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.
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 Hermanrican
Empire which rested probably rather on the reputation
of warlike prowess than on any great inherent strength,
military or politicalwent 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
monarchydoubtless possessing an ordered
hierarchy of nobles, free warriors, and slavesby
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, 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 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 Illyricumprobably
in the countries now known as Bosnia and Serviafrom
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.