The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 04

Volume Iv

An Outline Narrative of the Great Events, CHARLES F. HORNE

Visigoths Pillage Rome (A.D. 410), EDWARD GIBBON

Huns Invade the Eastern Roman Empire Attila Dictates a Treaty of Peace (A.D. 441), EDWARD GIBBON

The English Conquest of Britain (A.D. 449-579), JOHN R. GREEN CHARLES KNIGHT

Attila Invades Western Europe Battle of Châlons (A.D. 451), SIR EDWARD S. CREASY EDWARD GIBBON

Foundation of Venice (A.D. 452), THOMAS HODGKIN JOHN RUSKIN

Clovis Founds the Kingdom of the Franks It Becomes Christian (A.D. 486-511), FRANÇOIS P.G. GUIZOT

Publication of the Justinian Code (A.D. 529-534), EDWARD GIBBON

Augustine's Missionary Work in England (A.D. 597), THE VENERABLE BEDE JOHN R. GREEN

The Hegira: Career of Mahomet The Koran: and Mahometan Creed (A.D. 622), WASHINGTON IRVING SIMON OCKLEY

The Saracen Conquest of Syria (A.D. 636), SIMON OCKLEY

Saracens Conquer Egypt Destruction of the Library at Alexandria (A.D. 640), WASHINGTON IRVING

Evolution of the Dogeship in Venice (A.D. 697), WILLIAM C. HAZLITT

Saracens in Spain Battle of the Guadalete (A.D. 711), AHMED IBN MAHOMET AL-MAKKARI

Battle of Tours (A.D. 732), SIR EDWARD S. CREASY

Founding of the Carlovingian Dynasty Pépin the Short Usurps the Frankish Crown (A.D. 751), FRANÇOIS P.G. GUIZOT

Career of Charlemagne (A.D. 772-814), FRANÇOIS P.G. GUIZOT

Egbert Becomes King of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy (A.D. 827), DAVID HUME

Universal Chronology (A.D. 410-842), JOHN RUDD

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Volume Iv

A captive's wife pleads with the barbarian chief for the life of her husband, Frontispiece Painting by R. Peacock.

Mahomet, preaching the unity of God, enters Mecca at the head of his victorious followers, Painting by A. Mueller.

Painting by R. Peacock.]

AN OUTLINE NARRATIVE

TRACING BRIEFLY THE CAUSES, CONNECTIONS, AND CONSEQUENCES OF THE GREAT EVENTS

(FROM THE FALL OF ROME TO THE EMPIRE OF CHARLEMAGNE)

CHARLES F. HORNE

Our modern civilization is built up on three great corner-stones, three inestimably valuable heritages from the past. The Græco-Roman civilization gave us our arts and our philosophies, the bases of intellectual power. The Hebrews bequeathed to us the religious idea, which has saved man from despair, has been the potent stimulus to two thousand years of endurance and hope. The Teutons gave us a healthy, sturdy, uncontaminated physique, honest bodies and clean minds, the lack of which had made further progress impossible to the ancient world.

This last is what made necessary the barbarian overthrow of Rome, if the world was still to advance. The slowly progressing knowledge of the arts and handicrafts which we have seen passed down from Egypt to Babylonia, to Persia, Greece, and Rome, had not been acquired without heavy loss. The system of slavery which allowed the few to think, while the many were constrained to toil as beasts, had eaten like a canker into the heart of society. The Roman world was repeating the oft-told tale of the past, and sinking into the lifeless formalism of which Egypt was the type. Man had become wise, but worthless.

As though on purpose to prove to future generations how utterly worthless, the Roman civilization was allowed to continue uninterrupted in one unneeded corner of its former domains. For over a thousand years the successors of Theodosius and of Constantine held unbroken sway in the capital which the latter had founded. They only succeeded in emphasizing how futile their culture had become.

The entire ten centuries that followed the overthrow of Rome have long been spoken of as the "Dark Ages," but, considering how infinitely darker those same ages must have become without the intervention of the Teutons, present criticism begins to protest against the term. All that was lost with the ancient world was something of intellectual keenness, something of artistic culture, quickly regained when man was once more ripe for them. What the Teutons had to offer of infinitely greater worth, what they had developed in their cold, northern forests, was their sense of liberty and equality, their love of honesty, their respect for womankind. It is not too much to say that, without these, any higher progress was, and always will be, impossible.

In short, the Roman and Grecian races had become impotent and decrepit. The high destiny of man lay not with them, but with the younger race, for whom all earlier civilizations had but prepared the way.

Who were these Teutons? Rome knew them only vaguely as wild tribes dwelling in the gloom of the great forest wilderness. In reality they were but the vanguard of vast races of human beings who through ages had been slowly populating all Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. Beyond the Teutons were other Aryans, the Slavs. Beyond these were vague non-Aryan races like the Huns, content to direct their careers of slaughter against one another, and only occasionally and for a moment flaring with red-fire beacons of ruin along the edge of the Aryan world.

Some at least of the Teutonic tribes had grown partly civilized. The Germans along the Rhine, and the Goths along the Danube, had been from the time of Augustus in more or less close contact with Rome. Germanicus had once subdued almost the whole of Germany; later emperors had held temporarily the broad province of Dacia, beyond the Danube. The barbarians were eagerly enlisted in the Roman army. During the closing centuries of decadence they became its main support; they rose to high commands; there were even barbarian emperors at last. The intermingling of the two worlds thus became extensive, and the Teutons learned much of Rome. The Goths whom Theodosius permitted to settle within its dominions were already partly Christian.

THE PERIOD OF INVASION

It was these same Goths who became the immediate cause of Rome's downfall. Theodosius had kept them in restraint; his feeble sons scarce even attempted it. The intruders found a famous leader in Alaric, and, after plundering most of the Grecian peninsula, they ravaged Italy, ending in 410 with the sack of Rome itself.

This seems to us, perhaps, a greater event than it did to its own generation. The "Emperor of the West," the degenerate son of Theodosius, was not within the city when it fell; and the story is told that, on hearing the news, he expressed relief, because he had at first understood that the evil tidings referred to the death of a favorite hen named Rome. The tale emphasizes the disgrace of the famous capital; it had sunk to be but one city among many. Alaric's Goths had been nominally an army belonging to the Emperor of the East; their invasion was regarded as only one more civil war.

Besides, the Roman world might yet have proved itself big enough to assimilate and engulf the entire mass of this already half-civilized people. Its name was still a spell on them. Ataulf, the successor of Alaric, was proud to accept a Roman title and become a defender of the Empire. He marched his followers into Gaul under a commission to chastise the "barbarians" who were desolating it.

These later comers were the instruments of that more overwhelming destruction for which the Goths had but prepared the way. To resist Alaric, the Roman legions had been withdrawn from all the western frontiers, and thus more distant and far more savage tribes of the Teutons beheld the glittering empire unprotected, its pathways most alluringly left open. They began streaming across the undefended Rhine and Danube. Their bands were often small and feeble, such as earlier emperors would have turned back with ease; but now all this fascinating world of wealth, so dimly known and doubtless fiercely coveted, lay helpless, open to their plundering. The Vandals ravaged Gaul and Spain, and, being defeated by the Goths, passed on into Africa. The Saxons and Angles penetrated England and fought there for centuries against the desperate Britons, whom the Roman legions had perforce abandoned to their fate. The Franks and Burgundians plundered Gaul.

Fortunately the invading tribes were on the whole a kindly race. When they joyously whirled their huge battle-axes against iron helmets, smashing down through bone and brain beneath, their delight was not in the scream of the unlucky wretch within, but in their own vigorous sweep of muscle, in the conscious power of the blow. Fierce they were, but not coldly cruel like the ancients. The condition of the lower classes certainly became no worse for their invasion; it probably improved. Much the new-comers undoubtedly destroyed in pure wantonness. But there was much more that they admired, half understood, and sought to save.

Behind them, however, came a conqueror of far more terrible mood. We have seen that when the Goths first entered Roman territory they were driven on by a vast migration of the Asiatic Huns. These wild and hideous tribes then spent half a century roaming through central Europe, ere they were gathered into one huge body by their great chief, Attila, and in their turn approached the shattered regions of the Mediterranean. Their invasion, if we are to trust the tales of their enemies, from whom alone we know of them, was incalculably more destructive than all those of the Teutons combined. The Huns delighted in suffering; they slew for the sake of slaughter. Where they passed they left naught but an empty desert, burned and blackened and devoid of life.

Continue reading The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 04 free in the Wunder reader →