The friendly relations between Odovacar
and the Eastern Emperor which had been established
by the embassy last described were gradually altered
into estrangement. In the year 480, Nepos, the
dethroned Emperor of Rome, was stabbed by two treacherous
courtiers in his palace near Salona. Odovacar
led an army into Dalmatia, and avenged the murder,
but also apparently annexed the province of Dalmatia
to his dominion, thus coming into nearer neighbourhood
with Constantinople (487-488) This may have been one
cause of alienation, but a more powerful one was the
negotiation which was commenced in the year 484 between
Odovacar and Illus, the last of the many insurgent
generals who disturbed the reign of Zeno. At
first Odovacar held himself aloof from the proposed
confederacy, but afterwards (486) he was disposed,
or Zeno believed that he was disposed, to accept the
alliance of the insurgent general. In order to
find him sufficient occupation nearer home, the Emperor
fanned into a flame the smouldering embers of discord
between Odovacar and Feletheus, king of the Rugians,
the most powerful ruler of those Danubian lands from
which the Italian king himself had migrated into Italy.
The Rugian war was short, and Odovacar’s success
was decisive. In 487 he vanquished the Rugian
army and carried Feletheus and his wife prisoners
to Ravenna. In 488 an attempt to raise again the
standard of the Rugian monarchy, which was made by
Frederic, the son of Feletheus, was crushed, and Frederic,
an exile and a fugitive, betook himself to the camp
of Theodoric, who was then dwelling at Novae(Sistova?),
on the Danube.
When the attempt to weaken Odovacar
by means of his fellow-barbarians in “Rugiland”
failed, Zeno feigned outward acquiescence, offering
congratulations on the victory and receiving presents
out of the Rugian spoils, but in his heart he felt
that there must now be war to the death between him
and this too powerful ruler of Italy. The news
came to him at a time when Theodoric was in one of
his most turbulent and destructive moods, when he
had penetrated within fourteen miles of Constantinople
and had fired the towns and villages of Thrace, perhaps
even within sight of the capital. It was a natural
thought and not altogether an unstatesmanlike expedient
to play off one disturber of his peace against the
other, to commission Theodoric to dethrone the “tyrant”
Odovacar, and thus at least earn repose for the provincials
of Thrace, perhaps secure an ally at Ravenna.
Theodoric, we may be sure, with those instincts of
civilisation and love for the Empire which had been
in his heart from boyhood, though often repressed and
disobeyed, needed little exhortation to an enterprise
which he may himself have suggested to the Emperor.
Thus then it came to pass that a formal
interview was arranged between Emperor and King (perhaps
at Constantinople, though it seems doubtful whether
Theodoric could have safely trusted himself within
its walls), and at this interview the terms of the
joint enterprise were arranged, an enterprise to which
Theodoric was to contribute all the effective strength
and Zeno the glamour of Imperial legitimacy.
When the high contracting parties
met, Theodoric lamented the hapless condition of Italy
and Rome: Italy once subject to the predecessors
of Zeno; Rome, once the mistress of the world, now
harassed and distressed by the usurped authority of
a king of Rugians and Turcilingians. If the Emperor
would send Theodoric thither with his people, he would
be at once relieved from the heavy charges of their
stipendia which he was now bound to furnish,
while Theodoric would hold the land as of the free
gift of the Emperor, and would reign there as king,
only till Zeno himself should arrive to claim the
supremacy.
In the autumn of the year 488, Theodoric
with all his host set forth from Sistova on the Danube
on his march to Italy. His road was the same
taken by Alaric and by most of the barbarian invaders;
along the Danube as far as Belgrade, then between
the rivers Drave and Save or along the banks
of one of them till he reached the Julian Alps (not
far from the modern city of Laibach), then down upon
Aquileia and the Venetian plain. As in the Macedonian
campaign, so now, he was accompanied by all the members
of his nation, old men and children, mothers and maidens,
and doubtless by a long train of waggons. We
have no accurate information whatever as to the number
of his army, but various indications, both in earlier
and later history, seem to justify us in assuming that
the soldiers must have numbered fully 40,000; and
if this was the case, the whole nation cannot have
been less than 200,000. The difficulty of finding
food for so great a multitude in the often desolated
plains of Pannonia and Noricum must have been enormous,
and was no doubt the reason of the slowness of Theodoric’s
progress. Very probably he divided his army into
several portions, moving on parallel lines; foragers
would scour the country far and wide, stores of provisions
would be accumulated in the great Gothic waggons,
which would be laboriously driven over the rough mountain
passes. Then all the divisions of the army which
had scattered in search of food would have to concentrate
again when they came into the neighbourhood of an enemy,
whether Odovacar or one of the barbarian kings who
sought to bar their progress. All these operations
consumed much time, and hence it was that though the
Goths started on their pilgrimage in 488 (probably
in the autumn of that year) they did not descend into
the plains of Italy even at its extreme north-eastern
corner, till July, 489.
There was one fact which probably
facilitated the progress of Theodoric, and prevented
his expedition with such a multitude from being condemned
as absolute foolhardiness. His road lay, for the
most part, through regions with which he was already
well acquainted, through a land which might almost
be called his native land, and both the resources and
the difficulties of which were well known to him.
The first considerable city that he came to, Singidunum
(the modern Belgrade), was the scene of his own first
boyish battle. The Gepidae, who were his chief
antagonists on the road, had swarmed over into that
very province of Pannonia where his father’s
palace once stood; and though they showed themselves
bitter foes, they were doubtless surrounded by foes
of their own who would be friends to the Ostrogoths.
Probably, too, Frederic, the Rugian refugee, brought
with him many followers who knew the road and could
count on the assistance of some barbarian allies, eager
to overturn the throne of Odovacar. Thus it will
be seen that though the perils of the Ostrogothic
march were tremendous, the danger which in those mapless
days was so often fatal to an invading armyignorance
of the countrywas not among them.
We are vaguely told of countless battles
fought by the Ostrogoths with Sclavonic and other
tribes that lay across their line of march, but the
only battle of which we have any details (and those
only such as we can extract from the cloudy rhetoric
of a popular preacher) is one which was fought
with the Gepidse, soon after the Goths had emerged
from the territory of the friendly Empire, near the
great mere or river which went by the name of Hiulca
Palus, in what is now the crown-land of Sclavonia.
When the great and over-wearied multitude approached
the outskirts of the Gepid territory, their leader
sent an embassy to Traustila, king of the Gepidae,
entreating that his host might have an unmolested
passage, and offering to pay for the provisions which
they would require. To this embassy Traustila
returned a harsh and insulting answer: “He
would yield no passage through his dominions to the
Ostrogoths; if they would go by that road they must
first fight with the unconquered Gepidae” Traustila
then took up a strong position near the Hiulca
Palus, whose broad waters, girdled by fen and
treacherous morass, made the onward march of the invaders
a task of almost desperate danger. But the Ostrogoths
could not now retreat; famine and pestilence lay behind
them on their road; they must go forward, and with
a reluctant heart Theodoric gave the signal for the
battle.
It seemed at first as if that battle
would be lost, and as if the name and fame of the
Ostrogothic people would be swallowed up in the morasses
of the reedy Hiulca. Already the van of the
army, floundering in the soft mud, and with only their
wicker shields to oppose to the deadly shower of the
Gepid arrows, were like to fall back in confusion.
Then Theodoric, having called for a cup of wine, and
drunk to the fortunes of his people, in a few spirited
words called to his soldiers to follow his standardthe
standard of a king who would carve out the way to victory.
Perchance he may have discerned some part of the plain
where the road went over solid ground, and if that
were beset by foes, at any rate the Gepid was less
terrible than the morass. So it was that he charged
triumphantly through the hostile ranks, and, being
followed by his eager warriors, achieved a signal
victory. The Gepidae were soon wandering over
the plain, a broken and dispirited force. Multitudes
of them were slain before the descent of night saved
the remaining fugitives, and so large a number of
the Gepid store-waggons fell into the hands of the
Ostrogoths that throughout the host one voice of rejoicing
arose that Traustila had been willing to fight.
So had a little Gothic blood bought food more than
they could ever have afforded money to purchase.
Thus, through foes and famine, hardships
of the winter and hardships of the summer, the nation-army
held on its way, and at length (as has been already
said) in the month of August (489) the last of the
waggons descended from the highlands, which are an
outpost of the Julian Alps, and the Ostrogoths were
encamped on the plains of Italy. Odovacar, who
apparently had allowed them to accomplish the passage
of the Alps unmolested, stood ready to meet them on
the banks of the Isonzo, the river which flows near
the ruins of the great city of Aquileia. He had
a large army, the kernel of which would doubtless
be those mercenaries who had raised him on the shield
thirteen years before, and among whom he had divided
one-third part of the soil of Italy. But many
other barbarians had flocked to his standard, so that
he had, as it were, a little court of kings, chieftains
serving under him as supreme leader. He himself,
however, was now in the fifty-sixth year of his age,
and his genius for war, if he ever had any, seems
to have failed him. He fought (as far as we can
discern his conduct from the fragmentary notices of
the annalists and panegyrists) with a sort of sullen
savageness, like a wild beast at bay, but without
skill either of strategy or tactics. The invaders,
encumbered with the waggons and the non-combatants,
had greatly the disadvantage of position. Odovacar’s
camp had been long prepared, was carefully fortified,
and protected by the deep and rapid Isonzo. But
Theodoric’s soldiers succeeded in crossing the
river, stormed the camp, defended as it was by a strong
earthen rampart, and sent its defenders flying in
wild rout over the plains of Venetia. Odovacar
fell back on the line of the Adige, and the beautiful
north-eastern corner of Italy, the region which includes
among its cities Udine, Venice, Vicenza, Padua, now
accepted without dispute the rule of Theodoric, and
perhaps welcomed him as a deliverer from the stern
sway of Odovacar. From this time forward it is
allowable to conjecture that the most pressing of
Theodoric’s anxieties, that which arose from
the difficulty of feeding and housing the women and
children of his people, if not wholly removed was
greatly lightened. Odovacar took up a strong
position near Verona, separated from that city by the
river Adige. Theodoric, though not well provided
with warlike appliances, rightly judged that it
was of supreme importance to his cause to follow up
with rapidity the blow struck on the banks of the
Isonzo, and accordingly, towards the end of September,
he, with his army, stood before the fossatum
or entrenched camp at Verona. In order to force
his soldiers to fight bravely, Odovacar had, in defiance
of the ordinary rules of war, placed his camp where
retreat was almost hopelessly barred by the swift
stream of the Adige, and he addressed his army with
stout words full of simulated confidence in victory.
On the morning of the 30th of September, when the
two armies were about to join in what must evidently
be a most bloody encounter, the mother and sister
of Theodoric, Erelieva and Amalfrida, sought his presence
and asked him with some anxiety what were the chances
of the battle. With words, reminding us of the
Homeric saying that “the best omen is to fight
bravely for one’s country”, Theodoric reassured
their doubting hearts. On that day, he told his
mother, it was for him to show that she had given
birth to a hero on the day when the Ostrogoths did
battle with the Huns. Dressed in his most splendid
robes, those robes which their hands had adorned with
bright embroidery, he would be conspicuous both to
friend and foe, and would give a noble spoil to his
conqueror if any man could succeed in slaying him.
With these words he leapt on his horse, rushed to
the van, cheered on his wavering troops, and began
a series of charges, which at length, but not till
thousands of his own men as well as of the enemy were
slain, carried the fossatum of Odovacar.
The battle once gained, of course
the dispositions which Odovacar had made to ensure
the resistance of his soldiers, necessitated their
ruin, and the swirling waters of the Adige probably
destroyed as many as the Ostrogothic sword. Odovacar
himself, again a fugitive, sped across the plain south-eastward
to Ravenna, compelled like so many Roman Emperors
before him to shelter himself from the invader behind
its untraversable network of rivers and canals.
It would seem from the scanty notices which remain
to us that in this battle of Verona, the bloodiest
and most hardly fought of all the battles of the war,
the original army of foederati, the men who
had crowned Odovacar king, and divided the third part
of Italy between them, was, if not annihilated, utterly
broken and dispirited, and Theodoric, who now marched
westward with his people, and was welcomed with blessing
and acclamations by the Bishop and citizens of
Milan, received also the transferred allegiance of
the larger part of the army of his rival.
It seemed as if a campaign of a few
weeks had secured the conquest of Italy, but the war
was in fact prolonged for three years and a half from
this time by domestic treachery, foreign invasion,
and the almost absolute impregnability of Ravenna.
I. At the head of the soldiers of
Odovacar who had apparently with enthusiasm accepted
the leadership of his younger and more brilliant rival,
was a certain Tufa, Master of the Soldiery among the
foederati Either he had extraordinary powers
of deception, or Theodoric, short of generals, accepted
his professions of loyalty with most unwise facility;
for so it was that the Ostrogothic king entrusted to
Tufa’s generalship the army which assuredly
he ought to have led himself to the siege of Ravenna.
When Tufa arrived at Faventia, about eighteen miles
from Ravenna, his old master came forth to meet him;
the instinct of loyalty to Odovacar revived (if indeed
he had not all along been playing a part in his alleged
desertion), and Tufa carried over, apparently, the
larger part of the army under his command to the service
of Theodoric’s rival. Worst of all, he
surrendered to his late master the chief members of
his staff the so-called comités (henchmen) of
Theodoric some of whom had probably helped him in
his early adventure against Singidunum, and had shared
his hardships in many a weary march through Thrace
and Macedonia. These men were all basely murdered
by Odovacar, a deed which Theodoric inwardly determined
should never be forgiven (492).
Such an event as the defection of
Tufa, carrying with him a considerable portion of
his troops, was a great blow to the Ostrogothic cause.
Some time later another and similar event took place.
Frederic the Rugian, whose father had been dethroned,
and who had been himself driven into exile by the
armies of Odovacar, for some unexplained and most
mysterious reason, quitted the service of Theodoric
and entered that of his own deadliest enemy.
The sympathy of scoundrels seems to have drawn him
into a special intimacy with Tufa, with whom he probably
wandered up and down through Lombardy (as we now call
it) and Venetia, robbing and slaying in the name of
Odovacar, but not caring to share his hardships in
blockaded and famine-stricken Ravenna. Fortunately,
the Nemesis which so often waits on the friendship
of bad men was not wanting in this case. The
two traitors quarrelled about the division of the spoil
and a battle took place between them, in the valley
of the Adige above Verona, in which Tufa was slain.
Frederic, with his Rugian countrymen, occupied the
strong city of Ticinum (Pavia), where they spent
two dreadful years, “Their minds”, says
an eye-witness, in after-time the Bishop of that
city, “were full of cruel energy which prompted
them to daily crimes. In truth, they thought
that each day was wasted which they had not made memorable
by some sort of outrage”. In 494, with the
general pacification of Italy, they disappear from
view: and we may conjecture, though we are not
told, that Pavia was taken, and that Frederic received
his deserts at the hands of Theodoric.
II. In the year 490 Gundobad,
king of the Burgundians, crossed the Alps and descended
into Italy to mingle in the fray as an antagonist of
Theodoric. In the same year, probably at the same
time, Alaric II., king of the Visigoths, entered Italy
as his ally. A great battle was fought on the
river Adda, ten miles east of Milan, in which
Odovacar, who had emerged from the shelter of Ravenna,
was again completely defeated. He fled once more
to Ravenna, which he never again quitted.
While these operations were proceeding,
Theodoric’s own family and the non-combatants
of the Ostrogothic nation were in safe shelter, though
in somewhat narrow quarters, in the strong city of
Pavia, whose Bishop, Epiphanius, was the greatest
saint of his age, and one for whom Theodoric felt
an especial veneration. No doubt they must have
left that city before the evil-minded Rugians entered
it (492), but we hear nothing of the circumstances
of their flight or removal.
As for the Burgundian king, he does
not seem to have been guided by any high considerations
of policy in his invasion of Italy, and having been
induced to conclude a treaty with Theodoric, he returned
to his own royal city of Lyons with goodly spoil and
a long train of hapless captives torn from the fields
of Liguria.
III. These disturbing elements
being cleared away, we may now turn our attention
to the true key of the position and the central event
of the war, the siege of Odovacar in Ravenna.
After Tufa’s second change of sides, and during
the Burgundian invasion of Italy, there was no possibility
of keeping up an Ostrogothic blockade of the city of
the marshes. Odovacar emerged thence, won back
the lower valley of the Po, and marching on Milan,
inflicted heavy punishment on the city, for the welcome
given to Theodoric. In the battle of the Adda,
11 August, 490, however, as has been already mentioned,
he sustained a severe defeat, in which he lost one
of his most faithful friends and ablest counsellors,
a Roman noble named Pierius. After his flight
to Ravenna, which immediately followed the battle
of the Adda, there seems to have been a general
movement throughout Italy, headed by the Catholic clergy,
for the purpose of throwing off his yoke, and if we
do not misread the obscure language of the Panegyrist,
this movement was accompanied by a wide-spread popular
conspiracy, somewhat like the Sicilian Vespers of a
later day, to which the foederati, the still
surviving adherents of Odovacar, scattered over their
various domains in Italy, appear to have fallen victims.
Only two cities, Caesena and Rimini,
beside Ravenna, now remained to Odovacar, and for
the next two years and a half (from the autumn of 490
to the spring of 493) Ravenna was straitly besieged.
Corn rose to a terrible famine price (seventy-two
shillings a peck), and before the end of the siege
the inhabitants had to feed on the hides of animals,
and all sorts of foul and fearful aliments, and many
of them perished of hunger. A sortie made in
491 by a number of barbarian recruits whom Odovacar
had by some means attracted to his standard, was repelled
after a desperate encounter. During all this
time Theodoric, from his entrenched camp in the great
pine-wood of Ravenna, was watching jealously to see
that no provisions entered the city by land, and in
492, after taking Rimini, he brought a fleet of swift
vessels thence to a harbour about six miles from Ravenna,
and thus completed its investment by sea.
In the beginning of 493 the misery
of the besieged city became unendurable, and Odovacar,
with infinite reluctance, began to negotiate for its
surrender. His son Thelane was handed over as
a hostage for his fidelity, and the parleying between
the two rival chiefs began on the 25th of February.
On the following day Theodoric and his Ostrogoths
entered Classis, the great naval emporium, about three
miles from the city; and on the 27th, by the mediation
of the Bishop, peace was formally concluded between
the warring kings.
The peace, the surrender of the city,
the acceptance of the rule of “the new King
from the East”, were apparently placed under
the especial guardianship of the Church. “The
most blessed man, the Archbishop John”, says
a later ecclesiastical historian, “opened
the gates of the city, 5 March, 493, which Odovacar
had closed, and went forth with crosses and thuribles
and the Holy Gospels, seeking peace. While the
priests and the rest of the clergy round him intoned
the psalms, he, falling prostrate on the ground, obtained
that which he desired. He welcomed the new King
coming from the East, and peace was granted unto him,
including not only the citizens of Ravenna, but all
the other Romans, for whom the blessed John made
entreaty”.
The chief clause of the treaty was
that which assured Odovacar not only life but absolute
equality of power with his conqueror. The fact
that Theodoric should have, even in appearance, consented
to an arrangement so precarious and unstable, is the
strongest testimony to the impregnability of Ravenna,
which after three years’ strict blockade, could
still be won only by so mighty a concession. But
of course there was not, there could not be, any real
peace on such terms between the two queen-bees in
that swarming hive of barbarians. Theodoric received
informationso we are toldthat
his rival was laying snares for his life, and being
determined to anticipate the blow, invited Odovacar
to a banquet at “the Palace of the Laurel-grove”,
on the south-east of the city (15th March, 493).
When Odovacar arrived, two suppliants knelt before
him and clasped his hands while offering a feigned
petition. Some soldiers who had been stationed
in two side alcoves stepped forth from the ambush
to slay him, but at the last moment their hearts failed
them, and they could not strike. If the deed
was to be done, Theodoric must himself be the executioner
or the assassin. He raised his sword to strike.
“Where is God?” cried the defenceless but
unterrified victim. “Thus didst thou to
my friends”, answered Theodoric, reminding him
of the treacherous murder of the “henchmen”.
Then with a tremendous stroke of his broadsword he
clove his rival from the shoulder to the loin.
The barbarian frenzy, which the Scandinavian minstrels
call the “fury of the Berserk”, was in
his heart, and with a savage laugh at his own too
impetuous blow, he shouted as the corpse fell to the
ground: “I think the weakling had never
a bone in his body”.
The body of Odovacar was laid in a
stone coffin, and buried near the synagogue of the
Jews. His brother was mortally wounded while attempting
to escape through the palace-garden. His wife
died of hunger in her prison. His son, sent for
safe-keeping to the king of the Visigoths in Gaul,
afterwards escaped to Italy and was put to death by
the orders of Theodoric. Thus perished the whole
short-lived dynasty of the captain of the foederati.
In his long struggle for the possession
of Italy, Theodoric had shown himself patient in adversity,
moderate in prosperity, brave, resourceful, and enduring.
But the memory of all these noble deeds is dimmed
by the crime which ended the tragedy, a crime by the
commission of which Theodoric sank below the level
of the ordinary morality of the barbarian, breaking
his plighted word, and sinning against the faith of
hospitality.