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The Historians' History of the World 06 [The Early Roman Empire]
- Автор: Gutenberg
- Год: 1905
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: История
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The secondary tribes went up the Vistula through the Carpathians to the Danube. Beyond this stream, in the year 165, one of the unceasing wars between the Marcomanni and the Romans was in progress. The pressure of the new rovers from the north gave fresh weight and importance to the pressure of the Danubian Germans. The Marcomannic War lasted nearly fifteen years; its course was terrible, and similar to that of the Punic War.
Marcus Aurelius, however, was greater than the danger; he became its master. Not a foot of Roman territory was lost; on the contrary, many thousand homeless Germans settled in the empire as new brave subjects. There was now for half a century an apparent cessation of the process of destruction, but only of its external manifestations, not of the internal efforts and preparations towards this end. The Roman tithe province (agri decumates) between the Rhine and the Danube, unprotected by any natural boundaries, was the first field of Germanic occupation. At what date the chief mass of Vandals and Burgundiones, together with the Lygii, migrated from their settlements between the Oder and the Vistula to the Roman frontiers, we have no knowledge. We first encounter them under Probus in the year 277, acting in the rear of the older frontier tribes as their allies.
For over half a century, from 211 to 268, Rome had no great emperor; indeed, with the exception of Maximinus, 235-238, not even a warrior. He, however, was a rude barbarian who knew only how to fight and to conquer, not how to organise. Then began the period of decline, in which one emperor, Decius, fell upon the battle-field, and another, Valerian, was carried into lifelong captivity. Simultaneously there rose up in the East (about the year 226) a new and terrible foe, the powerful Sapor, one of the Persian Sassanidæ, by whom the rule of the Parthians was overthrown, and who was burning to become a second Cyrus. Under Gallienus, Valerian’s son, 260-268, the misery of Rome reached its height. In expeditions of hitherto unheard-of magnitude, the Goths during ten years overran Asia Minor and Greece to Macedonia; the noblest and finest towns of antiquity fell in flames.
[268-367 A.D.]
But the greatest evil of all, at least in the West, was the civil war. Nineteen tyrants, usurpers, rose against the ruler; amongst whom, however, two, Odenathus and his wife Zenobia, victoriously defended the empire against the Persians. For fifteen years the West languished under tyrants, of whom the first, Postumus, was certainly more powerful than the rightful emperor.
There was no longer any talk of repulsing the foreign foe; the fact that a great number of Germans were in both armies fighting for and against each other was only a diminution of the danger. Further districts of Gaul were being constantly annexed and won back from the barbarians, and a small host of Franks pressed fighting into Spain, and after twelve years lost itself in Africa. Not only the beginning of the end, but the end itself seemed to have set in, when Rome was again saved and raised almost to its former glory by a series of brave and great emperors. But the true saviour of the empire was Diocletian (285-305), the wisest if not the bravest of these. By his state reforms he built up the empire on a new foundation, suitable to the needs of his time. His predecessors had rendered harmless the most dangerous foes of the empire, the Goths—Claudius by his glorious victory at Naissus, and Aurelian by the cession of the large province of Dacia.
A Barbarian
The new Probus, however, had so completely vanquished the peoples of the West with their allies, Vandals, Burgundiones, and Lygii, that he was able to announce to the senate: “The whole of Germania, as far as it reaches, is subdued. Nine kings of different peoples lie at your feet.” In the next two years, however, the conquered people uprose once more, and the old state of affairs seemed to be returning, when Diocletian in the year 285 brought permanent succour.
The division of the imperial government among those brave and able men whom he appointed “cæsars” checked the German peril. His successor and the completer of his work, Constantine the Great, brought (at all events to the eastern portion of the empire) fresh life and more than a thousand years’ duration, by establishing his own place of residence at Constantinople. But once again, under the reign of Constantius, weak son of a great father, the lust of war and plunder was awakened in the barbarians of the West by the rise of a new tyrant in Gaul, and the civil war resulting therefrom. Already the Rhenish strongholds, amongst them Colonia Agrippina (Cologne), were in their hands when a new preserver, the youthful Julian, came upon the scene.
He, like Cæsar, knew how to fight and conquer. The Salian Franks, who had usurped the country between the Schelde and the Maas, Toxandria, were taken as subjects; the Ripuarians, even the Saxon Chauci, were forced to a submissive peace, and the Alamanni compelled, after four campaigns, to the condition of tributaries.
[367-476 A.D.]
Valentinian I continued Julian’s work with an iron hand and will. During this interlude of more than a century in the migration of the tribes the victory of Christendom was effected in Rome, and also its entry amongst the Germanic peoples in the form of Arianism, The Germans received a fresh impetus by the incursions of the Huns, which extended from the Crimean wall to the Loire. The western Goths, who were already in a state of transition from barbarism to civilisation, fled before these Mongols to the Romans. Tricked by imperial officers, wronged and deceived, they seized upon the sword; the decisive battle at Hadrianopolis, in which the emperor Valens fell, made them lords of the European provinces of the Eastern Empire. The joint empire was once more saved by Theodosius, the last of the great emperors, who contrived to appease the Goths. But when in 395 the last and permanent division of the empire took place under Arcadius and Honorius, the two weak sons of Theodosius, who were still in their boyhood, the danger to western Rome flared up again, even more terrible than before.
For nearly eight hundred years the capital of the world had seen no conqueror within its walls. Alaric the Visigoth, a fearless warrior, became after the emperor had caused his best commander Stilicho to be put to death the first successor of the Gallic Brennus.
But the twofold occupation of Rome by Alaric was of no more importance as an epoch in the barbarian invasion than was the later occupation by Genseric in the year 455. Alaric did not wish to destroy the empire, only to rule over his people in and with it; the Vandal wished for nothing but plunder. From the passage of the Rhine by the Vandals and Suevi, at the beginning of the year 406, to the incursion of the Visigoths into Gaul in 412, was a far more important period in the barbaric advance. In the year 409 the first went across the Pyrenees, and in 411 permanently established themselves in Spain. In the year 413 the Burgundiones took possession of the country now bearing their name; in the year 419 southwestern Gaul was at last formally ceded to the Visigoths by the emperor Honorius. This people acknowledged a certain, though only nominal, supremacy on the part of Rome. Rome, through its last great commander Aëtius, brought into subjection the whole of the rest of Gaul and the greater part of Spain. Far worse, however, was the loss it suffered at the hands of the most terrible of all the Germanic conquerors, Genseric the king of the Vandals; who in the year 427 deprived it of the distant and rich Africa, its granary, as well as of the islands of the Mediterranean, and founded a piratical state which became for him the source of enormous wealth during half a century, but for Italy and other countries of the coast one of indescribable devastations.