The Ostrogoths had yet one or two
battles to fight before they were quite rid of their
old masters. The sons of Attila still talked of
them as deserters and fugitive slaves, and a day came
when Walamir found himself compelled to face a sudden
inroad of the Huns. He had few men with him,
and being taken unawares, he had no time to summon
his brethren to his aid. But he held his own
bravely: the warriors of his nation had time
to gather round him; and at last, after he had long
wearied the enemy with his defensive tactics, he made
a sudden onset, destroyed the greater part of the
Hunnish army, and sent the rest scattered in hopeless
flight far into the deserts of Scythia.
Walamir at once sent tidings of the
victory to his brother Theudemir. The messenger
arrived at an opportune moment, for on that very day
Erelieva, the unwedded wife of Theudemir, had given
birth to a man-child. This infant, born on such
an auspicious day and looked upon as a pledge of happy
fortunes for the Ostrogothic nation, was named Thiuda-reiks
(the people-ruler), a name which Latin historians,
influenced perhaps by the analogy of Theodosius, changed
into Theodoricus, and which will here be spoken of
under the well-known form THEODORIC.
It will be observed that I have spoken
of Erelieva as the unwedded wife of Theudemir.
The Gothic historian calls her his concubine, but
this word of reproach hardly does justice to her position.
In many of the Teutonic nations, as among the Norsemen
of a later century, there seems to have been a certain
laxity as to the marriage rite, which was nevertheless
coincident with a high and pure morality. It has
been suggested that the severe conditions imposed
by the Church on divorces may have had something to
do with the peculiar marital usages of the Teutonic
and Norse chieftains. Reasons of state might require
Theudemir the Ostrogoth, or William Longsword the
Norman, to ally himself some day with a powerful king’s
daughter, and therefore he would not go through the
marriage rite with the woman, really and truly his
wife, but generally his inferior in social position,
who meanwhile governed his house and bore him children.
If the separation never came, and the powerful king’s
daughter never had to be wooed, she who was wife in
all but name, retained her position unquestioned till
her death, and her children succeeded without dispute
to the inheritance of their father. The nearest
approach to an illustration which the social usages
of modern Europe afford, is probably furnished by
the “morganatic marriages” of modern German
royalties and serenities: and we might say that
Theodoric was the offspring of such an union.
Notwithstanding the want of strict legitimacy in his
position, I do not remember any occasion on which
the taunt of bastard birth was thrown in his teeth,
even by the bitterest of his foes.
It would be satisfactory if we could
fix with exactness the great Ostrogoth’s birth-year,
but though several circumstances point to 454 as a
probable date, we are not able to define it with greater
precision.
The next event of which we are informed
in the history of the Ostrogothic nation, a war with
the Eastern Empire, was one destined to exert a most
important influence on the life of the kingly child,
The Ostrogoths settling in Pannonia, one of the provinces
of the Roman Empire, were in theory allies and auxiliary
soldiers of the Emperor. Similar arrangements
had been made with the Visigoths in Spain, with the
Vandals in that very province of Pannonia, probably
with many other barbarian tribes in many other provinces.
There was sometimes more, sometimes less, actual truth
in the theoretical relations thus established, and
it was one which in the nature of things was not likely
long to endure: but for the time, so long as the
Imperial treasury was tolerably full and the barbarian
allies tolerably amenable to control, the arrangement
suited both parties. In the case before us the
position of the Ostrogoths in Pannonia was legalised
by the alliance, and such portions of the political
machinery of the Empire as might still remain were
thereby placed at their disposal. The Emperor,
on the other hand, was able to boast of a province
recovered for the Empire, which was now guarded by
the broadswords of his loyal Ostrogoths against the
more savage nations outside, who were ever trying
to enter the charmed circle of the Roman State.
But as the Ostrogothic foederati were his soldiers,
there was evidently a necessity that he must send them
pay, and this pay, which was called wages when the
Empire was strong, and tribute when it was weak, consisted,
partly at any rate, of heavy chests of Imperial aurei,
sent as strenae or New Year’s presents,
to the barbarian king and his chief nobles.
Now, about the year 461, the Emperor
Leo (successor of the brave soldier Marcian), whether
from a special emptiness in the Imperial treasury or
from some other cause, omitted to send the accustomed
strenae to the Ostrogothic brother-kings.
Much disturbed at the failure of the aurei
to appear, they sent envoys to Constantinople, who
returned with tidings which filled the three palaces
of Pannonia with the clamour of angry men. Not
only were the strenae withheld, and likely to
be still withheld, but there was another Goth, a low-born
pretender, not of Amal blood, who was boasting of
the title of foederatus of the Empire, and
enjoying the strenae which ought to come only
to Amal kings and their nobles. This man, who
was destined to cross the path of our Theodoric through
many weary years, was named like him Theodoric, and
was surnamed Strabo (the squinter) from his devious
vision, and son of Triarius, from his parentage.
He was brother-in-law, or nephew, of a certain Aspar,
a successful barbarian, who had mounted high in the
Imperial service and had placed two Emperors on the
throne. It was doubtless through his kinsman’s
influence that the squinting adventurer had obtained
a position in the court of the Roman Augustus so disproportioned
to his birth, and so outrageous to every loyal Ostrogoth.
When the news of these insults to
the lineage of the Amals reached Pannonia, the three
brothers in fury snatched up their arms and laid waste
almost the whole province of Illyricum. Then the
Emperor changed his mind, and desired to renew the
old friendship. He sent an embassy bearing the
arrears of the past-due strenae, those which
were then again falling due, and a promise that all
future strenae should be punctually paid.
Only, as a hostage for the observance of peace he
desired that Theudemir’s little son, Theodoric,
then just entering his eighth year, should be sent
to Constantinople. The fact that this request
or demand was made by the ostensibly beaten side, may
make us doubt whether the humiliation of the Empire
was so complete as the preceding sentences (translated
from the words of the Gothic historian) would lead
us to suppose.
Theudemir was reluctant to part with
his first-born son, even to the great Roman Emperor.
But his brother Walamir earnestly besought him not
to interpose any hindrance to the establishment of
a firm peace between the Romans and Goths. He
yielded therefore, and the little lad, carried by
the returning ambassadors to Constantinople, soon earned
the favour of the Emperor by his handsome face and
his winning ways.
Thus was the young Ostrogoth brought
from his home in Pannonia, by the banks of lonely
Lake Balaton, to the New Rome, the busy and stately
city by the Bosphorus, the city which was now, more
truly than her worn and faded mother by the Tiber,
the “Lady of Kingdoms” the “Mistress
of the World”. Of the Constantinople which
the boyish eyes of Theodoric beheld, scarcely a vestige
now remains for the traveller to gaze upon. Let
us try, therefore, to find a contemporary description.
These are the words in which the visit of the Gothic
chief Athanaric to that city about eighty years previously
is described by Jordanes:
“Entering the royal city, and
marvelling thereat, ‘Lo! now I behold,’
said he, ’what I often heard of without believing,
the glory of so great a city.’ Then turning
his eyes this way and that, beholding the situation
of the city and the concourse of ships, now he marvels
at the long perspective of lofty walls, then he sees
the multitudes of various nations like the wave gushing
forth from one fountain which has been fed by divers
springs, then he beholds the marshalled ranks of the
soldiery. ‘A God,’ said he, ’without
doubt a God upon Earth is the Emperor of this realm,
and whoso lifts his hand against him, that man’s
blood be on his own head.”
Still can we behold “the situation
of the city”, that unrivalled situation which
no map can adequately explain, but which the traveller
gazes upon from the deck of his vessel as he rounds
Seraglio Point, and the sight of which seems to bind
together in one, two continents of space and twenty-five
centuries of time. On his right hand Asia with
her camels, on his left Europe with her railroads.
Behind him are the Sea of Marmora and the Dardanelles,
with their memories of Lysander and AEgospotami, of
Hero, Leander, and Byron, with the throne of Xerxes
and the tomb of Achilles, and farther back still the
island-studded Archipelago, the true cradle of the
Greek nation. Immediately in front of him is
the Golden Horn, now bridged and with populous cities
on both its banks, but the farther shore of which,
where Pera and Galata now stand, was probably covered
with fields and gardens when Theodoric beheld it.
There also in front of him, but a little to the right,
comes rushing down the impetuous Bosphorus, that river
which is also an arm of the sea. Lined now with
the marble palaces of bankrupt Sultans, it was once
a lonely and desolate strait, on whose farther shore
the hapless Io, transformed into a heifer, sought
a refuge from her heaven-sent tormentor. Up through
its difficult windings pressed the adventurous mariners
of Miletus in those early voyages which opened up the
Euxine to the Greeks, as the voyage of Columbus opened
up the Atlantic to the Spaniards. It is impossible
now to survey the beautiful panorama without thinking
of that great inland sea which, as we all know, begins
but a few miles to the north of the place where we
are standing, and whose cloudy shores are perhaps
concealing in their recesses the future lords of Constantinople.
We look towards that point of the compass, and think
of Sebastopol. The great lords of Theudemir’s
court, who brought the young Theodoric to his new
patron, may have looked northwards too, remembering
the sagas about the mighty Hermanric, who
dwelt where now the Russians dwell, and the fateful
march of the terrible Huns across the shallows of
the Sea of Azof.
The great physical features of the
scene are of course unchanged, but almost everything
else, how changed by four centuries and a half of
Ottoman domination! The first view of Stamboul,
with its mosques, its minarets, its latticed houses,
its stream of manifold life both civilised and barbarous,
flowing through the streets, is delightful to the
traveller; but if he be more of an archaeologist than
an artist, and seeks to reproduce before his mind’s
eye something of the Constantinople of the Caesars
rather than the Stamboul of the Sultans, he will experience
a bitter disappointment in finding how little of the
former is left.
He may still see indeed the land-ward
walls of the city, and a most interesting historical
relic they are. They stretch for about four miles,
from the Sea of Marmora to the Golden Horn. It
is still, comparatively speaking, all city inside
of them, all country on the outside. There is
a double line of walls with towers at frequent intervals,
some square, some octagonal, and deep fossés running
along beside the walls, now in spring often bright
green with growing corn. These walls and towers,
seen stretching up hill and down dale, are a very
notable feature in the landscape, and ruinous and dismantled
as they are after fourteen centuries of siege, of
earthquake, and of neglect, they still help us vividly
to imagine what they must have looked like when the
young Theodoric beheld them little more than ten years
after their erection.
Of the gates, some six or seven in
number, two are especially interesting to us.
The first is the Tep-Kapou (Cannon Gate), or Porta
Sancti Romani. This was the weakest
part of the fortifications of Constantinople, the
“heel of Achilles”, as it has been well
called, and here the last Roman Emperor of the
East, Constantine Palaeologus, died bravely in the
breach for the cause of Christianity and civilisation,
The other gate is the Porta Aurea, a fine triple gateway,
the centre arch of which rests on two Corinthian pilasters.
Through this gatewaythe nearest representative
of the Capitoline Hill at Romethe Eastern
Emperors rode in triumphant procession when a new Augustus
had to be proclaimed, or when an enemy of the Republic
had been defeated. It is possible that Theodoric
may have seen Anthemius, the Emperor whom Constantinople
gave to Rome, ride forth through this gate (467) to
take possession of the Western throne: possible
too that the great but unsuccessful expedition planned
by the joint forces of the East and West against the
Vandals of Africa may have had its ignominious failure
hidden from the people for a time by a triumphal procession
through the Golden Gate in the following year (468).
This gate is now walled up, and tradition says that
the order for its closure was given by Mohammed, the
Conqueror, immediately after his entry into the city,
through fear of an old Turkish prophecy, which declared
that through this gate the next conquerors should
enter Constantinople.
Of the palace of the Emperor, into
which the young Goth was ushered by the eunuch-chamberlain,
no vestige probably now remains. The Seraglio
has replaced the Palation, and is itself now abandoned
to loneliness and decay, being only the recipient
of one annual visit from the Sultan, when he goes
in state to kiss the cloak of Mohammed. The great
mosque of St. Sophia on the right is a genuine and
a glorious monument of Imperial Constantinople, but
not of Constantinople as Theodoric saw it. The
basilica, in which he probably listened with childish
bewilderment to many a sermon for or against the decrees
of the council of Chalcedon, was burnt down sixty
years after his visit in the great Insurrection of
the “Nika”, and the noble edifice in which
ten thousand Mussulmans now assemble to listen to
the reading of the Koran, while above them the Arabic
names of the companions of the Prophet replace the
mosaics of the Evangelists, is itself the work of
the great Emperor Justinian, the destroyer of the
State which Theodoric founded.
But almost between the Church of St.
Sophia and the Imperial Palace lay in old times the
Great Hippodrome, centre of the popular life of the
capital, where the excited multitudes cheered with
rapture, or howled in execration, at the victory of
the Blue or the Green charioteer; where many a time
the elevation or the deposition of an Emperor was
accomplished by the acclamations of the same roaring
throng. Of this Hippodrome we have still a most
interesting memorial in the Atmeidan (the Place of
Horses), which, though with diminished area, still
preserves something of the form of the old racecourse.
And here to this day are two monuments on which the
young hostage may have often gazed, wondering at their
form and meaning. The obelisk of Thothmes I.,
already two thousand years old when Constantinople
was founded, was reared in the Hippodrome, by order
of the great Emperor Theodosius, and some of the bas-reliefs
on its pedestal still explain to us the mechanical
devices by which it was lifted into position, while
in others Theodosius, his wife, his sons, and his
colleague sit in solemn state, but, alas! with grievously
mutilated countenances. Near it is a spiral column
of bronze which, almost till our own day, bore three
serpents twined together, whose heads long ago supported
a golden tripod. This bronze monument is none
other than the votive offering to the temple of Apollo
at Delphi, presented by the confederated states of
Greece, to celebrate the victory of Plataea.
The golden tripod was melted down at the time of Philip
of Macedon, but the twisted serpents, brought by Constantine
to adorn and hallow his new capital by the Bosphorus,
bore and still bear the names, written in archaic
characters, of all the Hellenic states which took
part in that great deliverance.
All these monuments are on the first
of the seven hills on which Constantinople is built.
On the second hill stands a strange and blackened
pillar, which once stood in the middle of the Forum
of Constantine; and this too was there in the days
of Theodoric. It is called the Burnt Column,
because it has been more than once struck by lightning,
and is blackened with the smoke of the frequent fires
which have consumed the wooden shanties at its base.
But
“there
it stands, as stands a lofty mind,
Worn, but unstooping to the
baser crowd”.
It was once 150 feet high, but is
now 115, and it consists of six huge cylinders of
porphyry, one above another, whose junction is veiled
by sculptured laurel wreaths. On its summit stood
the statue of Constantine with the garb and attributes
of the Grecian Sun-God, but having his head surrounded
with the nails of the True Cross, brought from Jerusalem
to serve instead of the golden rays of far-darting
Apollo. Underneath the column was placed (and
remains probably to this day) the Palladium, that
mysterious image of Minerva, which AEneas carried from
Troy to Alba Longa, which his descendants
removed to Rome, and which was now brought by Constantine
to his new capital, so near to its first legendary
home, to be the pledge of abiding security to the
city by the Bosphorus.
These are the chief relics of Constantinople
in the fifth century which are still visible to the
traveller. I have described with some little
detail the outward appearance of the city and its monuments,
because these would naturally be the objects which
would most attract the attention of a child brought
from such far different scenes into the midst of so
stately a city. But during the ten or eleven years
that Theodoric remained in honourable captivity at
the court of Leo, while he was growing up from childhood
to manhood, it cannot be doubted that he gradually
learned the deeper lessons which lay below the glory
and the glitter of the great city’s life, and
that the knowledge thus acquired in those years which
are so powerful in moulding character, had a mighty
influence on all his subsequent career.
He saw here for the first time, and
by degrees he apprehended, the results of that state
of civilitas which in after years he was to
be constantly recommending to his people. Sprung
from a race of hunters and shepherds, having slowly
learned the arts of agriculture, and then perhaps
partly unlearned them under the over-lordship of the
nomad Huns, the Ostrogoths at this time knew nothing
of a city life. A city was probably in their
eyes little else than a hindrance to their freebooting
raids, a lair of enemies, a place behind whose sheltering
walls, so hard to batter down, cowards lurked in order
to sally forth at a favourable moment and attack brave
men in their rear. At best it was a treasure-house,
which valiant Goths, if Fortune favoured them, might
sack and plunder: but Fortune seldom did favour
the children of Gaut in their assaults upon the fenced
cities of the Empire.
Now, however, the lad Theodoric began
to perceive, as the man Ataulfus had perceived before
him, that the city life upon which all the proverbs
and the songs of his countrymen poured contempt, had
its advantages. To the New Rome came the incessant
ships of Alexandria, bringing corn for the sustenance
of her citizens. Long caravans journeyed over
the highlands of Asia Minor loaded with the spices
and jewels of India and the silks of China. Men
of every conceivable Asiatic country were drawn by
the irresistible attraction of hoped-for profit to
the quays and the Fora of Byzantium. The scattered
homesteads of the Ostrogothic farmers had no such
wonderful power of drawing men over thousands of miles
of land and sea to visit them. Then the bright
and varied life of the Imperial City could not fail
to fill the boy’s soul with pleasure and admiration.
The thrill of excitement in the Hippodrome as the two
charioteers, Green and Blue, rounded the spina,
neck and neck, the tragedies acted in the theatre
amid rapturous applause, the strange beasts from every
part of the Roman world that roared and fought in the
Amphitheatre, the delicious idleness of the Baths,
the chatter and bargaining and banter of the Forum,all
this made a day in beautiful Constantinople very unlike
a day in the solemn and somewhat rude palace by Lake
Balaton.
As the boy grew to manhood, the deep
underlying cause of this difference perhaps became
clearer to his mind. He could see more or less
plainly that the soul which held all this marvellous
body of civilisation together was reverence for Law.
He visited perhaps some of the courts of law; he may
have seen the Illustrious Praetorian Prefect, clothed
in Imperial purple, move majestically to the judgment-seat,
amid the obsequious salutations of the dignified officials,
who in their various ranks and orders surrounded the
hall. The costly golden reed-case, the massive
silver inkstand, the silver bowl for the petitions
of suitors, all emblems of his office, were placed
solemnly before him, and the pleadings began.
Practised advocates arose to plead the cause of plaintiff
or defendant; busy short-hand writers took notes of
the proceedings; at length in calm and measured words
the Prefect gave his judgment; a judgment which was
necessarily based on law, which had to take account
of the sayings of jurisconsults, of the stored-up
wisdom of twenty generations of men; a judgment which,
notwithstanding the venality which was the curse of
the Empire, was in most instances in accordance with
truth and justice. How different, must Theodoric
often have thought, in after years, when he had returned
to Gothland,how different was this settled
and orderly procedure from the usage of the barbarians.
With them the “blood-feud”, the “wild
justice of revenge”, often prolonged from generation
to generation, had been long the chief righter of
wrongs done; and if this was now slowly giving place
to judicial trial, that trial was probably a coarse
and almost lawless proceeding, in which the head man
of the district, with a hundred assessors, as ignorant
as himself, amid the wild cries of the opposed parties,
roughly fixed the amount of blood-money to be paid
by a murderer, or decided at hap-hazard, often with
an obvious reference to the superior force at the
command of one or other of the litigants, some obscure
dispute as to the ownership of a slave or the right
to succeed to a dead man’s inheritance.
Law carefully thought out, systematised,
and in the main softened and liberalised, from generation
to generation, was the great gift of the Roman Empire
to the world, and by her strong, and uniform, and,
in the main, just administration of this law, that
Empire had kept, and in the days of Theodoric was
still keeping, her hold upon a hundred jarring nationalities.
What hope was there that the German intruders into
the lands of the Mediterranean could ever vie with
this great achievement? Yet if they could not,
if it was out of their power to reform and reinvigorate
the shattered state, if they could only destroy and
not rebuild, they would exert no abiding influence
on the destinies of Europe.
I do not say that all these thoughts
passed at this time through the mind of Theodoric,
but I have no doubt that the germs of them were sown
by his residence in Constantinople. When he returned,
a young man of eighteen years and of noble presence
to the palace of his father, he had certainly some
conception of what the Greeks meant when he heard them
talking about politeia, some foreshadowing of
what he himself would mean when in after days he should
speak alike to his Goth and Roman subjects of the
blessings of civilitas.