The Great Empires of Prophecy

Rome Divided

The Angles and Saxons
The Angles and Saxons, the freedom-loving progenitors of the English race, were the next barbarians to plant themselves on the territory of what had been the majestic empire of Rome.
"For the fatherland of the English race we must look far away from England itself. In the fifth century after the birth of Christ the one country which we know to have borne the name of Angeln, or England, lay within the district which is now called Sleswick, a district in the heart of the peninsula that parts the Baltic from the Northern seas. Its pleasant pastures, its black-timbered homesteads, its prim little townships looking down on inlets of purple water, were then but a wild waste of heather and sand, girt along the coast with a sunless woodland, broken here and there by meadows that crept down to the marshes and the sea.
"The dwellers in this district, however, seem to have been merely an outlying fragment of what was called the Engle, or English folk, the bulk of whom lay probably in what is now Lower Hanover and Oldenburg. On one side of them the Saxons of Westphalia held the land from the Weser to the Rhine; on the other, the Eastphalian Saxons stretched away to the Elbe. North again of the fragment of the English folk in Sleswick lay another kindred tribe, the Jutes, whose name is still preserved in their district of Jutland. Engle, Saxon, and Jute all belonged to the same low German branch of the Teutonic family; and at the moment when history discovers them they were being drawn together by the ties of a common blood, common speech, common social and political institutions. There is little ground indeed for believing that the three tribes looked on themselves as one people, or that we can as yet apply to them, save by anticipation, the common name of Englishmen. But each of them was destined to share in the conquest of the land in which we live [England], and it is from the union of all of them, when its conquest was complete, that the English people has sprung.
"Of the temper and life of the folk in this older England we know little. But from the glimpses that we catch of it when conquest had brought them to the shores of Britain, their political and social organization must have been that of the German race to which they belonged. In their villages lay ready formed the social and political life which is round us in the England of to-day. A belt of forest or waste parted each from its fellow villages, and within this boundary or mark the `township,' as the village was then called, from the `tun' or rough fence and trench that served as its simple fortification, formed a complete and independent body, though linked by ties which were strengthening every day, to the townships about it and the tribe of which it formed a part. Its social center was the homestead where the aetheling or eorl, a descendant of the first English settlers in the waste, still handed down the blood and traditions of his fathers.
"Around this homestead or aethel, each in its little croft, stood the lowlier dwellings of freelings or ceorls . . . The eorl was distinguished from his fellow villagers by his wealth and his nobler blood; he was held by them in a hereditary reverence; and it was from him and his fellow aethelings that host leaders, whether of the village or the tribe, were chosen in times of war. But this claim to precedence rested simply on the free recognition of his fellow villagers. Within the township every freeman or ceorl was equal. It was the freeman who was the base of village society. He was the `free-necked man,' whose long hair floated over a neck which had never bowed to a lord. He was the `weaponed man,' who alone bore spear and sword, and who alone preserved that right of selfredress or private war which in such a state of society formed the main check upon lawless outrage."
"The religion of these men was the same as that of the rest of the German peoples . . . The common god of the English people was Woden, the war god, the guardian of ways and boundaries, to whom his worshipers attributed the invention of letters, and whom every tribe held to be the first ancestor of its kings. Our own names for the days of the week still recall to us the gods whom our fathers worshiped in their German home land. Wednesday is Woden's-day, as Thursday is the day of Thunder, the god of air and storm and rain. Friday is Frea's-day, the deity of peace and joy and fruitfulness, whose emblems, borne aloft by dancing maidens, brought increase to every field and stall they visited. Saturday commemorates an obscure god, Saetere; Tuesday, the dark god, Tiw, to meet whom was death. Eostre, the god of the dawn or of the spring, lends his name to the Christian festival of the resurrection. Behind these floated the dim shapes of an older mythology: `Wyrd,' the death-goddess, whose memory lingered long in the `Weird' of Northern superstition; or the Shield-Maidens, the `mighty women,' who, an old rhyme tells us, `wrought on the battle-field their toil, and hurled the thrilling javelins.' Nearer to the popular fancy lay deities of wood and fell, or hero-gods of legend and song: Nicor, the water-sprite who survives in our nixies and `Old Nick;' Weland, the forger of weighty shields and sharp-biting swords, who found a later home in the `Weyland's smithy' of Berkshire; Egil, the hero-archer, whose legend is one with that of Cloudesly or Tell.
"The energy of these people found vent in a restlessness which drove them to take part in the general attack of the German race on the empire of Rome. For busy tillers and busy fishers as Englishmen were, they were at heart fighters, and their world was a world of war. Tribe warred with tribe, and village with village; even within the township itself feuds parted household from household, and passions of hatred and vengeance were handed on from father to son. Their mood was above all a mood of fighting men, venturesome, self-reliant, proud, with a dash of hardness and cruelty in it, but ennobled by the virtues which spring from war, — by personal courage and loyalty to plighted word, by a high and stern sense of manhood and the worth of man. A grim joy in hard fighting was already a characteristic of the race. War was the Englishman's `shield-play' and `sword-game;' the gleeman's verse took fresh fire as he sang of the rush o the host and the crash of the shield line. . .
"And next to their love of war came their love of the sea. Everywhere throughout Beowulf's song, as everywhere throughout the life that it pictures, we catch the salt whiff of the sea. The Englishman was as proud of his sea-craft as of his war-craft; sword in teeth, he plunged into the sea to meet walrus and sea-lion; he told of his whale-chase amid the icy waters of the North. Hardly less than his love for the sea was the love he bore to the ship that traversed it. In the fond playfulness of English verse the ship was `the wave-floater,' the `foam-necked,' `like a bird' as it skimmed the wave-crest, 'like a swan' as its curved prow breasted the `swan-road' of the sea.
"Their passion for the sea marked out for them their part in the general movement of the German nations. While Goth and Lombard were slowly advancing over the mountain and plain, the boats of the Englishmen pushed faster over the sea. Bands of English rovers, outdriven by stress of fight, had long found a home there, and lived as they could by sack of vessel or coast. Chance has preserved for us in a Sleswick peat-bog one of the war keels of these early pirates. The boat is flat-bottomed, seventy feet long and eight or nine feet wide, its sides of oak boards fastened with bark ropes and iron bolts. Fifty oars drove it over the waves with a freight of warriors whose arms, axes, swords, lances, and knives were found heaped together in its hold.
"Like the galleys of the Middle Ages, such boats could only creep cautiously along from harbor to harbor in rough weather; but in smooth water their swiftness fitted them admirably for the piracy by which the men of these tribes were already making themselves dreaded. Its flat bottom enabled them to beach the vessel on any fitting coast; and a step on shore at once transformed the boatmen into a war-band. From the first the daring of the English race broke out in the secrecy and suddenness of the pirate's swoop, in the fierceness of their onset, in the careless glee with which they seized either sword or oar. `Foes are they,' sang a Roman poet of the time, `fierce beyond other foes, and cunning as they are fierce; the sea is their school of war, and the storm their friend; they are sea-wolves that prey on the pillage of the world!'
"Of the three English tribes the Saxons lay nearest to the empire, and they were naturally the first to touch the Roman world; before the close of the third century, indeed, their boats appeared in such force in the English Channel as to call for a special fleet to resist them. The piracy of our fathers had thus brought them to the shores of a land which, dear as it is now to Englishmen, had not as yet been trodden by English feet. This land was Britain. When the Saxon boats touched its coast, the island was the westernmost province of the Roman Empire. In the fifty-fifth year before Christ a descent of Julius Caesar revealed it to the Roman world; and a century after Caesar's landing, the emperor Claudius undertook its conquest. The work was swiftly carried out. Before thirty years were over, the bulk of the island had passed beneath the Roman sway, and the Roman frontier had been carried to the Frith of Forth and of Clyde. . . .
"For three hundred years the Roman sword secured order and peace without Britain and within; and with peace and order came a wide and rapid prosperity. Commerce sprang up in ports among which London held the first rank; agriculture flourished till Britain became one of the corn-exporting countries of the world; the mineral resources of the province were explored in the tin mines of Cornwall, the lead mines of Somerset or Northumberland, and the iron mines of the Forest of Dean. But evils which sapped the strength of the whole empire, told at last on the province of Britain."
"Whilst Italy was ravaged by the Goths, and a succession of feeble tyrants oppressed the provinces beyond the Alps, the British island separated itself [A. D. 409] from the body of the Roman Empire. The regular forces which guarded that remote province, had been gradually withdrawn; and Britain was abandoned without defense to the Saxon pirates, and the savages of Ireland and Caledonia. The Britains, reduced to this extremity, no longer relied on the tardy and doubtful aid of a declining monarchy. They assembled in arms, repelled the invaders, and rejoiced in the important discovery of their own strength . . . Britain was irrecoverably lost. But as the emperors wisely acquiesced in the independence of a remote province, the separation was not embittered by the reproach of tyranny or rebellion; and the claims of allegiance and protection were succeeded by the mutual and voluntary offices of national friendship. This revolution dissolved the artificial fabric of civil and military government, and the independent country, during a period of forty years [A. D. 409-449] till the descent of the Saxons, was ruled by the authority of the clergy, the nobles, and the municipal towns."
"Here then, in the year 409, was our England an independent State. In the Anglo- Saxon chronicle — the curious but meager record of early events, which is supposed to have existed in the time of Alfred, and even to have been partly compiled by that great king — there is the following entry which singularly agrees with the chronology of Greek and Latin historians: —
This year the Goths took the city of Rome by storm, and after this the Romans never ruled in Britain, and this was about eleven hundred and ten years after it was built. Altogether they ruled in Britain four hundred and seventy years since Caius Julius first sought the land.
"It was to defend Italy against the Goths that Rome in the opening of the fifth century withdrew her legions from Britain, and from that moment the province was left to struggle unaided against the Picts. Nor were these its only enemies. While marauders from Ireland, whose inhabitants then bore the name of Scots, harried the West, the boats of Saxon pirates, as we have seen, were swarming off its eastern and southern coasts. For forty years Britain held out bravely against these assailants; but civil strife broke its powers of resistance, and its rulers fell back at last on the fatal policy by which the empire invited its doom while striving to avert it, — the policy of matching barbarian against barbarian.
"By the usual promises of land and pay, a band of warriors was drawn for this purpose from Jutland in 449, with two ealdormen, Hengist and Horsa, at their head. If by English history we mean the history of Englishmen in the land which from that time they made their own, it is with this landing of Hengist's war-band that English history begins. They landed on the shores of the Isle of Tbanet at a spot known since as Ebbsfleet. No spot can be so sacred to Englishmen as the spot which first felt the tread of English feet."
"Hengist and Horsa, who, according to the Anglo-Saxon historians, landed in the year 449 on the shore which is called Ypwinesfleet, were personages of more than common sort. `They were the sons of Wihtgils; son of Witta, Witta of Wecta, Wecta of Woden.' So says the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, and adds, `From this Woden sprung all our royal families.' These descendants, in the third generation from the great Saxon divinity, came over in three boats. They came by invitation of Wyrtgeone — Vortigern — king of the Britons. The king gave them land in the southeast of the country, on condition that they should fight against the Picts; and they did fight, and had the victory wheresoever they came. And then they sent for the Angles, and told them of the worthlessness of the people and the excellences of the land. This is the Saxon narrative."
"The work for which the mercenaries had been hired was quickly done, and the Picts are said to have been scattered to the winds in a battle fought on the eastern coast of Britain. But danger from the Pict was hardly over when danger came from the Jutes themselves. Their fellow pirates must have flocked from the Channel to their settlement in Thanet; the inlet between Thanet and the mainland was crossed, and the Englishmen won their first victory over the Britons in forcing their passage of the Medway at the village of Aylesford. A second defeat at the passage of the Cray drove the British forces in terror upon London; but the ground was soon won back again, and it was not till 465 that a series of petty conflicts which had gone on along the shores of Thanet made way for a decisive struggle at Wippedsfleet. Here, however, the overthrow was so terrible that from this moment all hope of saving northern Kent seems to have been abandoned, and it was only on its southern shore that the Britons held their ground. Ten years later, in 475, the long contest was over, and with the fall of Lymme, whose broken walls look, from the slope to which they cling, over the great flat of Romney Marsh, the work of the first English conqueror was done."
"The arts and religion, the laws and language, which the Romans had so carefully planted in Britain, were extirpated by their barbarous successors. After the destruction of the principal churches, the bishops, who had declined the crown of martyrdom, retired with the holy relics into Wales and Armorica; the remains of their flocks were left destitute of any spiritual food; the practise, and even the remembrance, of Christianity were abolished.
"The kings of France maintained the privileges of their Roman subjects; but the ferocious Saxons trampled on the laws of Rome and of the emperors. The proceedings of civil and criminal jurisdiction, the titles of honor, the forms of office, the ranks of society, and even the domestic rights of marriage, testament, and inheritance, were finally suppressed: and the indiscriminate crowd of noble and plebeian slaves was governed by the traditionary customs, which had been coarsely framed for the shepherds and pirates of Germany.
"The language of science, of business, and of conversation, which had been introduced by the Romans, was lost in the general desolation. A sufficient number of Latin or Celtic words might be assumed by the Germans to express their new wants and ideas; but those illiterate pagans preserved and established the use of their national dialect. Almost every name, conspicuous either in the church or State, reveals its Teutonic origin; and the geography of England was universally inscribed with foreign characters and appellations. The example of a revolution, so rapid and so complete, may not easily be found."
And from that time until now, the history of the Angles and Saxons — the Anglo- Saxons — is but the history of England — Angle-land.
Chapter 43
Rome Divided

The Ostrogoths Enter the Western Empire
Four years after the Saxons set their feet on the soil of Britain the Ostrogoths established their independence [A. D. 453] in the Western Empire, where they remained as long as they were a nation.
It will be remembered that before the permanent separation of the Visigoths from their Eastern brethren, the whole Gothic nation, both Ostrogoths and Visigoths, was subject to the great Hermanric. whose dominions extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea; that the great body of the united nations dwelt in the country drained by the river Dnieper; and that in A. D. 375 the inundation of the Huns swept away the Alani, who dwelt between the Volga and the Don, and poured like a mighty flood upon the dominions of Hermanric. We have already traced the Visigoths from there to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean; we now return to the Ostrogoths, of whom, at the attack of the Huns, it is said: "The Ostrogoths submitted to their fate; and the royal race of the Amali will hereafter be found among the subjects of the haughty Attila."
The power of the Huns steadily spread until the reign of Attila. (A. D. 423-453), whose dominions extended from the Black Sea and the Lower Danube to the Baltic, and from the Upper Danube to unknown limits in the steppes of Scythia, over "an empire which did not contain in the space of several thousand miles a single city." The capital — "an accidental camp which, by the long and frequent residence of Attila, had insensibly swelled into a huge village" — seems to have been near, if not exactly at the spot, where now Tokay is situated in Hungary.
"In the proud review of the nations who acknowledged the sovereignty of Attila, and who never entertained during his lifetime the thought of a revolt, the Gepidae and the Ostrogoths were distinguished by their numbers, their bravery, and the personal merit of their chiefs. The renowned Ardaric, king of the Gepidae, was the faithful and sagacious counselor of the monarch, who esteemed his intrepid genius, whilst he loved the mild and discreet virtues of the noble Walamir, king of the Ostrogoths.
"The crowd of vulgar kings, the leaders of so many martial tribes, who served under the standard of Attila, were ranged in the submissive order of guards and domestics round the person of their master. They watched his nod; they trembled at his frown; and at the first signal of his will they executed, without murmur or hesitation, his stern and absolute commands. In time of peace, the dependent princes, with their national troops, attended the royal camp in regular succession; but when Attila collected his military force, he was able to bring into the field an army of five, or, according to another account, of seven, hundred thousand barbarians."
In A. D. 451 Attila, with an immense army, made a raid into Gaul, and the Ostrogoths went with him; the way in which it was brought about was this: Theodoric was at that time king of the Visigoths, in their country in southwestern Gaul; his two daughters "were given in marriage to the eldest sons of the kings of the Suevi and of the Vandals, who reigned in Spain and Africa." The one who married the son of the king of the Vandals, thus became the daughter-in-law of the terrible Genseric. "The cruel Genseric suspected that his son's wife had conspired to poison him; the supposed crime was punished by the amputation of her nose and ears; and the unhappy daughter of Theodoric was ignominiously returned to the court of Toulouse in that deformed and mutilated condition. This horrid act, which must seem incredible to a civilized age, drew tears from every spectator; but Theodoric was urged, by the feelings of a parent and a king, to revenge such irreparable injuries. The imperial ministers, who always cherished the discord of the barbarians, would have supplied the Goths with arms and ships and treasures for the African war, and the cruelty of Genseric might have been fatal to himself, if the artful Vandal had not armed in his cause the formidable power of the Huns. His rich gifts and pressing solicitations inflamed the ambition of Attila; and the designs of AEtius and Theodoric were prevented by the invasion of Gaul.
"The kings and nations of Germany and Scythia, from the Volga perhaps to the Danube, obeyed the warlike summons of Attila. From the royal village, in the plains of Hungary, his standard moved [A. D. 451] toward the west; and after a march of seven or eight hundred miles he reached the conflux of the Rhine and the Neckar, where he was joined by the Franks who adhered to his ally, the elder of the sons of Clodion. A troop of light barbarians who roamed in quest of plunder, might choose the winter for the convenience of passing the river on the ice; but the innumerable cavalry of the Huns required such plenty of forage and provisions as could be procured only in a milder season; the Hercynian forest supplied materials for a bridge of boats; and the hostile myriads were poured, with resistless violence, into the Belgic provinces. . . . From the Rhine and the Moselle, Attila advanced into the heart of Gaul; crossed the Seine at Auxerre; and after a long and laborious march, fixed his camp under the walls of Orleans."
Orleans was besieged, and was obstinately defended. But when the defenses had been overcome, and the troops of Attila were entering the city, the imperial army appeared in sight, under the leadership of AEtius the Roman, and Theodoric the Visigoth, who pressed forward to the relief of the city.
"On their approach, the king of the Huns immediately raised the siege, and sounded a retreat to recall the foremost of his troops from the pillage of a city which they had already entered. The valor of Attila was always guided by his prudence; and as he foresaw the fatal consequences of a defeat in the heart of Gaul, he repassed the Seine, and expected the enemy in the plains of Chalons whose smooth and level surface was adapted to the operations of his Scythian cavalry. . . . The nations from the Volga to the Atlantic were assembled on the plain of Chalons, but many of these nations had been divided by faction, or conquest, or emigration: and the appearance of similar arms and ensigns which threatened each other, presented the image of a civil war.
"Cassiodorus had familiarly conversed with many Gothic warriors who served in that memorable engagement, — `a conflict,' as they informed him, `fierce, various, obstinate, and bloody; such as could not be paralleled, either in the present or in past ages.' The number of the slain amounted to a hundred and sixty-two thousand, or according to another account, three hundred thousand persons; and these incredible exaggerations suppose a real and effective loss sufficient to justify the historian's remark that whole generations may be swept away, by the madness of kings, in the space of a single hour.
"The Huns were undoubtedly vanquished, since Attila was compelled to retreat. . . . It was determined in a general council of war, to besiege the king of the Huns in his camp, to intercept his provisions, and to reduce him to the alternative of a disgraceful treaty, or an unequal combat. But the impatience of the barbarians soon disdained these cautions and dilatory measures; and the mature policy of AEtius was apprehensive that after the extirpation of the Huns, the republic would be oppressed by the pride and power of the Gothic nation."
As Theodoric had been killed in the battle, AEtius "exerted the superior ascendent of authority and reason, to calm the passions which the son of Theodoric considered as a duty; represented, with seeming affection and real truth, the dangers of absence and delay; and persuaded Torismond to disappoint, by his speedy return, the ambitious designs of his brothers, who might occupy the throne and treasures of Toulouse. After the departure of the Goths, and the separation of the allied army, Attila was surprised at the vast silence that reigned over the plains of Chalons; the suspicion of some hostile stratagem detained him several days within the circle of his wagons; and his retreat beyond the Rhine confessed the last victory which was achieved in the name of the Western Empire."
Before the raid into Gaul, Attila had demanded the hand of the princess Honoria, the daughter of Placidia, and sister to Valentinian III; but his offer was rejected. The next year after the battle of Chalons he renewed his demand, and it being again rejected, he, A. D. 452, again took the field, passed the Alps, invaded Italy, ravaging the country as he went, took possession of the royal palace of Milan, and "declared his resolution of carrying his victorious arms to the gates of Rome." Valentinian III had fled to Rome, and it was there decided by him, the Senate, and the people, to send a "solemn and suppliant embassy," headed by Pope Leo the Great, to deprecate the wrath of Attila. "The barbarian monarch listened with favorable, and even respectful attention; and the deliverance of Italy was purchased by the immense ransom, or dowry, of the princess Honoria.
"Before the king of the Huns evacuated Italy, he threatened to return more dreadful and more implacable, if his bride, the princess Honoria, were not delivered to his ambassadors within the term stipulated by the treaty. Yet, in the meanwhile, Attila relieved his tender anxiety by adding a beautiful maid, whose name was Ildico, to the list of his innumerable wives. Their marriage was celebrated with barbaric pomp and festivity, at his wooden palace beyond the Danube; and the monarch, oppressed with wine and sleep, retired at a late hour from the banquet to the nuptial bed. His attendants continued to respect his pleasures, or his repose, the greatest part of the ensuing day, till the unusual silence alarmed their fears and suspicions; and after attempting to awaken Attila by loud and repeated cries, they at length broke into the royal apartment. They found the trembling bride sitting by the bedside, hiding her face with her veil, and lamenting her own danger as well as the death [A. D. 453] of the king, who had expired during the night. An artery had suddenly burst; and as Attila lay in a supine posture, he was suffocated by a torrent of blood, which, instead of finding a passage through the nostrils, regurgitated into the lungs and stomach.
"The revolution which subverted the empire of the Huns established the fame of Attila, whose genius alone had sustained the huge and disjointed fabric. After his death, the boldest chieftains aspired to the rank of kings; the most powerful kings refused to acknowledge a superior; and the numerous sons, whom so many various mothers bore to the deceased monarch, divided and disputed, like a private inheritance, the sovereign command of the nations of Germany and Scythia. The bold Ardaric felt and resented the disgrace of this servile partition; and his subjects, the warlike Gepidae, with the Ostrogoths, under the conduct of three valiant brothers, encouraged their allies to vindicate the rights of freedom and royalty. In a bloody and decisive conflict on the banks of the river Netad, in Pannonia, the lance of the Gepidae, the sword of the Goths, the arrows of the Huns, the Suevic infantry, the light arms of the Heruli, and the heavy weapons of the Alani, encountered or supported each other; and the victory of Ardaric was accompanied with the slaughter of thirty thousand of his enemies."
"The battle was joined near the river Nedao, a stream in Pannonia, which modern geographers have not identified, but which was probably situated in that part of Hungary which is west of the Danube. There, says Jordanes, `did all the various nations whom Attila had kept under his dominion, meet and look one another in the face. Kingdoms and peoples are divided against one another, and out of one body divers limbs are made, no longer governed by one impulse, but animated by mutual rage, having lost their presiding head. Such were those most mighty nations which had never found their peers in the world if they had not been sundered the one from the other, and gashed one another with mutual wounds. I trow it was a marvelous sight to look upon. There should you have seen the Goth fighting with his pike, the Gepid raging with his sword, the Rugian breaking the darts of the enemy at the cost of his own wounds, the Sueve pressing on with nimble foot, the Hun covering his advance with a cloud of arrows, the Alan drawing up his heavyarmed troops, the Herul his lighter companies, in battle array.'
"We are not distinctly told what was the share of the Ostrogoths in this great encounter, and we may reasonably doubt whether all the German tribes were arranged on one side and all the Tartars on the other with such precision as a modern ethnologist would have used in an ideal battle of the nationalities. But the result is not doubtful. After many desperate charges, victory, which they scarcely hoped for, sat upon the standards of the Gepidae. Thirty thousand of the Huns and their confederates lay dead upon the field, among them Ellak, Attila's first-born, `by such a glorious death that it would have done his father's heart good to witness it.' The rest of his nation fled away across the Dacian plains, and over the Carpathian Mountains to those wide steppes of southern Russia, in which at the commencement of our history we saw the three Gothic nations taking up their abode."
"Ellac, the eldest son of Attila, lost his life and crown in the memorable battle of Netad; his early valor had raised him to the throne of the Acatzires, a Scythian people, whom he subdued; and his father, who loved the superior merit, would have envied the death of Ellac. His brother Dengisich, with an army of Huns, still formidable in their flight and ruin, maintained his ground above fifteen years on the banks of the Danube. The palace of Attila, with the old country of Dacia, from the Carpathian Hills to the Euxine, became the seat of a new power, which was erected by Ardaric, king of the Gepidae. The Pannonia conquests from Vienna to Sirmium, were occupied by the Ostrogoths; and the settlements of the tribes, who had so bravely asserted their native freedom were irregularly distributed according to the measure of their respective strength."
"When the Hunnish Empire broke in pieces on the death of Attila [A. D. 453], the East-Goths recovered their full independence. They now entered into relations with the empire, and settled on lands in Pannonia. During the greater part of the latter half of the fifth century, the East-Goths play in southeastern Europe nearly the same part which the West-Goths played [there] in the century before. They were seen going to and fro, in every conceivable relation of friendship and enmity with the Eastern Roman power, till, just as the West-Goths had done before them, they pass from the East to the West."
Theodoric was the great king of the Ostrogothic power. And the course of events from the establishment of their independence till his accession to the Ostrogothic throne, A. D. 475, is thus told: "Theodoric the Ostrogoth, the fourteenth in lineal descent of the royal line of the Amali, was born in the neighborhood of Vienna [A. D. 455] two years after the death of Attila. A recent victory had restored the independence of the Ostrogoths; and the three brothers, Walamir, Theodemir, and Widimir, who ruled that warlike nation with united counsels, had separately pitched their habitations in the fertile though desolate province of Pannonia. The Huns still threatened their revolted subjects, but their hasty attack was repelled by the single forces of Walamir, and the news of his victory reached the distant camp of his brother in the same auspicious moment that the favorite concubine of Theodemir was delivered of a son and heir. In the eighth year of his age, Theodoric was reluctantly yielded by his father to the public interest, as the pledge of the alliance which Leo, emperor of, the East, had consented to purchase by an annual subsidy of three hundred pounds of gold.
"The royal hostage was educated at Constantinople with care and tenderness. His body was formed to all the exercises of war, his mind was expanded by the habits of liberal conversation; he frequented the schools of the most skilful masters; but he disdained or neglected the arts of Greece; and so ignorant did he always remain of the first elements of science, that a rude mark was contrived to represent the signature of the illiterate king of Italy. The first four letters of his name were inscribed on a gold plate, and when it was fixed on the paper, the king drew his pen through the intervals. As soon as he had attained the age of eighteen, he was restored to the wishes of the Ostrogoths, whom the emperor aspired to gain by liberality and confidence.
"Walamir had fallen in battle; the youngest of the brothers, Widimir, had led away into Italy and Gaul an army of barbarians, and the whole nation acknowledged [A. D. 455-475] for their king the father of Theodoric. His ferocious subjects admired the strength and stature of their young prince; and he soon convinced them that he had not degenerated from the valor of his ancestors. At the head of six thousand volunteers, he secretly left the camp in quest of adventures, descended the Danube as far as Singidunum, or Belgrade, and soon returned to his father with the spoils of a Sarmatian king whom he had vanquished and slain.
"Such triumphs, however, were productive only of fame, and the invincible Ostrogoths were reduced to extreme distress by the want of clothing and food. They unanimously resolved to desert their Pannonian encampments, and boldly to advance into the warm and wealthy neighborhood of the Byzantine court, which already maintained in pride and luxury so many bands of confederate Goths. After proving by some acts of hostility that they could be dangerous, or at least troublesome, enemies, the Ostrogoths sold at a high price their reconciliation and fidelity, accepted a donative of lands and money, and were entrusted with the defense of the Lower Danube, under the command of Theodoric, who succeeded, after his father's death [A. D. 475], to the hereditary throne of the Amali."
Although Gibbon says they "resolved to desert their Pannonian encampments," it must not be understood that this is spoken of the whole nation, but rather the principal warriors; nor that these renounced either their claim or their possessions there; because the history that follows clearly shows that the Ostrogoths dwelt in Pannonia, and that their superior power was exercised and gratefully acknowledged over all that province during the whole fifty-one years (A. D. 475-526) of the reign of Theodoric.
This was so even after the seat of the kingdom had been removed to Italy, as it was, in A. D. 489. "He reduced under a strong and regular government, the unprofitable countries of Rhaeetia, Noricum, Dalmatia, and Pannonia, from the source of the Danube and the territory of the Bavarians, to the petty kingdom erected by the Gepidae on the ruins of Sirmium. . . . The Alemanni were protected, an inroad of the Burgundians was severely chastised, the conquest of Arles and Marseilles opened a free communication with the Visigoths, who revered him as their national protector, and as the guardian of his grandchild, the infant son of Alaric [II]."
"His domestic alliances — a wife, two daughters, a sister, and a niece — united the family of Theodoric with the kings of the Franks, the Burgundians, the Visigoths, the Vandals, and the Thuringians, and contributed to maintain the harmony, or at least the balance, of the great republic of the West. . . . The Gothic sovereignty was established from Sicily to the Danube; from Sirmium, or Belgrade, to the Atlantic Ocean; and the Greeks themselves have acknowledged that Theodoric reigned over the fairest portion of the Western Empire."
Chapter 44