Part 13

The confusion of the second Gothic war, in which the future of the world and the major interests of man were in jeopardy, may be divided into three parts. The first of these is that in which the whole administration precariously established by Belisarius fell to pieces before the earthquake that was Totila, who, never systematically met and opposed, by the year 544 held all Italy with the exception, as I have said, of Ravenna, Rome, Spoleto, Perugia, Piacenza, and a few other strongholds. The second is that in which Belisarius again appears, and from the citadel of Ravenna, without ceasing or rest, but without much success, opposes him everywhere. In this period Rome was occupied and reoccupied no less than four times, and, as I have said, in 546 was left utterly desolate. Nevertheless, when for the second time Belisarius was recalled, in 548, he left things much as he had found them. He had at least--and with what scarcity of men and money we may see in his letters to the emperor--opposed and perhaps stemmed the overwhelming Gothic advance. At his departure the imperialists held Ravenna, Rome (but after the sack of 546), Rimini, Spoleto, Ancona, and Perugia. But before he arrived in Constantinople, Perugia had fallen; in the same year, 549, a mutiny in Rome gave the City to the Goths and Rimini was betrayed. In the year 551, the year of Narses' appointment as general-in-chief in Italy and the opening of the third period, only Ravenna and Ancona, with Hydruntum (Otranto) and Crotona in southern Italy, remained to the empire.

In that year, 551, however, everywhere the Gothic cause began to fail. In a sea-fight off Sinigaglia the imperial forces disposed of the Gothic sea power and relieved Ancona, which was in grave danger. About the same time Sicily was delivered from the Gothic yoke, and in the spring of 552 Crotona was relieved. Meanwhile, in Illyricum, Narses gathered his army, in which Ardoin, King of the Lombards, rode at the head of two thousand of his people, and prepared for the great march into Italy.

He came through Venetia round the head of the Adriatic, close to the sea (for a formidable Frankish host held the great roads), crossing with what anxiety we may guess, the mouths of the Piave, the Brenta, the Adige, and the Po by means of his ships, and having thus turned the flank of the Frankish armies he triumphantly marched into Ravenna. There he remained for nine days, as it were another Caesar about to cross the Rubicon.

While he waited in Ravenna an insulting challenge reached him from the barbarian Usdrilas who held Rimini. "After your boasted preparations, which have kept all Italy in a ferment, and after striking terror into our hearts by knitting your brows and looking more awful than mortal men, you have crept into Ravenna and are skulking there afraid of the very name of the Goths. Come out with all that mongrel host of barbarians to whom you want to deliver Italy and let us behold you, for the eyes of the Goths hunger for the sight of you." And Narses laughed at the insolence of the barbarian, and presently he set forward with the army he had made, upon the great road through Classis for Rimini, till he came to the bridge over the Marecchia, there which Augustus had built and which was held by the enemy. There in the fight which followed--little more than a skirmish--the barbarian Usdrilas came by his end, and Narses ignoring Rimini marched on, his great object before him, Totila and his army, which he meant, before all things else, to seek out and to destroy. So he went down the Flaminian Way to Fano and there presently left it for a by-way upon the left, rejoining the great highway some miles beyond the fortress of Petra Pertusa, which he disregarded as he had done that of Rimini. He marched on till he came to the very crest of the Apennines, over which he passed and camped upon the west under the great heights, at a place then called Ad Ensem and to-day Scheggia.

Meanwhile Totila had come to meet him from Rome, and had managed to reach Tadinum, the modern Gualdo Tadino, when he found Narses, unexpectedly, for he must have thought the way over the mountains securely barred by the fortress of Petra Pertusa, upon the great road before him.

Narses sent an embassy to Totila to offer, "not peace, but pardon;" this the barbarian refused. Asked when he would fight Totila answered, "In eight days from this day." But Narses, knowing what manner of man his enemy was, made all ready for the morrow, and at once occupied the great hill upon his left which overlooked both camps. In this he was right, for no sooner had he seized this advantage than Totila attempted to do the same, but without any success.

Then on the morrow Totila, having meanwhile been reinforced with two thousand men, rode forth before the two armies and "exhibited in a narrow space the strength and agility of a warrior. His armour was enchased with gold; his purple banner floated with the wind; he cast his lance into the air; caught himself backwards; recovered his seat and managed a fiery steed in all the paces and evolutions of the equestrian school." No doubt Narses the eunuch smiled. The barbarians were all the same, and they remain unaltered. Totila's theatrical antics are but the prototype to those amazing cavalry charges, excellently stage-managed, that may be seen almost any autumn during the German manoeuvres, a new Totila at their head.

When Totila had finished his display the two armies faced one another, the imperialists with Narses and John upon the left, the Lombards in the centre, and Valerian upon the right with John the Glutton; the Goths in what order of battle we do not know. At length at noon the battle was joined. The Gothic charge failed, Narses drew his straight line of troops into a crescent, and the short battle ended in the utter rout of the Goths, Totila flying from the field. In that flight one Asbad a Gepid struck at him and fatally wounded him. He was borne by his companions to the village of Caprae, more than twelve miles away, and there he died.

Thus ended Totila the Goth and with him the Gothic cause in Italy. A remnant of his army made its way to Pavia, where it was contained by Valerian; and all over Italy the Gothic fortresses hastened to surrender, Perugia, Spoleto, Narni, all opened their gates, and Narses marched on to occupy Rome which he did without much difficulty. All Italy lay open to the imperialists, and when Totila's successor Teias was slain all hope of recovery was gone. The Goths offered to leave Italy, and their offer was accepted. For a year longer a desultory war, the reduction of Cumae and Lucca, occupied Narses; but by 554 this too was brought to an end, and unhappy Italy was once more gathered into the government of the empire.

VIII

MODICA QUIES

THE PRAGMATIC SANCTION AND THE SETTLEMENT OF ITALY

Such was the inevitable end of the Gothic war in Italy. The issue thus decided was, as I have tried to show, something much more tremendous than the mere supremacy of a race. Nothing less than the future of the world was assured upon those stricken fields and about those ruined fortresses, the supremacy of the Catholic religion in which was involved the whole destiny of Europe, the continuance of our civilisation and culture. For let it be said again: these wars of the sixth century were not a struggle to the death between two races, but between two religions; the opponents were not really Roman and Goth, but Catholic and Arian, and in the victory of the former was involved the major interest of mankind. The whole energy of that age was devoted to the final establishment of what for a thousand years was to be the universal religion of Europe, the source of all her greatness and the reason of her being. What was saved in those unhappy campaigns was not Italy, but the soul of Europe.

Certainly it was not Italy. Materially the result of those eighteen years of war, which began with the invasion of Italy by Belisarius in 536, reached their crisis in 540 with the capture of Ravenna, and were finally decided by Narses in 552-554, was the ruin of Italy. Exhausted, devastated, and unfilled, the prey, for half a generation, of a fundamental war, Italy was materially ruined by Justinian's Gothic campaigns, and so hopelessly that, when in 568 the Lombards fell upon her, she was almost unable to defend herself, to offer any resistance to what proved--and in part for this reason--the only barbaric invasion which had upon her any enduring consequences. Visigoths, Huns, Vandals, Ostrogoths, all poured over her, and presently, like winter floods, retreated and subsided, leaving nothing to remind us of their fear and devastation; the Lombards remained.

I say this was largely due to the appalling exhaustion and ruin of Italy in the Gothic war; but there was something else which we must not forget. The Gothic war was a religious war. The Arianism of the Goths had really threatened our civilisation. But the Lombards were largely mere heathens. Their heathenism was not at all dangerous to us as a heresy must always be. Therefore Italy never roused herself from her exhaustion, one might almost say her indifference. It was only her material well-being that was at stake, her future was safe. Her great attempt against the Lombards was a spiritual effort, was an effort for their conversion, and their final discomfiture, wrought not from within the peninsula, but from over the Alps, did not involve their expulsion from Italy, but was seized upon as the opportunity for the re-establishment in name and in fact of the Western Empire, and for the great crowning of Charlemagne by the pope in S. Peter's church.

Italy, and with Italy Europe, were, then, saved from nothing less than death when Narses finally disposed of Totila in the Apennines in 552; but that war which had a result so very glorious had materially ruined the country.

From this general bankruptcy one city certainly escaped; that city was Ravenna, which since the year 540, when she had opened her gates to Belisarius, had been free from attack, and had more than ever been established as the capital of the West. That position was secured to her, as I have already said, by her geographical position, which now that Constantinople had reasserted the claim of the empire to Italy established her more than at any time in her history as the necessary seat of military and administrative power; and from Ravenna as from the citadel the whole of the second part of the Gothic war was waged by the imperialists. As we might expect the true nature of that war is immediately manifested in her history at this time.

It would seem that very shortly after the occupation of Ravenna by the imperialists in 540, the re-edification of the city and its splendid embellishment was begun. The church of S. Vitalis begun by S. Ecclesius (c. 521-532) was finished and gloriously adorned with mosaics by S. Maximianus (c 546-556), and not long after S. Apollonaris in Classe begun by S. Ursicinus (532-536) was completed and adorned by the same great bishop.

But this eagerness to mark and to express in such glorious monuments as these the great victory for Catholicism and civilisation that was then in the winning becomes even more manifest after the death of Totila and the end of the war. To the S. Agnellus and to the Church of Ravenna Justinian "rectae fidei Augustus" gave all the substance of the Goths, according to the Liber Pontificalis, "not only in Ravenna itself, but in the suburban towns and in the villages, both sanctuaries and altars, slaves and maidens, whatever was theirs. S. Mater Ecclesia Ravennas, vera mater, vera orthodoxa nam ceterae multae Ecclesiae falsam propter metum et terrores Principum superinduxere doctrinam; haec vero et veram et unicam Sanctam Catholicam tenuit Fidem, nunquam mutavit fluctuationem sustinuit, a tempestate quassata immobilis permansit. Therefore S. Agnellus the archbishop reconciled all the churches of the Goths, which in their time or in that of King Theodoric had been built or had been occupied by the false doctrines of the Arians.... He thus reconciled the church of S. Eusebius which Unimundus the (Arian) bishop had built in the twenty-third year of King Theodoric. In the same year he reconciled the church of S. Georgius (S. Giorgio ad Tabulam fuori delle Mura) ... the church of S. Sergius which is in Classis and of S. Zenone which is in Caesarea." In Ravenna itself he reconciled the churches of S. Theodorus (S. Spirito), S. Maria in Cosmedin (the Arian Baptistery), the church of S. Martin (S. Apollinare Nuovo) which Theodoric had built, which was called Caelum Aureum and which Agnellus re-decorated with the mosaics of the Martyrs and Virgins we see and the effigies of Justinian and himself.

Such was the work achieved in the fortunate capital. But ruined Italy awaited a more necessary, if less splendid, labour. This can have been nothing less than the resurrection of the country, which, in those eighteen years of war, can have become little less than a desert; and, as we might expect, all Italy desolate and depopulated looked to Justinian to succour her in her misery if she was not to perish under her ruins and her debts. The first step in that work was undertaken in the very year of the peace, in the August of the year 554, and it took the form of a solemn "Pragmatic Sanction" addressed to Narses and to Antiochus, the Prefect of Italy, in Ravenna. It had for its object the social peace of Italy, the re-establishment of order out of the chaos of the Ostrogothic war; and it is significant of the true position of affairs that this decree asserts that it is issued by the emperor in reply to the petition of the pope.

It consists of twenty-seven articles, and first establishes what is to be considered as still having authority in that tempestuous past; what part of it is to remain and to be confirmed and what is to be utterly swept away. Thus the emperor confirms all dispositions made by Amalasuntha, Athalaric, and Theodahad, as well as all his own acts--and these would include Theodoric's--and those of Theodora. But everything done by "the most wicked tyrant Totila" is null and void, "for we will not allow these law-abiding days of ours to take any account of what was done by him in the time of his tyranny." Totila had indeed most cruelly attacked the great landed proprietors whom he suspected of too great an attachment for Constantinople; he had attacked them in their persons and in their wealth. With a single stroke of the pen Justinian, as it were, effaced all the ordinances of the tyrant and rendered again to their legitimate masters, as far as it could be done, their lands, their flocks, their peasants, and their slaves which had been taken from them, or which fear had caused them to alienate.

Such were the political achievements of the decree. Nor were its financial provisions less far-reaching. Something had to be done to meet the crisis resulting from the enormous quantity of debt. Everywhere Justinian undertook great public works, and tried to repair the destruction caused by the war; but it is probable that in reality he achieved very little. He had enriched the Church; he had re-established the great proprietors in their lands and their rights, but the industry and commerce of Italy, save perhaps at Ravenna and at Naples, he could not restore. And we seem to understand that the mere lack of men left whole districts of Italy uncultivated and desert.

As for the administrative and legal clauses of the decree, they gave the Italian--the Roman as he is called--the right to have his suit heard by a civil judge instead of a military official. This established the security of the Italian against the barbaric hosts the imperial armies had brought into the country. But perhaps more important, and certainly more significant, is the twelfth clause of the decree which relates to the way in which the Judices Provinciarum are to be appointed. "We order," says Justinian, "that only fit and proper persons able to administer the local government shall be chosen, and this by the bishops and chief persons of each province from the inhabitants of that province." This clause was soon proved to contain so much wisdom that in 569 by Justinian's successor it was extended to the provinces of the Eastern empire.

In all this we recognise the work of the great reformer who had already produced the Corpus Juris Civilis, consisting of the Institutes, Digest, Code, and Novellae, which more than anything else he did--and he did everything--determined that Europe, which he had secured for ever, should be a Roman thing established upon Roman Law. But are we also to see in this great man the creator of the exarchate, that citadel of the empire in Italy which was to endure, though almost all else perished, till Charlemagne appeared and the empire itself suddenly re-arose, armed at all points and ready for battle? It might seem that we are not to attribute that great scheme to Justinian, but rather to a later recognition of the force and reality of the disasters that so few years after his death descended once more upon Italy.

When Narses at the head of the armies of Justinian had in 554 conquered the Goths and possessed Italy, the administrative divisions of the peninsula would seem to have remained almost the same as they had been in the time of Honorius. Indeed the re-entry of Italy within the empire was accompanied by no important change in the provincial divisions of the peninsular because there was no necessity for it. Narses, who ruled just eleven years in Ravenna, was never known by the title of exarch. On the contrary, Procopius and Agathias call him simply the general-in-chief of the Roman army [Greek: o Romaion strataegos], and pope Pelagius calls him Patricius et Dux in Italia, and others, among them Gregory the Great and Agnellus, simply Patricius. But it is obvious that there was something new in the official situation and that certain extraordinary powers were conferred upon Narses. And it is the same with his successor Longinus. All the texts that mention him, including the Liber Pontificalis, call him Praefectus. But the transformation from which the exarchate arose was more obscure and far more slow than any official reform of Justinian's could have been. It is in part the result of the new condition of the country, which Justinian had had to take into account, but it is much more the result of the progress of the Lombard conquest and the new necessities of defence, which not one of the three great men who had restored Italy to the empire lived to see.

For Belisarius and Justinian both died in 565, and Narses, who was recalled in that year by the foolish and insolent Sophia, the wife of the new emperor Justin II., seems to have died about 572.

It is difficult to determine to which of these three great and heroic figures Italy, and through Italy, Europe, owes most, but since it was Justinian who chose and employed them we must, I think, accord him, here too, the first place in our remembrance.

Belisarius, who had fought the first great war so gloriously against Vitiges, and for so long and with so little encouragement had opposed Totila in the second, is of course one of the great soldiers of the world and perhaps the greatest the empire ever employed. His capture of Ravenna, by stratagem it is true, but against time and, as it were, in spite of the emperor, brought the first Gothic war to an end, and would, had he been left in Italy a few months longer, have prevented all the long drawn out agony of the second. As it was his achievement, and his achievement alone, made that second war something better than the hopeless affair it seemed for so long, and though he himself to all appearances made little headway against Totila, it was his series of heroic campaigns, in which he refused despair, that made the ever glorious march of Narses possible, and the final crushing of the barbarian in the Apennines after all but the crown of his endeavour.