths, but, on the other hand, he by judicious diplomacy

recovered Sicily from the Vandals. Altogether it is probable that Italy

was, at any rate, not more miserable under the sway of this barbarian

king than she had been at any time since Alaric's invasion, in 408,

proclaimed her helplessness to the world.



One piece of solemn comedy is worth relating, namely, the embassies

despatched to Constantinople by the rival claimants to the dominion of

Italy. It was probably towards the end of 477, or early in 478, that

Zeno, then recently returned from exile after the usurpation of

Basiliscus, received two embassies from two deposed Emperors of the

West. First of all came the ambassadors of Augustulus, or rather of the

Roman Senate, sent nominally by the orders of Augustulus, really by

those of Odovacar. These men, great Roman nobles, represented that they

did not need an Emperor of their own. One absolute ruler was sufficient

to guard both East and West; but they had, moreover, chosen Odovacar,

who was well able to protect their interests, being a man wise in

counsel and brave in war. They therefore prayed the Emperor to bestow on

him the dignity of Patrician, and to entrust to him the administration

of the affairs of Italy. At the same time (apparently) they brought the

ornaments of the Imperial dignity, the diadem, the purple robe, the

jewelled buskins, which had been worn by all the Shadow Emperors who

flitted across the stage, and requested that they might be laid up in

the Imperial palace at Constantinople.



Simultaneously there came ambassadors from Nepos, the Imperial refugee,

the nephew by marriage of Verina. From his Dalmatian exile he

congratulated his kinsman Zeno on his recent restoration to the throne,

and begged him to lend men and money to bring about the like happy

result for him by replacing him on the Western throne.



To these embassies Zeno returned ambiguous answers, which seemed to

leave the question as to the legitimacy of Odovacar's rule an open one.

The Senate were sharply rebuked for having acquiesced in the

dethronement of Nepos, and a previous Emperor who had been sent to them

from the East.[50] Odovacar was recommended to seek the coveted dignity

from Nepos, and to co-operate for his return. At the same time, the

moderation of Odovacar's rule, and his desire to conform himself to the

maxims of Roman civilisation, received the Emperor's praise. The nature

of the reply to Nepos is not recorded, but it was no doubt made plain to

him that sympathy and good wishes were all that he would receive from

his Eastern colleague. The letters addressed to Odovacar bore the

superscription To the Patrician Odovacar, and that was all that the

barbarian really cared for. With such a title as this, every act, even

the most high-handed, on the part of the barbarian king was rendered

legitimate. Nepos and Augustulus were equally excluded as useless

encumbrances to the state, and the kings de jure and de facto became

practically one man, and that man Odovacar.



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