In order to complete our survey of
the foreign policy of the great Ostrogoth, we must
now consider the relations which existed between him
and the majestic personage who, though he had probably
never set foot in Italy, was yet always known in the
common speech of men as “The Roman Emperor”.
It has been already said that Zeno, the sovereign who
bore this title when Theodoric started for Italy,
died before his final victory, and that it was his
successor, Anastasius, with whom the tedious negotiations
were conducted which ended (497) in a recognition,
perhaps a somewhat grudging recognition, by the Emperor
of the right of the Ostrogothic king to rule in Italy.
Anastasius, who was Theodoric’s
contemporary during twenty-five years of his reign,
was already past sixty when the widowed Empress Ariadne
chose him for her husband and her Emperor, and he
had attained the age of eighty-eight when his harassed
life came to a close. A man of tall stature and
noble presence, a wise administrator of the finances
of the Empire, and therefore one who both lightened
taxation and accumulated treasure, a sovereign who
chose his servants well and brought his only considerable
war, that with Persia, to a successful issue, Anastasius
would seem to be an Emperor of whom both his own subjects
and posterity should speak favourably. Unfortunately,
however, for his fame he became entangled in that
most wearisome of theological debates, which is known
as the Monophysite controversy. In this controversy
he took an unpopular side; he became embroiled with
the Roman Pontiff, and estranged from his own Patriarch
of Constantinople. Opposition and the weariness
of age soured a naturally sweet temper, and he was
guilty of some harsh proceedings towards his ecclesiastical
opponents. Even worse than his harshness (which
did not, even on the representations of his enemies,
amount to cruelty) was a certain want of absolute truthfulness,
which made it difficult for a beaten foe to trust
his promises of forgiveness, and thus caused the fire
of civil discord, once kindled, to smoulder on almost
interminably. The religious party to which he
belonged had probably the majority of the aristocracy
of Constantinople on its side, but the mob and the
monks were generally against Anastasius, and some
scenes very humiliating to the Imperial dignity were
the consequence of this antagonism.
(511) Once, when he had resolved on
the deposition of the orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople,
Macedonius, so great a tempest of popular and
theological fury raged through the city, that he ordered
the great gates of his palace to be barred and the
ships to be made ready at what is now called Seraglio
Point, intending to seek safety in flight. A
humiliating reconciliation with the Patriarch, the
order for whose banishment he rescinded, saved him
from this necessity. The citizens and the soldiers
poured through the streets shouting triumphantly:
“Our father is yet with us!” and the storm
for the time abated. But the Emperor had only
appeared to yield, and some months later he stealthily
but successfully carried into effect his design for
the banishment of Macedonius. Again, the
next year, a religious faction-fight disgraced the
capital of the Empire.
(511) The addition of the words “Who
wast crucified for us” to the chorus of the
Te Deum, “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty”,
goaded the orthodox but fanatical mob to madness.
For three days such scenes as London saw during Lord
George Gordon’s “No Popery” riots
were enacted in the streets of Constantinople.
The palaces of the heterodox ministers were burned,
their deaths were eagerly demanded, the head of a monk,
who was supposed to be responsible for the heretical
addition to the hymn, was carried round the city on
a pole, while the murderers shouted: “Behold
the head of an enemy to the Trinity!” Then the
statues of the Emperor were thrown down, an act of
insurrection which corresponded to the building of
barricades in the revolutions of Paris, and loud voices
began to call for the proclamation of a popular general
as Augustus. Anastasius this time dreamed not
of flight, but took his seat in the podium
at the Hippodrome, the great place of public meeting
for the citizens of Constantinople. Thither,
too, streamed the excited mob, fresh from their work
of murder and pillage, shouting with hoarse voices
the line of the Te Deum in its orthodox form.
A suppliant, without his diadem, without his purple
robe, the white-haired Anastasius, eighty-two years
of age, sat meekly on his throne, and bade the criers
declare that he was ready to lay down the burden of
the Empire if the citizens would decide who should
assume it in his stead. The humiliation was accepted,
the clamorous mob were not really of one mind as to
the election of a successor, and Anastasius was permitted
still to reign and to reassume the diadem, which has
not often encircled a wearier or more uneasy head.
Such an Emperor as this, at war with
a large part of his subjects, and suspected of heresy
by the great body of the Catholic clergy, was a much
less formidable opponent for Theodoric than the young
and warlike Clovis, with his rude energy, and his
unquestioning if somewhat truculent orthodoxy.
Moreover, at this time, independently of these special
causes of strife, there was a chronic schism between
the see of Rome and the see of Constantinople (precursor
of that great schism which, three centuries later,
finally divided the Eastern and Western Churches),
and this schism, though it did not as yet lead to the
actual excommunication of Anastasius, caused
him to be looked upon with coldness and suspicion
by the successive Popes of Rome, and made the rule
of Theodoric, avowed Arian as he was, but anxious to
hold the balance evenly between rival churches, far
more acceptable at the Lateran than that of the schismatic
partisan Anastasius.
For some years after the embassy of
Festus (497) and the consequent recognition of Theodoric
by the Emperor, there appears to have been peace,
if no great cordiality, between the courts of Ravenna
and Constantinople. But a war in which Theodoric
found himself engaged with the Gepidae (504), taking
him back as it did into his old unwelcome nearness
to the Danube, led to the actual outbreak of hostilities
between the two States, hostilities, however, which
were but of short duration.
The great city of Sirmium on the Save,
the ruins of which may still be seen about eighty
miles west of Belgrade, had once belonged to the Western
Empire and had been rightly looked upon as one of the
bulwarks of Italy. To anyone who studies the
configuration of the great Alpine chain, which parts
off the Italian peninsula from the rest of Europe,
it will be manifest that it is in the north-east that
that mountain barrier is the weakest. The Maritime,
Pennine, and Cottian Alps, which soar above the plains
of Piedmont and Western Lombardy, afford scarcely any
passes below the snow-line practicable for an invading
army. Great generals, like Hannibal and Napoleon,
have indeed crossed them, but the pride which they
have taken in the achievement is the best proof of
its difficulty. Modern engineering science has
carried its zig-zag roads up to their high crests,
has thrown its bridges across their ravines, has defended
the traveller by its massive galleries from their avalanches,
and in these later days has even bored its tunnels
for miles through the heart of the mountains; but
all these are works done obviously in defiance of
Nature, and if Europe relapsed into a state of barbarism,
the eternal snow and the eternal silence would soon
reassert their supremacy over the frail handiwork
of man. Quite different from this is the aspect
of the mountains on the north-eastern border of Italy.
The countries which we now call Venetia and Istria
are parted from their northern neighbours by ranges
(chiefly that known as the Julian Alps) which are
indeed of bold and striking outline, but which are
not what we generally understand by “Alpine”
in their character, and which often do not rise to
a greater elevation than four thousand feet. Therefore
it was from this quarter of the horizon, from the
Pannonian (or in modern language, Austrian) countries
bordering on the Middle Danube, that all the greatest
invaders in the fifth and sixth centuries, Alaric,
Attila, Alboin, bore down upon Italy. And for
this reason it was truly said by an orator who
was recounting the praises of Theodoric in connection
with this war: “The city of the Sirmians
was of old the frontier of Italy, upon which Emperors
and Senators kept watch, lest from thence the stored
up fury of the neighbouring nations should pour over
the Roman Commonwealth”.
This city of Sirmium, however, and
the surrounding territory had now been for many years
divorced from Italy. In Theodoric’s boyhood
it is possible that his own barbarian countrymen,
occupying as they did the province of Pannonia, lorded
it in the streets of Sirmium, which was properly a
Pannonian city. Since the Ostrogoths evacuated
the province (473), the Gepidae, as we have seen,
had entered it, and it was a king of the Gepidae,
Traustila, who sought to bar Theodoric’s march
into Italy, and who sustained at the hands of the
Ostrogothic king the crushing defeat by the Hiulca
Palus (488). Traustila’s son, Trasaric,
had asked for Theodoric’s help against a rival
claimant to the throne, and had, perhaps, promised
to hand over possession of Sirmium in return for that
assistance. Theodoric, who, as king of “the
Hesperian realm”, felt that it was a point of
honour to recover possession of “the frontier
city of Italy”, gave the desired help, but failed
to receive the promised recompense. When Trasaric’s
breach of faith was manifest, Theodoric sent an army
(504) composed of the flower of the Gothic youth, commanded
by a general named Pitzias, into the valley of the
Save. The Gepidaae, though reinforced by some
of the Bulgarians (who about thirty years before this
time had made their first appearance in the country
which now bears their name), were completely defeated
by Pitzias. Trasaric’s mother, the widow
of Theodoric’s old enemy, Traustila, fell into
the hands of the invaders; Trasaric was expelled from
that corner of Pannonia, and Sirmium, still apparently
a great and even opulent city, notwithstanding the
ravages of the barbarians, submitted, probably with
joy, to the rule of Theodoric, under which she felt
herself once more united to the Roman Commonwealth.
We have still (in the “Various
Letters” of Cassiodorus) two letters relating
to this annexation of Sirmium. In the first, addressed
to Count Colossaeus, that “Illustrious”
official is informed that he is appointed to the governorship
of Pannonia Sirmiensis, a former habitation of the
Goths. This province is now to extend a welcome
to her old Roman lords, even as she gladly obeyed
her Ostrogothic rulers. Surrounded by the wild
anarchy of the barbarous nations, the new governor
is to exhibit the justice of the Goths, “a nation
so happily situated in the midst of praise, that they
could accept the wisdom of the Romans and yet hold
fast the valour of the barbarians”. He is
to shield the poor from oppression, and his highest
merit will be to establish in the hearts of the inhabitants
of the land the love of peace and order.
To the barbarians and Romans settled
in Pannonia the secretary of Theodoric writes, informing
them that he has appointed as their governor a man
mighty in name (Colossaeus) and mighty in deeds.
They must refrain from acts of violence and from redressing
their supposed wrongs by main force. Having got
an upright judge, they must use him as the arbiter
of their differences. What is the use to man
of his tongue, if his armed hand is to settle his
cause, or how can peace be maintained if men take
to fighting in a civilised State? They are therefore
to imitate the example of “our Goths”,
who do not shrink from battles abroad, but who have
learned to exhibit peaceable moderation at home.
The recovery of Sirmium from the Gepidae,
though doubtless the subject of congratulation in
Italy, was viewed with much displeasure at Constantinople.
Whether the part of Pannonia in which it was included
belonged in strictness to the Eastern or Western Empire,
is a question that has been a good deal discussed
and upon which we have perhaps not sufficient materials
for coming to a conclusion. The boundary line
between East and West had undoubtedly fluctuated a
good deal in the fourth and fifth centuries, and the
fact that there were not, as viewed by a Roman statesman,
two Empires at all, but only one great World-Empire,
which for the sake of convenience was administered
by two Emperors, one dwelling at Ravenna or Milan
and the other at Constantinople, was probably the
reason why that boundary was not defined as strictly
as it would have been between two independent kingdoms.
Moreover, through the greater part of the fifth century,
when Huns and Ostrogoths, Rugians and Gepidae were
roaming over these countries of the Middle Danube,
any claim of either the Eastern or Western Emperor
to rule in these lands must have been so purely theoretical
that it probably seemed hardly worth while to spend
time in defining it. But now that the actual
ruler of Italy, and that ruler a strong and capable
barbarian like Theodoric, was holding the great city
of Sirmium, and was sending his governors to civilise
and subdue the inhabitants of what is now called the
“Austrian Military Frontier”, the Emperor
who reigned at Constantinople was not unlikely to find
his neighbourhood unpleasant.
It was doubtless in consequence of
the jealousy, arising from the conquest of Sirmium,
that war soon broke out between the two powers.
Upper Moesia (in modern geography Servia) was undoubtedly
part of the Eastern Empire, yet it is there that we
next find the Gothic troops engaged in war. (505)
Mundo, the Hun, a descendant of Attila, was in league
with Theodoric, but at enmity with the Empire, and
was wandering with a band of freebooters through the
half desolate lands south of the Danube. Sabinian,
the son of the general of the same name, who twenty-six
years before had fought with Theodoric in Macedonia,
was ordered by Anastasius to exterminate this disorderly
Hun. With 10,000 men (among whom there were some
Bulgarian foederati), and with a long train
of waggons containing great store of provisions, he
marched from the Balkans down the valley of the Morava.
Mundo, in despair and already thinking of surrender,
called on his Ostrogothic ally for aid, and Pitzias,
marching rapidly with an army of 2,500 young and warlike
Goths (2,000 infantry and 500 cavalry), reached Horrea
Margi, the place where Mundo was besieged, in
time to prevent his surrender. Notwithstanding
the enthusiasm of the Gothic troops, the battle was
most stubbornly contested, especially by the fierce
Bulgarians, but in the end Pitzias obtained a complete
victory. We may state this fact with confidence,
as it is recorded in the chronicles of an official
of the Eastern Empire. He says of Sabinian:
“Having joined battle at Horrea Margi, and many
of his soldiers having been slain in this conflict
and drowned in the river Margus (Morava), having
also lost all his wagons, he fled with a few followers
to the fortress which is called Nato. In
this lamentable war so promising an army fell, that,
speaking after the manner of men, its loss could never
be repaired”.
Without any general campaign, the
quarrel between the Goths and the Empire seems to
have smouldered on for three years longer. In
his chronicle for the year 508, the same Byzantine
official who has just been quoted, says very honestly:
“Romanus Count of the Domestics and Rusticus
Count of the Scholarii, with 100 armed ships and
as many cutters, carrying 8,000 soldiers, went forth
to ravage the shores of Italy, and proceeded as far
as the most ancient city of Tarentum. Having
recrossed the sea they reported to Anastasius Cæsar
this inglorious victory, which in piratical fashion
Romans had snatched from their fellow-Romans”.
These words of the chronicler show
to what extent Theodoric’s kingdom was looked
upon as still forming part of the Roman Empire, and
they also point to the difficulty of the position
of Anastasius, who, whatever might be his cause of
quarrel with Theodoric, could only enforce his complaints
against him by resorting to acts which in the eyes
of his subjects wore the unholy appearance of a civil
war.
Though we are not precisely informed
when or how hostilities were brought to a close, it
seems probable that soon after this raid, about the
year 509, peace, unbroken for the rest of Theodoric’s
reign, was re-established between Ravenna and Byzantium.
The Epistle which stands in the forefront of the “Various
Letters” of Cassiodorus was probably written
on this occasion.
“Most clement Emperor”,
says Theodoric, or rather Cassiodorus speaking in
his name, “there ought to be peace between us
since there is no real occasion for animosity.
Every kingdom should desire tranquillity, since under
it the people flourish and the common good is secured.
Tranquillity is the comely mother of all useful arts;
she multiplies the race of men as they perish and
are renewed; she expands our powers, she softens our
manners, and he who is a stranger to her sway grows
up in ignorance of all these blessings. Therefore,
most pious Prince, it redounds to your glory that
we should now seek harmony with your government, as
we have ever felt love for your person. For you
are the fairest ornament of all realms, the safeguard
and defence of the world; to whom all other rulers
rightly look up with reverence, inasmuch as they recognise
that there is in you something which exists nowhere
else. But we pre-eminently thus regard you, since
by Divine help it was in your Republic that we learned
the art of ruling the Romans with justice. Our
kingdom is an imitation of yours, which is the mould
of all good purposes, the only model of Empire, Just
in so far as we follow you do we surpass all other
nations.
“You have often exhorted me
to love the Senate, to accept cordially the legislation
of the Emperors, to weld together all the members of
Italy. Then, if you wish thus to form my character
by your counsels, how can you exclude me from your
august peace? I may plead, too, affection for
the venerable city of Rome, from which none can separate
themselves who prize that unity which belongs to the
Roman name.
“We have therefore thought fit
to direct the two Ambassadors who are the bearers
of this letter to visit your most Serene Piety, that
the transparency of peace between us, which from various
causes hath been of late somewhat clouded, may be
restored to-its former brightness by the removal of
all contentions. For we think that you, like ourselves,
cannot endure that any trace of discord should remain
between two Republics which, under the older Princes,
ever formed but one body, and which ought not merely
to be joined together by a languid sentiment of affection,
but strenuously to help one another with their mutually
imparted strength. Let there be always one will,
one thought in the Roman kingdom. ... Wherefore,
proffering the honourable expression of our salutation,
we beg with humble mind that you will not even for
a time withdraw from us the most glorious charity
of your Mildness, which I should have a right to hope
for even if it were not granted to others. (The
change from We to I, which here occurs in the original,
is puzzling.)
“Other matters we have left
to be suggested to your Piety verbally by the bearers
of this letter, that on the one hand this epistolary
speech of ours may not become too prolix, and on the
other that nothing may be omitted which would tend
to our common advantage”.
The letter which I have attempted
thus to bring before the reader is one which almost
defies accurate translation. It is an exceedingly
diplomatic document, full of courtesy, yet committing
the writer to nothing definite. The very badness
of his style enables Cassiodorus to envelop his meaning
in a cloud of words from which the Quaestor of Anastasius
perhaps found it as hard to extract a definite meaning
then, as a perplexed translator finds it hard to render
it into intelligible English now. It is certainly
difficult to acquit Cassiodorus of the charge of a
deficient sense of humour, when we find him putting
into the mouth of his master, who had so often marched
up and down through Thrace, ravaging and burning,
these solemn praises of “Tranquillity”.
And when we read the fulsome flattery which is lavished
on Anastasius, the almost obsequious humbleness with
which the great Ostrogoth, who was certainly the stronger
monarch of the two, prays for a renewal of his friendship,
we may perhaps suspect either that the “illiteratus
Rex” did not comprehend the full meaning of
the document to which he attached his signature, or
that Cassiodorus himself, in his later years, when,
after the death of his master, he republished his
“Various Letters”, somewhat modified their
diction so as to make them more Roman, more diplomatic,
more slavishly subservient to the Emperor, than Theodoric
himself would ever have permitted.
One other act of this Emperor must
be noticed, as illustrating the subject of the last
chapter. When Clovis returned in triumph from
the Visigothic war (508) he found messengers awaiting
him from Anastasius, who brought to him some documents
from the Imperial chancery which are somewhat obscurely
described as “Codicils of the Consulship”.
Then, in the church of St. Martin at Tours he was
robed in a purple tunic and chlamys, and placed
apparently on his own head some semblance of the Imperial
diadem. At the porch of the basilica he mounted
his horse and rode slowly through the streets of the
city to the other chief church, scattering largesse
of gold and silver to the shouting multitude.
“From that day”, we are told, “he
was saluted as Consul and Augustus”.
The name of Clovis does not, like
that of Theodoric, appear in the Fasti of Imperial
Rome, and what the precise nature of the consulship
conferred by the “codicils” may have been,
it is not easy to discover. But there is no doubt
that the authority which Clovis up to this time had
exercised by the mere right of the stronger, over great
part of Gaul, was confirmed and legitimised by this
spontaneous act of the Augustus at Constantinople,
nor that this eager recognition of the royalty of
the slayer of Alaric was meant in some degree as a
demonstration of hostility against Alaric’s father-in-law,
with whom Anastasius had not then been reconciled.
The coalition of Eastern Emperor and
Frankish King boded no good to Italy. Perhaps
could the eye of Anastasius have pierced through the
mists of seven future centuries, could he have foreseen
the insults, the extortions, the cruelties which a
Roman Emperor at Constantinople was to endure at the
hands of “Frankish” invaders, he would
not have been so eager in his worship of the new sun
which was rising over Gaul from out of the marshes
of the Scheldt.
The remainder of the life of Clovis
seems to have been chiefly spent in removing the royal
competitors who were obstacles to his undisputed sway
over the Franks. Doubtless these were kings of
a poor and barbarous type, with narrower and less
statesmanlike views than those of the founder of the
Merovingian dynasty; but the means employed to remove
them were hardly such as we should have expected from
the eldest Son of the Church, from him who had worn
the white robe of a catechumen in the baptistery at
Rheims. His most formidable competitor was Sigebert,
king of the Ripuarian Franks, that is the Franks dwelling
on both banks of the Rhine between Maintz and Köln,
in the forest of the Ardennes and along the valley
of the Moselle. But Sigebert, who had sent a body
of warriors to help the Salian king in his war against
the Visigoths, was now growing old, and among these
barbarous peoples age and bodily infirmity were often
considered as to some extent disqualifications
for kingship. Clovis accordingly sent messengers
to Cloderic, the son of Sigebert, saying: “Behold
thy father has grown old and is lame on his feet.
If he were to die, his kingdom should be thine and
we would be thy friends”. Cloderic yielded
to the temptation, and when his father went forth
from Köln on a hunting expedition in the beech-forests
of Hesse, assassins employed by Cloderic stole upon
him in his tent, as he was taking his noon-tide slumber,
and slew him. The deed being done, Cloderic sent
messengers to Clovis saying: “My father
is dead and his treasures are mine. Send me thy
messengers to whom I may confide such portion of the
treasure as thou mayest desire”. “Thanks”,
said Clovis, “I will send my messengers, and
do thou show them all that thou hast, yet thou thyself
shalt still possess all”. When the messengers
of Clovis arrived at the palace of the Ripuanan, Cloderic
showed them all the royal hoard. “And here”,
said he, pointing to a chest, “my father used
to keep his gold coins of the Empire”. (In hanc
arcellolam solitus erat pater meus
numismata auri congerere.) “Plunge
thy hand in”, said the messenger, “and
search them down to the very bottom”. The
King stooped low to plunge his hand into the coins,
and while he stooped the messenger lifted high his
battle-axe and clove his skull. “Thus”,
says the pious Gregory, who tells the story, “did
the unworthy son fall into the pit which he had digged
for his own father”.
When Clovis heard that both father
and son were slain, he came to the same place (probably
Colonia) where all these things had come to pass and
called together a great assembly of the Ripuarian people.
“Hear”, he said, “what hath happened.
While I was quietly sailing down the Scheldt, Cloderic,
my cousin’s son, practised against his father’s
life, giving forth that I wished him slain, and when
he was fleeing through the beech-forests he sent robbers
against him, by whom he was murdered. Then Cloderic
himself, when he was displaying his treasures, was
slain by some one, I know not whom. But in all
these things I am free from blame. For I cannot
shed the blood of my relations: that were an unholy
thing to do. But since these events have so happened,
I offer you my advice if it seem good to you to accept
it. Turn you to me that you may be under my defence”.
Then they, when they heard these things, shouted approval
and clashed their spears upon their shields in sign
of assent, and raising Clovis on a buckler proclaimed
him their king. And he receiving the kingdom
and the treasures of Sigebert added the Ripuanans to
the number of his subjects. “For”,
concludes Gregory, Bishop of Tours, to whom we owe
the story of this enlargement of the dominions of his
hero, “God was daily laying low the enemies
of Clovis under his hand and increasing his kingdom,
because he walked before him with a right heart and
did those things which were pleasing in his eyes”.
This ideal champion of orthodoxy in
the sixth century then proceeded to clear the ground
of the little Salian kings, his nearer relatives and
perhaps more dangerous competitors. Chararic had
failed to help him in his early days against Syagrius.
He was deposed: the long hair of the Merovingians
was shorn away from his head and from his son’s
head, and they were consecrated as priest and deacon
in the Catholic Church. Chararic wept and wailed
over his humiliation, but his son, to cheer him, said,
alluding to the loss of their locks: “The
wood is green, and the leaves may yet grow again.
Would that he might quickly perish who has done these
things!” The words were reported to Clovis, who
ordered both father and son to be put to death, and
added their hoards to his treasure, their warriors
to his host.
Chararic had not gone forth to the
battle against Syagrius, but Ragnachar of Cambray
had given Clovis effectual help in that crisis of
his early fortunes. However Ragnachar, by his
dissolute life and his preposterous fondness for an
evil counsellor named Farro, had given great offence
to the proud Franks, his subjects. Just as James
I. said of the forfeited estates of Raleigh:
“I maun hae the land, I maun hae it for Carr”,
so Ragnachar said whenever anyone offered him a present,
or whenever a choice dish was brought to table:
“This will do for me and Farro”.
Clovis learned and fomented the secret discontent.
He sent to the disaffected nobles amulets and baldrics
of copper-giltwhich they in their simplicity
took for gold,inviting them to betray their
master. The secret bargain being struck, Clovis
then moved his army towards Cambray. The anxious
Ragnachar sent scouts to discover the strength of
the advancing host. “How many are they?”
said he on their return. “Quite enough
for thee and Farro”, was the discouraging and
taunting reply: and in fact the soldiers of Ragnachar
seem to have been beaten as soon as the battle was
set in array. With his hands bound behind his
back, Ragnachar and his brother Richiar were brought
into the presence of Clovis. “Shame on
thee”, said the indignant king, “for humiliating
our race by suffering thy hands to be bound. It
had been better for thee to diethus”,
and the great battle-axe descended on his head.
Then turning to Richiar, he said: “If thou
hadst helped thy brother, he would not have been bound”;
and his skull too was cloven with the battle-axe.
Before many days the traitorous chiefs discovered
the base metal in the ornaments which had purchased
their treason, and complained of the fraud. “Good
enough gold”, said Clovis, “for men who
were willing to betray their lord to death”;
and the traitors, trembling for their lives under
his frown and fierce rebuke, were glad to leave the
matter undiscussed.
Thus in all his arguments with the
weaker creatures around him the Frankish king was
always right. It was always they, not he, who
had befouled the stream. In this, shall I say,
shameless plausibility of wrong, the founder of the
Frankish monarchy was a worthy prototype of Louis
XIV. and of Napoleon.
Having slain these and many other
kings, and extended his dominions over the whole of
Gaul, he once, in an assembly of his nobles, lamented
his solitary estate. “Alas, I am but a
stranger and a pilgrim, and have no kith or kin who
could help me if adversity came upon me”.
But this he said, not in real grief for their death,
but in guile, in order that if there were any forgotten
relative lurking anywhere he might come forth and
be killed. None, however, was found to answer
to the invitation.
Like all his family, Clovis was short-lived,
though not so conspicuously short-lived as many of
his descendants. He died at forty-five, in the
year 511, five years after the battle of the Campus
Vogladensis. He was buried (511) in the Church
of the Holy Apostles at Paris, and his kingdom, consolidated
with so much labor and at the price of so many crimes,
was partitioned among his four sons. The aged
Emperor Anastasius survived his Frankish ally seven
years, and died in the eighty-ninth year of his age,
8th July, 518. His death was sudden, and some
later writers averred that it was caused by a thunderstorm,
of which he had always had a peculiar and superstitious
fear. Others declared that he was inadvertently
buried alive, that he was heard to cry out in his
coffin, and that when it was opened some days after,
he was found to have gnawed his arm. But these
facts are not known to earlier and more authentic
historians, and the invention of them seems to be
only a rhetorical way of putting the fact that he died
at enmity with the Holy See.