For eighty years the power of the
Ostrogoths suffered eclipse under the shadow of Hunnish
barbarism. As to this period we have little historical
information that is of any value. We hear of resistance
to the Hunnish supremacy vainly attempted and sullenly
abandoned. The son and the grandson of Hermanric
figure as the shadowy heroes of this vain resistance.
After the death of the latter (King Thorismund) a strange
story is told us of the nation mourning his decease
for forty years, during all which time they refused
to elect any other king to replace him whom they had
lost. There can be little doubt that this legend
veils the prosaic fact that the nation, depressed
and dispirited under the yoke of the conquering Huns,
had not energy or patriotism enough to choose a king;
since almost invariably among the Teutons of that age,
kingship and national unity flourished or faded together.
At length, towards the middle of the
fifth century after Christ, the darkness is partially
dispelled, and we find the Ostrogothic nation owning
the sovereignty of three brothers sprung from the Amal
race, but not direct descendants of Hermanric, whose
names are Walamir, Theudemir, and Widemir. “Beautiful
it was”, says the Gothic historian, “to
behold the mutual affection of these three brothers,
when the admirable Theudemir served like a common
soldier under the orders of Walamir; when Walamir
adorned him with the crown at the same time that he
conveyed to him his orders; when Widemir gladly rendered
his services to both of his brothers". Theudemir,
the second in this royal brotherhood, was the father
of our hero, Theodoric.
The three Ostrogothic brethren, kings
towards their own countrymen, were subjectsalmost,
we might say, servantsof the wide-ruling
king of the Huns, who was now no longer one of those
forgotten chiefs by whom the conquering tribe had
been first led into Europe, but ATTILA, a name of
fear to his contemporaries and long remembered in the
Roman world. He, with his brother Bleda, mounted
the barbarian throne in the year 433, and after twelve
years the death of Bleda (who was perhaps murdered
by order of his brother) left Attila sole wielder
of the forces which made him the terror of the world.
He dwelt in rude magnificence in a village not far
from the Danube, and his own special dominions seem
to have pretty nearly corresponded with the modern
kingdom of Hungary. But he held in leash a vast
confederacy of nationsTeutonic, Sclavonic,
and what we now call Turanian,whose territories
stretched from the Rhine to the Caucasus, and he is
said to have made “the isles of the Ocean”,
which expression probably denotes the islands and peninsulas
of Scandinavia, subject to his sway. Neither,
however, over the Ostrogoths nor over any of the other
subject nations included in this vast dominion are
we to think of Attila’s rule as an organised,
all-permeating, assimilating influence, such as was
the rule of a Roman Emperor. It was rather the
influence of one great robber-chief over his freebooting
companions. The kings of the Ostrogoths and Gepidae
came at certain times to share the revelries of their
lord in his great log-palace on the Danubian plain;
they received his orders to put their subjects in array
when he would ride forth to war, and woe was unto them
if they failed to stand by his side on the day of
battle; but these things being done, they probably
ruled their own peoples with little interference from
their over-lord. The Teutonic members of the confederacy,
notably the Ostrogoths and the kindred tribe of Gepidae
seem to have exercised upon the court and the councils
of Attila an influence not unlike that wielded by
German statesmen at the court of Russia during the
last century. The Huns, during their eighty years
of contact with Europe, had lost a little of that
utter savageness which they brought with them from
the Tartar deserts. If they were not yet in any
sense civilised, they could in some degree appreciate
the higher civilisation of their Teutonic subjects.
A Pagan himself, with scarcely any religion except
some rude cult of the sword of the war-god, Attila
seems never to have interfered in the slightest degree
with the religious practices of the Gepidae or the
Ostrogoths, the large majority of whom were by this
time Christians, holding the Arian form of faith.
And not only did he not discourage the finer civilisation
which he saw prevailing among these German subjects
of his, but he seems to have had statesmanship enough
to value and respect a culture which he did not share,
and especially to have prized the temperate wisdom
of their chiefs, when they helped him to array his
great host of barbarians for war against the Empire.
From his position in Central Europe,
Attila, like Alaric before him, was able to threaten
either the Eastern or the Western Empire at pleasure.
For almost ten years (440-450) he seemed to be bent
on picking a quarrel with Theodosius II., the feeble
and unwarlike prince who reigned at Constantinople.
He laid waste the provinces south of the Danube with
his desolating raids; he worried the Imperial Court
with incessant embassies, each more exacting and greedy
than the last (for the favour of the rude Hunnish
envoy had to be purchased by large gifts from the
Imperial Treasury); he himself insisted on the payment
of yearly stipendia by the Emperor; he constantly
demanded that these payments should be doubled; he
openly stated that they were nothing else than tribute,
and that the Roman Augustus who paid them was his slave.
These practices were continued until,
in the year 450 the gentle Theodosius died. He
was succeeded by his sister Pulcheria and her husband
Marcian, who soon gave a manlier tone to the counsels
of the Eastern Empire. Attila marked the change
and turned his harassing attentions to the Western
State, with which he had always a sufficient number
of pretexts for war ready for use. In fact he
had made up his mind for war, and no concessions,
however humiliating, on the part of Valentinian III.,
the then Emperor of the West, would have availed to
stay his progress. Not Italy however, to some
extent protected by the barrier of the Alps, but the
rich cities and comparatively unwasted plains of Gaul
attracted the royal freebooter. Having summoned
his vast and heterogeneous army from every quarter
of Central and North-eastern Europe, and surrounded
himself by a crowd of subject kings, the captains
of his host, he set forward in the spring of 451 for
the lands of the Rhine. The trees which his soldiers
felled in the great Hercynian forest of Central Germany
were fashioned into rude rafts or canoes, on which
they crossed the Rhine; and soon the terrible Hun and
his “horde of many-nationed spoilers”
were passing over the regions which we now call Belgium
and Lorraine in a desolating stream. The Huns,
not only barbarians, but heathens, seem in this invasion
to have been animated by an especial hatred to Christianity.
Many a fair church of Gallia Belgica was laid in ashes:
many a priest was slain before the altar, whose sanctity
was vain for his protection. The real cruelties
thus committed are wildly exaggerated by the mythical
fancy of the Middle Ages, and upon the slenderest
foundations of historical fact arose stately edifices
of fable, like the story of the Cornish Princess Ursula,
who with her eleven thousand virgin companions was
fabled to have suffered death at the hands of the
Huns in the city of Cologne.
The barbarian tide was at length arrested
by the strong walls of Orleans, whose stubborn defence
saved all that part of Gaul which lies within the
protecting curve of the Loire from the horrors of their
invasion. At midsummer Attila and his host were
retiring from the untaken city, and beginning their
retreat towards the Rhine, a retreat which they were
not to accomplish unhindered. The extremity of
the danger from these utterly savage foes had welded
together the old Empire and the new Gothic kingdom,
the civilised and the half-civilised power, in one
great confederacy, for the defence of all that was
worth saving in human society. The tidings of
the approach of the Gothic king had hastened the departure
of Attila from the environs of Orleans, and, perhaps
about a fortnight later, the allied armies of Romans
and Goths came up with the retreating Huns in “the
Catalaunian plains” not far from the city of
Troyes. The general of the Imperial army was Aetius;
the general and king of the Visigoths was Theodoric,
a namesake of our hero. Both were capable and
valiant soldiers. On the other side, conspicuous
among the subject kings who formed the staff of Attila,
were the three Ostrogothic brethren, and Ardaric,
king of the Gepidae. The loyalty of Walamir,
the firm grasp with which he kept his master’s
secrets, and Ardaric’s resourcefulness in counsel
were especially prized by Attila. And truly he
had need of all their help, for, though it is difficult
to ascertain with any degree of accuracy the numbers
actually engaged (162,000 are said to have fallen
on both sides), it is clear that this was a collision
of nations rather than of armies, and that it required
greater skill than any that the rude Hunnish leader
possessed, to win the victory for his enormous host.
After “a battle ruthless, manifold, gigantic,
obstinate, such as antiquity never described when
she told of warlike deeds, such as no man who missed
the sight of that marvel might ever hope to have another
chance of beholding", night fell upon the virtually
defeated Huns. The Gothic king had lost his life,
but Attila had lost the victory. All night long
the Huns kept up a barbarous dissonance to prevent
the enemy from attacking them, but their king’s
thoughts were of suicide. He had prepared a huge
funeral pyre, on which, if the enemy next day successfully
attacked his camp, he was determined to slay himself
amid the kindled flames, in order that neither living
nor dead the mighty Attila might fall into the hands
of his enemies. These desperate expedients, however,
were not required. The death of Theodoric, the
caution of Aetius, some jealousy perhaps between the
Roman and the Goth, some anxiety on the part of the
eldest Gothic prince as to the succession to his father’s
throne,all these causes combined to procure
for Attila a safe but closely watched return into
his own land.
The battle of the Catalaunian plains
(usually but not quite correctly called the battle
of Chalons) was a memorable event in the history of
the Gothic race, of Europe, and of the world.
It was a sad necessity which on this one occasion
arrayed the two great branches of the Gothic people,
the Visigoths under Theodoric, and the Ostrogoths under
Walamir, in fratricidal strife against each other.
For Europe the alliance between Roman and Goth, between
the grandson of Theodosius, Emperor of Rome, and the
successor of Alaric, the besieger of Rome, was of
priceless value and showed that the great and statesmanlike
thought of Ataulfus was ripening in the minds of those
who came after him. For the world, yes even for
us in the nineteenth century, and for the great undiscovered
continents beyond the sea, the repulse of the squalid
and unprogressive Turanian from the seats of the old
historic civilisation, was essential to the preservation
of whatever makes human life worth living. Had
Attila conquered on the Catalaunian plains, an endless
succession of Jenghiz Khans and Tamerlanes would
probably have swept over the desolated plains of Europe;
Paris and Florence would have been even as Khiva and
Bokhara, and the island of Britain would not have yet
attained to the degree of civilisation reached by the
peninsula of Corea.
In the year after the fruitless invasion
of Gaul, Attila crossed the Julian Alps and entered
Italy, intending (452) doubtless to rival the fame
of Alaric by his capture of Rome, an operation which
would have been attended with infinitely greater ruin
to
“the seven-hilled city’s pride”,
than any which she had sustained at
the hands of the Visigothic leader. But the Huns,
unskilful in siege work, were long detained before
the walls of Aquileia, that great and flourishing
frontier city, hitherto deemed impregnable, which
gathered in the wealth of the Venetian province, and
guarded the north-eastern approaches to Italy.
At length by a sudden assault they made themselves
masters of the city, which they destroyed with utter
destruction, putting all the inhabitants to the sword,
and then wrapping in fire and smoke the stately palaces,
the wharves, the mint, the forum, the theatres of
the fourth city of Italy. The terror of this
brutal destruction took from the other cities of Venetia
all heart for resistance to the terrible invader.
From Concordia, Altino, Padua, crowds of trembling
fugitives walked, waded, or sailed with their hastily
gathered and most precious possessions to the islands,
surrounded by shallow lagoons, which fringed the Adriatic
coast, near the mouths of the Brenta and Adige.
There at Torcello, Burano, Rialto, Malamocco, and
their sister islets, they laid the humble foundations
of that which was one day to be the gorgeous and wide-ruling
Republic of Venice.
Attila meanwhile marched on through
the valley of the Po ravaging and plundering, but
a little slackening in the work of mere destruction,
as the remembrance of the stubborn defence of Aquileia
faded from his memory. Entering Milan as a conqueror,
and seeing there a picture representing the Emperors
of the Romans sitting on golden thrones, and the Scythian
barbarians crouching at their feet, he sought out a
Milanese painter, and bade the trembling artist represent
him, Attila, sitting on the throne, and the two Roman
Emperors staggering under sacks full of gold coin,
which they bore upon their shoulders, and pouring out
their precious contents at his feet.
This little incident helps us to understand
the next strange act in the drama of Attila’s
invasion. To enjoy the luxury of humbling the
great Empire, and of trampling on the pride of her
statesmen, seems to have been the sweetest pleasure
of his life. This mere gratification of his pride,
the pride of an upstart barbarian, at the expense of
the inheritors of a mighty name and the representatives
of venerable traditions, was the object which took
him into Italy, rather than any carefully prepared
scheme of worldwide conquest. Accordingly when
that august body, the Senate of Rome, sent a consul,
a prefect, and more than all a pope, the majestic
and fitly-named Leo, to plead humbly in the name of
the Roman people for peace, and to promise acquiescence
at some future day in the most unreasonable of his
demands, Attila granted the ambassadors an interview
by the banks of the Mincio, listened with haughty
tranquillity to their petition, allowed himself to
be soothed and, as it were, magnetised by the words
and gestures of the venerable pontiff, accepted the
rich presents which were doubtless laid at his feet,
and turning his face homewards recrossed the Julian
Alps, leaving the Apennines untraversed and Rome unvisited.
Even in the act of granting peace
Attila used words which showed that it would be only
a truce, and that (452) if there were any failure to
abide by any one of his conditions, he would return
and work yet greater mischief to Italy than any which
she had yet suffered at his hands. But he had
missed the fateful moment, and the delight of standing
on the conquered Palatine, and seeing the smoke ascend
from the ruined City of the World, was never to be
his. In the year after his invasion of Italy
he died suddenly at night, apparently the victim of
the drunken debauch with which the polygamous barbarian
had celebrated the latest addition to the numerous
company of his wives.
With Attila’s death the might
of the Hunnish Empire was broken. The great robber-camp
needed the ascendancy of one strong chief-robber to
hold it together, and that ascendancy no one of the
multitudinous sons who emerged from the chambers of
his harem was able to exert. Unable to agree
as to the succession of the throne, they talked of
dividing the Hunnish dominions between them, and in
the discussions which ensued they showed too plainly
that they looked upon the subject nations as their
slaves, to be partitioned as a large household of such
domestics would be partitioned among the heirs of
their dead master. The pride of the Teutons was
touched, and they determined to strike a blow for the
recovery of their lost freedom. Ardaric, king
of the Gepidae, so long the trusty counsellor of Attila,
was prime mover in the revolt against his sons.
A battle was fought by the banks of the river Nedao
between the Huns (with those subject allies who still
remained faithful to them) and the revolted nations.
Among these revolted nations there
can be but little doubt that the Ostrogoths held a
high place, though the matter is not so clearly stated
as we should have expected, by the Gothic historian,
and even on his showing the glory of the struggle
for independence was mainly Ardaric’s.
After a terrible battle the Gepidae were victorious,
and Ellak, eldest son of Attila, with, it is said,
thirty thousand of his soldiers, lay dead upon the
field. “He had wrought a great slaughter
of his enemies, and so glorious was his end”,
says Jordanes, “that his father might well have
envied him his manner of dying”.
The battle of Nedao, whatever may
have been the share of the Ostrogoths in the actual
fighting, certainly brought them freedom. From
this time the great Hunnish Empire was at an end,
and there was a general resettlement of territory
among the nations which had been subject to its yoke.
While the Huns themselves, abandoning their former
habitations, moved, for the most part, down the Danube,
and became the humble servants of the Eastern Empire,
the Gepidae, perhaps marching southward occupied the
great Hungarian plains on the left bank of the Danube,
which had been the home of Attila and his Huns; and
the Ostrogoths going westwards (perhaps with some
dim notion of following their Visigothic kindred)
took up their abode in that which had once been the
Roman province of Pannonia, now doubtless known to
be hopelessly lost to the Empire.
Pannonia, the new home of the Ostrogoths,
was the name of a region, rectangular in shape, about
two hundred miles from north to south and one hundred
and sixty miles from east to west, whose northern and
eastern sides were washed by the river Danube, and
whose north-eastern corner was formed by the sudden
bend to the south which that river makes, a little
above Buda-Pest. This region includes Vienna and
the eastern part of the Archduchy of Austria, Graetz,
and the eastern part of the Duchy of Styria, but it
is chiefly composed of the great corn-growing plain
of Western Hungary, and contains the two considerable
lakes of Balaton and Neusiedler See. Here then
the three Ostrogothic brethren took up their abode,
and of this province they made a kind of rude partition
between them, while still treating it as one kingdom,
of which Walamir was the head. The precise details
of this division of territory cannot now be recovered,
nor are they of much importance, as the settlement
was of short duration. We can only say that Walamir
and Theudemir occupied the two ends of the territory,
and Widemir dwelt between them. What is most
interesting to us is the fact that Theudemir’s
territory included Lake Balaton (or Platten See), and
that his palace may very possibly have stood upon
the shores of that noble piece of water, which is
forty-seven miles in length and varies from three
to nine miles in width. To the neighbourhood of
this lake, in the absence of more precise information,
we may with some probability assign the birth-place
and the childish home of Theodoric.