The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (10 page)

Of those years, Constantine himself was to live for another seven. Then, in the spring of 337, already a sick man, he travelled to Helenopolis, a city that he had had rebuilt in memory of his mother, where the hot medicinal baths might, he hoped, effect a cure. Alas, they failed to do so, and on the way home to the capital he grew rapidly worse until it was plain that he would be unable to complete the journey. It was therefore not in Constantinople but in Nicomedia that this extraordinary man, who had for years been a self-styled bishop of the Christian Church, finally received his baptism. When the ceremony was done, Eusebius tells us, ‘he arrayed himself in imperial vestments white and radiant as light, and laid himself down on a couch of the purest white, refusing ever to clothe himself in purple again.’

Why, it may be asked, did he delay this baptism for so long? The most probable answer is also the simplest: that this sacrament conferred complete absolution from all sins, but unfortunately could be celebrated only once. It stood to reason, therefore, that the longer it was deferred the less opportunity there would be of falling once again into the ways of iniquity. This last supreme example of brinkmanship was perhaps a fitting conclusion to Constantine’s reign of thirty-one years–the longest of any Roman Emperor since Augustus–which ended at noon on Whit Sunday, 22 May 337. He was buried in his newly-completed Church of the Holy Apostles. By virtue of this dedication ‘he caused twelve sarcophagi to be set up in this church, like sacred pillars, in honour and memory of the number of the Apostles, in the centre of which was placed his own, having six of theirs on either side of it.’

Constantine’s undivided rule did not last long. On the death of the Emperor Theodosius the Great in 395 the Empire split again and, although the supreme authority was firmly rooted in Constantinople, a series of semi-puppet emperors reigned in Italy (mostly in Ravenna) for the best part of another century. During this period, however, the Italian peninsula–and indeed much of western Europe–was transformed.

Those who transformed it were the people contemptuously known to the citizens of the Empire as the barbarians. Of their many and various tribes, two only are of interest to us at this point in our story: the Goths and the Huns. They could hardly have been more different. By the end of the fourth century the Goths were a relatively civilised people, the majority of them Arian Christians. Although the western branch, that of the Visigoths, was still ruled by local chieftains, the Ostrogoths of the east had already evolved into a united and prosperous central European kingdom. The Huns, on the other hand, were savages: an undisciplined, heathen horde, Mongolian in origin, which had swept down from the central Asian steppe, laying waste everything in its path. Both tribes, at different times, posed major threats to the Empire. Surprisingly, perhaps, it was the Goths who attacked first.

During the last years of the fourth century, the Visigothic chieftain Alaric had spread terror from the walls of Constantinople to the southern Peloponnese; in 401 he invaded Italy. The Empire somehow managed to hold him at bay, and for several years more it continued to do so; but it suffered from two huge misconceptions. The first was that all barbarians were alike: undisciplined hordes of skin-clad savages who would be no match for the highly trained imperial army. This delusion did not last long. The second–that Alaric was bent on the Empire’s overthrow–unfortunately lasted a good deal longer. The truth was quite the contrary: he was fighting not to destroy the Empire but to establish a permanent home for his people within it, in such a way that they might enjoy their own autonomy while he, as their chieftain, would be granted high imperial rank. If only the Western Emperor Honorius–away in Ravenna–and the Roman Senate could have understood this simple fact, they might well have averted the final catastrophe. By their lack of comprehension they made it inevitable.

Three times between 408 and 410 Alaric besieged Rome. The first siege starved it out; the Romans were obliged to pay an enormous ransom, which included 5,000 pounds of gold and 30,000 of silver. The second ended when they agreed to depose the Emperor; the third, which had begun when Honorius, safely entrenched in Ravenna, refused to go, resulted in the sack of the city. Even then, it could have been worse: Alaric, devout Christian that he was, ordered that no churches or religious buildings were to be touched and that the right of asylum was everywhere to be respected. A sack, nevertheless, remains a sack; and the Goths, Christians though they may have been, were very far from being saints. When the traditional three days allowed for pillage and plunder were over, Alaric moved on to the south, but he had got no further than Cosenza when he fell victim to a violent fever–most probably malaria–and within a few days he was dead. He was only forty. His followers carried his body to the river Busento, which they dammed and temporarily deflected from its usual channel. There, in the stream’s bed, they buried their leader; then they broke the dam, and the waters came surging back and covered him.

The Huns–who, unlike the Goths, were barbarians in more than name–had first smashed their way into Europe in 376 and destroyed the Ostrogothic kingdom; their first contact with the civilised world, however, had had little effect upon them. The vast majority still lived and slept in the open, disdaining all agriculture and even cooked food–though they liked to soften raw meat by putting it between their own thighs and their horses’ flanks as they rode. For clothing they favoured tunics made from the skins of field mice crudely stitched together. These they wore continuously, without ever removing them, until they dropped off of their own accord. Their home was the saddle; they seldom dismounted, not even to eat or to sleep. Attila himself was typical of his race: short, swarthy and snub-nosed, with beady eyes set in a head too big for his body and a thin, straggling beard. Within a very few years of his accession he had become known throughout Europe as ‘the scourge of God’: more feared, perhaps, than any other single man–with the possible exception of Napoleon–before or since.

Not until 452 did he launch his army upon Italy. All the great cities of the Veneto were put to the torch; Pavia and Milan were ruthlessly sacked. Then he turned south towards Rome–and suddenly, unaccountably, stopped. Why he did so remains a mystery. Traditionally, the credit has always been given to Pope Leo the Great, who travelled from Rome to meet him on the banks of the Mincio–probably somewhere near Peschiera, where the river issues from Lake Garda–and persuaded him to advance no further.
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But it seems hardly likely that the pagan Hun should have obeyed the Pope out of respect for his office alone. He would surely have demanded a substantial tribute in return. Quite different possibilities have also been suggested. There is reason to believe that his followers, having devastated all the surrounding country, were running seriously short of food, and that disease had broken out in their ranks. Meanwhile, troops were beginning to arrive from Constantinople to swell the local imperial forces. Finally, since Attila is known to have been incorrigibly superstitious, could it not be that Leo reminded him of how Alaric had died within weeks of his sack of Rome, and suggested that a similar fate befell every invader who raised his hand against the holy city? We can never be sure. All we know is that if the King of the Huns thought by sparing Rome to ensure his own survival, he was mistaken. A year later, during the night following his marriage to yet another of his already innumerable wives, his exertions brought on a sudden haemorrhage. As his lifeblood flowed away, all Europe breathed again–although not, as it soon became clear, for long.

By comparison with the Goths and the Huns, the Vandals–the last of the great barbarian peoples to have cast its shadow over the unhappy fifth century–had little direct influence on the Empire, but their effect on the Mediterranean was greater than that of the other two put together. These Germanic tribesmen, their creed fanatically Arian, had fled westward from the Huns some half a century before and in 409, after invading and laying waste a large area of Gaul, had settled in Spain. There they had remained until 428, when the newly crowned King Gaiseric led his entire people–probably some 180,000 men, women and children–across the sea to North Africa. Just eleven years later he captured Carthage,
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the last imperial stronghold on the coast, which he effectively made into a centre for piracy. By now he had built himself a formidable fleet–the only barbarian ruler to do so–and, particularly after his conquest of Sicily in around 470, was the undisputed master of the western Mediterranean.

In the early summer of 455, Gaiseric launched his most fateful expedition–against Rome itself. The reaction there was one of panic. The elderly Emperor Petronius Maximus, cowering in his palace, issued a proclamation–not, as might have been expected, calling upon all able-bodied men to rally to the defence of the Empire, but announcing that anyone who wished to leave was free to do so. His subjects had not awaited this permission. Already the terrified Romans were sending their wives and daughters away to safety, and the roads to the north and east were choked with carts as the more well-to-do families poured out of the city with all the objects of value that they wished to save from Vandal clutches. On 31 May the palace guard mutinied, killing and dismembering Petronius and throwing the pieces into the Tiber. For the fourth time in less than half a century–and but for Pope Leo it would have been the fifth–a barbarian army stood at the gates of Rome.

Once again, the long-suffering Pope did what he could. He was unable to stop Gaiseric altogether, but he did manage to extract a promise that there would be no wanton killing and no destruction of buildings, public or private. On this understanding the gates of the city were opened, and the barbarians passed into an unresisting city. For fourteen relentless days they systematically stripped it of its wealth: the gold and silver ornaments from the churches, the statues from the palaces, the sacred vessels from the Jewish synagogue, even the gilded copper roof–or half of it–from the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus. Everything was carted down to Ostia, loaded into the waiting ships and carried away to Carthage. True to their word, however, they had left the people and the buildings unharmed. They had behaved like brigands, certainly, but not, on this occasion, like Vandals.

After the sack of Rome, one might have thought that the Vandals would have been satisfied. One would have been wrong. Over the next few years they systematically ravaged Campania and occupied the Balearic Islands, Corsica and Sardinia. Then it was the turn of Sicily, after which, for good measure, they sacked the western shores of Greece. As this unedifying story shows all too clearly, the Roman Empire of the West was by now sick unto death, and the abdication in 476 of its last Emperor, the pathetic child Romulus Augustulus–his very name a double diminutive–need cause us no surprise. He was toppled by another Germanic barbarian named Odoacer,
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who refused to accept the old plurality of emperors, recognising only the authority of the Emperor Zeno in Constantinople. All he asked of Zeno was the title of Patrician, in which capacity he proposed to rule Italy in the Emperor’s name.

Five years before, in 471, a boy of about seventeen named Theodoric had succeeded his father as paramount leader of the eastern Goths. Although he had received little or no formal education during the ten years of his childhood spent as a hostage in Constantinople–he is said to have signed his name all his life by stencilling it through a perforated gold plate–he had acquired an instinctive understanding of the Byzantines and their ways which was to serve him in good stead in the years to come. His main objective on his accession, like that of so many barbarian leaders before him, was to find and secure a permanent home for his people. To this end he was to devote the better part of the next twenty years: fighting sometimes for and sometimes against the Empire, arguing, bargaining, threatening and cajoling by turns, until, some time in 487, he and Zeno made an agreement. Theodoric would lead his entire people into Italy, overthrow Odoacer and rule the land as an Ostrogothic kingdom under imperial sovereignty. And so, early in 488, the great exodus took place: men, women and children, with their horses and their pack animals, their cattle and their sheep, lumbering slowly across the plains of central Europe in search of greener and more peaceful pastures.

Odoacer fought back, but his army was no match for that of the Goths. He withdrew to Ravenna, where Theodoric blockaded him for more than two years until the local bishop arranged an armistice. It was then agreed that Italy was to be ruled by the two of them jointly, both sharing the imperial palace. In the circumstances this solution seemed remarkably generous on the part of Theodoric, but it soon became clear that he wished only to lull his rival into a false sense of security; he had not the faintest intention of keeping his word. On 15 March 493 he invited Odoacer, his brother, his son and his senior officers to a banquet. There, as his guest took his place in the seat of honour, Theodoric stepped forward and, with one tremendous stroke of his sword, clove through the body of Odoacer from collarbone to thigh. The other guests were similarly dealt with by the surrounding guards. Odoacer’s wife was thrown into prison, where she died of starvation; his son, whom he had surrendered to the Ostrogoths as a hostage, was sent off to Gaul and executed. Finally Theodoric laid aside the skins and furs that were the traditional clothing of his race, robed himself–as Odoacer had never done–in the imperial purple and settled down to rule in Italy.