3

Goths, Huns and Christians
300–560

Constantine and Byzantium

From the moment of Diocletian’s division of the empire, Europe moved into a state of transition. It was leaving the domain of a mostly united Mediterranean littoral centred on Rome, and approaching one whose loyalties were split between its western and eastern possessions. This gulf was long to outlast the Roman empire. There were other divisions. One was between a pagan autocracy and the authority of a new faith, Christianity. Another was between a dominant Graeco-Roman culture and the experience of peoples the Romans called ‘barbarians’ – not necessarily a derogatory term – living on and beyond Rome’s borders.

It was symbolic of this new Europe that, when the western emperor Constantius died in 306 and was succeeded by his son, Constantine (306–37), both events occurred in York, at the empire’s northern extremity. When Constantine’s soldiers saluted him as the new emperor, it was not the end of the matter. He had to spend the next eighteen years fighting rivals to claim his title. Not until 324 did he win supremacy over both eastern and western thrones. He had been trained at Diocletian’s eastern court and that was where Constantine’s heart lay. He duly announced that he would found a new city at Byzantion, overlooking the Bosphorus. Constantinople would be the superior capital, the new Rome.

By now Constantine was a seasoned soldier and autocrat, ruthless, egotistical and duplicitous. He overcame his chief rival, Licinius, by promising him sanctuary and safe retirement before promptly having him killed. How sincere was his conversion to Christianity no one can know. What is true is that, following a battlefield ‘revelation’, in 313 he signed a compact granting ‘both to Christians and to all others, full authority to follow whatever worship each man has desired’. His new city would, he declared, be ‘a Christian city’.

Constantine soon found that asserting a faith was simpler than defining it. Already Christianity was far from united. An Alexandrian priest named Arius (c.250–336) said that Jesus was mortal, the agent or creation of God on Earth, and therefore subsidiary to God. That alone could explain his death. This was at odds with the Catholics, who declared the identity of a Trinity of God, Christ and what they called the Holy Spirit. To Constantine, a faith that could not agree on its core beliefs – indeed was crowded with feuding bishops – was dangerous. Within a year of consolidating power, he in 325 summoned a council to Nicaea (present İznik), to resolve the dispute.

Christianity was most strongly rooted in the eastern empire. Of 1,800 bishops, some 1,000 were in the east, and of the 318 bishops who attended Nicaea, no more than five were from the west. Equally significant, the council summons came not from any bishop but from the emperor personally. He said he would merely attend ‘as a spectator and participant in those things that will be done’. Yet his biographer, Eusebius, records him saying, ‘I also am a bishop, ordained by God to overlook those outside the church.’ He arrived at the council, ‘like some heavenly messenger of God, clothed in raiment which glittered as it were with rays of light … adorned with the brilliant splendour of gold and precious stones’. In the outcome, Constantine’s support for the empire’s Catholics was unwavering. God and Christ were ‘of one substance’. This was formulated as the Nicene Creed and is used by all Christians to this day. Arianism was declared a heresy.

Constantine now had to make peace with the city of Rome, still the emotional capital of empire. In 326 he set out with a large entourage, pausing only to kill his wife, son and nephew, for reasons that remain obscure. In Rome he was not well received by the city’s careworn patricians. He appeared before them not in the military garb of a Roman imperator, but in civilian silks and with a retinue of courtiers. Nor did the custodians of the ancient temples take to his Christian enthusiasm. Rome was dilapidated, depopulated and malarial. Constantine installed a Christian governor in the city and ordered the building of two new churches, St John’s by the Lateran palace and St Peter’s on Vatican Hill. He left in place Diocletian’s concept of a western emperor (to be based in Milan), but he affirmed the superiority of Constantinople. It was more defensible by land and sea, and held the key to trade with the Asian interior. It also lay close to the Danube frontier and the border with the Persian empire. It was close to the origins of the empire’s new religion.

In 327 the emperor’s mother, Helena, set off on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Here she fulfilled the dream of every archaeologist, ‘finding’ on her first day the site of Calvary and the remains of Christ’s true cross buried in a cistern. She proclaimed its validity by laying other crosses on a dying woman, whom only hers cured. Helena’s other souvenirs included the hatchet used to build the Ark and the basket used to feed the 5,000. The age of the fake relic had arrived. In 330, these objects were given starring roles in the dedication of Constantine’s new city, just six years after it had begun construction. It had massive walls, squares and a forum, studded with porticos and carvings brought from across the empire. At its centre was a column and gilded statue to Constantine himself, portrayed as a demi-god. The emperor ordered the manufacture of fifty illuminated bibles, requiring the parchment of 5,000 cows. Byzantium, successor to the eastern Roman empire, was born.

Constantine died seven years later, in 337, being formally baptized into the Christian church on his deathbed. He left a united empire, but not a harmonious church. Nicaea did not suppress Arianism, which over the next century became the dominant faith in much of the western empire, notably among recent barbarian converts from paganism. Its hierarchy of a god in heaven and a ‘son’ on Earth was more appealing than the abstract theology of the Trinity. Even Eusebius, Constantine’s counsellor and bishop, was an Arian.

Nor was Arianism alone. Christianity fractured, at various times, into Novatianists and Donatists, Melitians and Homoeans, Pelagians, Nestorians and Miaphysites. It disputed with dualist Manichaeans and Gnostics. Sectarianism went geographical. Alexandria quarrelled with Antioch, Rome with Carthage. The philosopher emperor Julian (361–3), who was briefly the last pagan emperor, declared that ‘no wild beasts are such dangerous enemies to man as Christians are to each other’.

Constantinople grew to become the largest city in Europe, estimated at some 800,000 inhabitants. Its walls, bastions, churches and palaces far outshone those of Rome. It was located at the crossroads of Europe and Asia. But while it treasured its Hellenistic legacy, it was never able to develop the free-thinking rationalism that had once inspired the cities of the Aegean and the philosophy of Socrates and Plato. Its inhabitants were consumed by theological disputation, while suppression of dissent seemed merely to further sectarianism. One visitor to fourth-century Constantinople reported on this obsession: ‘Ask a man for change, and he philosophizes about the Begotten and the Unbegotten … ask if your bath is ready and the attendant asserts that “the Son was made of nothing”.’

Huns, Goths and Vandals

From the early 370s, just thirty years after Constantine’s death, reports began arriving in Constantinople of Hun raiders (otherwise called Scythians) arriving on the banks of the Danube. They were horse-borne warriors, speaking an unknown tongue. Dark and small in stature they appeared as roaming bands of mounted archers, reputedly able to ride 1,000 miles in a month. Their clothes were stitched rat skins and they ate roots and raw meat, warmed between their thighs. Their skill at constructing siege towers and battering rams overwhelmed towns in their path. With them came a mix of nomadic and settled peoples, eager for grazing land and tribute from the territories they crossed.

Modern DNA scholarship suggests that the Hun ‘invasion’ was more a steady infiltration, intermarrying with local Germanic tribes, otherwise known as Goths. But the warriors in its van were like a piston forced into Europe’s constricted geography. Soon they were evicting Ostrogoths and Visigoths, then Vandals and Burgundians in central Europe. Those they evicted became migrants in turn, streaming down Roman rivers and along Roman roads. This presented the empire with a double menace, from the Huns and those they forced to move. Roman soldiers, administrators and tax-gatherers withdrew into fortified citadels or fled back to Italy. The heartland of Europe emptied of defensive energy.

In 379 the eastern emperor Theodosius I (379–95) sought to reunite the empire, but it was an empire afflicted with rebellions and religious divisions. Already in 374 the governor of Milan, Ambrose, found himself acclaimed as bishop and charged with leading a campaign for the Nicene Creed against Arianism. He barricaded Milan’s basilica against the western emperor, the Arian Valentinian. He even excommunicated Theodosius for ordering a gruesome massacre of 7,000 citizens of Thessalonica for killing their governor. Leaders of the Roman church were gradually assuming secular authority.

Among those uprooted by the Huns in the Balkans was a Visigoth king, Alaric. Typical of leaders within the empire, Alaric was an Arian and a trained Roman soldier, who had helped put down a rebellion of Germanic Franks. Regarding himself as inadequately rewarded, he led his army south into Greece, sacking Athens in 395. In 401 he turned his attention to Italy, where he was disregarded by the new western emperor, Theodosius’s teenage son, Honorius (393–423). In 402 Honorius decided to move his capital from Milan to the more defensible Ravenna. Alaric occupied Italy for eight years before, in 410, making a final plea to Honorius for recognition in the imperial army. Rebuffed, he marched to Rome and subjected it to three days of pillage, the first such humiliation in the city’s imperial history. Despite gruesome reports of devastation, reliable sources speak of the Goths’ ‘remarkable clemency’. Wealth was certainly stolen, but few houses were destroyed.

By now, Gaul was in disarray as Vandals, Burgundians and others fled the Huns. In 410, as Rome was pillaged, a desperate Honorius wrote to his subjects in Britain stating that he had no legions to spare against incursion by Germanic tribes, already settled along Britain’s eastern shores. They were advised to ‘take steps to defend yourselves’. Angles, Jutes and Saxons took the opportunity to push westwards across Britain, gradually confining the Christian British into the western, so-called Celtic extremities. It was in these isolated communities of Wales, Cornwall and Ireland that northern Christianity was to find temporary asylum.

At the same time the Visigoths in Spain drove earlier invaders, the Vandals under their king Genseric, across the Straits of Gibraltar into north Africa. Here they moved eastwards along the coast, seizing territory that since the days of the republic had been Rome’s breadbasket. In 430 Vandals besieged the town of Hippo in modern Algeria, home of the theologian and bishop St Augustine. He had studied in Carthage, taught in Milan and returned as a scholar to Hippo, applying his understanding of philosophy to his theological writings. Yet by 439 Hippo and Carthage were in the hands of Vandals, and the Mediterranean was no longer a Roman lake.

The eastern empire offered no help to the west in this crisis. It was itself divided by religious heterodoxy. Arianism had not been suppressed. A Syrian monk, Nestorius, asked how Christ could be ‘eternal’ and on a par with God if he so clearly lived and died a human being. A council was summoned by Theodosius II to Ephesus in 431, at which Nestorianism was anathematized and Christianity reasserted. The council abandoned any lingering tolerance and proscribed all deviation from its creed as heresy, with authorized penalties to include maiming and blinding. It dictated the terms of the Easter ritual and declared Holy Week a holiday. Further councils in 449 and 451 became ever more heated and their deliberations more obscure. At the latter, in Chalcedon, Pope Leo of Rome proposed a compromise on the ‘consubstantiality’ of God and Christ. A divided empire now had a fractured faith, Catholics assailed by Arians in the west and Nestorians in the east.

Attila and the end of empire

The invading Huns had in 434 acquired a charismatic leader in the pugnacious Attila (434–53). He was described as ‘born into the world to shake nations, the scourge of all lands’. His rolling eyes and alarming appearance terrified all who crossed his path. Yet he was said to be ‘restrained in action, mighty in counsel, gracious to suppliants and lenient to those who were received into his protection’. In 443 and again in 447, he brought his forces to the walls of Constantinople. Each time they defied him, and he was bribed to withdraw. Finally, Theodosius’s militaristic successor, Marcian (450–57), refused to pay further bribes and drove the Huns from his territory.

Attila crossed Europe into Gaul, where he met a force unprecedented in the continent’s history. In 451 a Roman general, Flavius Aetius, and a Visigoth king, Theodoric I, amassed an army of Romans, Franks and Goths to confront what they saw as a collective threat. It was the first time a coalition of Roman and barbarian armies had combined to take the field against an external foe, a first ‘European army’. At the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains in 451, the coalition was victorious. Attila retreated and led his battered army south into Italy. There the inhabitants of the Veneto region of north-east Italy sought refuge from him in the sparsely inhabited islands of the coastal lagoon. Venice was born. Europe has Attila to thank for its most glorious possession.

Italy was Attila’s last throw. Pope Leo joined a deputation to persuade him to retreat to the Danube, and the Huns consolidated their settlement in what is now Hungary. Attila died in 453, reputedly haemorrhaging in the arms of an Ostrogoth maiden to whom he had just become ‘betrothed’. Despite Attila’s defeat, the Hun invasion reiterated what Alaric’s more settled Goths had shown a generation before, that the new Europe was vulnerable to forces sweeping west across its central plains. Roman citizen/colonists, many half-barbarian, sought safety not in the distant hope of imperial armies but in fortified towns, where they gave allegiance to any leader who might offer them security. Empire gave way to kingdom.

Nothing could bring peace to battered Italy. In 475 a Roman official named Orestes, who had served in Attila’s retinue, seized power in Ravenna and appointed his fifteen-year-old son Romulus as emperor, giving the boy the impressive name of Romulus Augustulus. There seems no limit to the agonies fathers visit on their sons. The following year the boy was ousted by a Roman soldier of Germanic origin, Flavius Odoacer, who did not bother with emperorship but took the title king of Italy with his capital in Ravenna. Accordingly, the date of 476 is generally taken as the date of the formal demise of the ‘Roman empire’, though a Roman empire was to continue in its Byzantine form for another millennium.

Clovis and Theodoric

The term Dark Ages to describe the three centuries between the fall of Rome and the rise of Charlemagne is now dismissed by historians of the period. But it reasonably describes a continent staggering into an uncertain future, concussed by the enormity of what was gone. In 481 a fifteen-year-old named Clovis, hewn from more resilient timber than Augustulus, emerged as leader of the Frankish Merovingian clan, in what is now Belgium. Clovis (481–511) marched his warriors across Gaul, eventually winning submission from the Rhine in the east to the Loire in the west. He then moved south to conquer the Visigoths in Aquitaine. By the turn of the sixth century he could claim overlordship from Cologne to the Pyrenees. He fixed his capital in Paris, while his name mutated into Louis, Ludwig and Lewis.

Though Clovis was pagan in origin, his subjects were mostly Arian. In c.492 he married a Burgundian princess, Clotilde, who, unusually for a Burgundian, was not Arian but attached to the Catholic church. She insisted that her new husband convert to Catholicism. When a tribe’s faith was dictated by its leader, such conversion was critical. Had Clotilde’s faith been otherwise, Christendom might have taken a very different course. From now on, and with remarkable constancy, French kings gave their religious allegiance to Rome.

At the same time, the Ostrogoths in the present-day Balkans came under the rule of Theodoric the Great. He had been raised in Constantinople as a hostage to the Ostrogoths’ good behaviour, and enjoyed the patronage of the emperor Zeno. In 488 he was commanded by Zeno to return to his people and recapture Italy on behalf of the empire of the east. This required the elimination of Italy’s king, Odoacer. Theodoric achieved this in 493 by inviting him to dinner and, it is said, cleaving him from the shoulder to the groin.

Clovis in Paris acknowledged Theodoric as king of Italy, sealing their treaty in 493 by giving him his sister, Audofleda, in marriage. This was despite Theodoric being a devout Arian and building an Arian basilica, St Apollinaris, which stands in Ravenna to this day as a Catholic church. Even many of its original mosaics are intact. Theodoric further strengthened his position by marrying his own daughters to leaders of the Burgundians, the Spanish Visigoths and the African Vandals. Matrimonial diplomacy was born. From this point on, Europe’s political personality focused on the ever-shifting relationship between three groups of peoples in what became Italy, France and Germany, geographical terms I have so far used for convenience.

The Roman church also took a new turn. Monasteries had first been founded by the eastern church, in Egypt and elsewhere. They now appeared in the west. In c.500 a young priest named Benedict was so dismayed at what he regarded as the church’s corruption that he retreated to an ascetic life of work and prayer. In 529 he joined a group of ‘brothers’ to found a monastery at Monte Cassino, south-east of Rome. Benedict’s ‘rule’ for his monks became a key text for western monasticism, establishing an arm of Christianity that was loyal to Rome but autonomous and outside Rome’s hierarchy. As such it was a safety valve for internal dissent, a ‘loyal opposition’. The monastic movement swiftly spread, developing a power network of its own, a state within the state of Christendom. Benedict’s monastery at Monte Cassino survived for almost a millennium and a half, until flattened by Allied bombers in 1944.

Justinian and Belisarius

Clovis and Theodoric were founding fathers of medieval Europe, dying in 511 and 526 respectively. As Greece had bequeathed its culture to Rome, so Rome bequeathed its culture to the kings and courts of what were becoming settled northern tribes. They lived in Roman cities and adopted Roman ways. They communicated with each other in Latin. But the possibly fertile fusion of northern vigour and southern culture was fragile. It depended on power, and that depended on inheritance. It could vanish if dissipated by weak heirs.

The stability implied by the alliance of Clovis and Theodoric did not survive their passing. Italy was instead traumatized by a re-emergence of the ghost of its past. The eastern empire at the start of the sixth century had been reduced to little more than the shores of the Black Sea, the Aegean and the Levant. Its court lived off the wealth of its past and the profits of trade with the Orient. In 518 Justinian, the nephew of the emperor Justin, became his adopted son and, nine years later, co-ruler and then successor (527–65). He was a competent and ambitious man, reforming the imperial administration and improving relations with the Roman church.

Justinian had shocked Constantinople by choosing as his wife an actress and reputed courtesan named Theodora, daughter of a circus performer. Justinian adored her and she became his shrewd consort – and later a feminist icon. Thanks to a contemporary historian, Procopius, Justinian and Theodora shine larger than life from this obscure period. They faced an awesome task. War with Persia had resumed and open conflict broken out in Constantinople between two factions, the blues and greens, supporters of chariot teams in the hippodrome. This culminated in 532 in riots that saw parts of the city left a gutted ruin. Justinian was prepared to flee, but Theodora urged him to stay and a loyal general, Belisarius, restored order by killing rioters by the hundred.

A reinvigorated Justinian moved to establish his authority. He made peace with the Persians and, in 532, work finally began on the city’s great cathedral of Hagia Sophia, two centuries after Constantine. Justinian declared on its completion in 537, ‘Solomon, I have surpassed thee.’ It was the biggest and most splendid church in Christendom, and survives (as a mosque) to this day. Justinian reformulated the empire’s laws into the Codex Iustinianus, versions of which became the standard text for law schools throughout the Middle Ages. Drawing on Roman and Christian traditions, it recognized the idea of equality before the law, but also the exclusivity of the Christian church.

Justinian then embarked on his greatest project, nothing less than the reconquest for the east of the western Roman empire. By now Italy was Ostrogoth, Africa was Vandal, Spain was Visigoth and Gaul/France was ruled by Franks. Justinian had in Belisarius a commander of rare talent and rarer loyalty. Gibbon portrays him as ‘[of] lofty stature and majestic countenance … daring without rashness, prudent without fear, slow or rapid according to the exigencies of the moment’. His wife Antonina shared a theatrical background with Theodora, and accompanied him on a lifetime of campaigning. In 533 Justinian summoned Belisarius from the Persian Wars and dispatched him with a large army and fleet to recapture Carthage. He returned victorious, bringing with him the original Jewish menorah (ritual candlestick), taken from Jerusalem by the emperor Vespasian and then from Rome by the Vandals. Amid much ceremony, it was returned to Jerusalem.

In 535 Justinian directed Belisarius to a far greater prize, the reconquest of Italy. This again was successful, with first Naples, then Rome and finally Ravenna falling to Constantinople. But the outcome was not peace. For four years, the Ostrogoth leader, Witigis, fought a guerrilla war, such that Belisarius’s eventual triumph was tarnished by ruling a devastated land. When in 540 he had to return east to fend off another challenge from Persia, the Ostrogoths simply took back control under a new commander, Totila.

This time an uncertain Justinian lacked the resources for an emphatic response. Totila asked to be regarded as Justinian’s subject king of Italy, but Justinian arrogantly refused. In 552, the ageing emperor sent a eunuch courtier, Narses, to restore the conquest, which he duly did. Spain too came briefly under the aegis of Byzantium, and Justinian was thus at last able to contemplate a ‘Roman’ empire revived at least round the Mediterranean. Belisarius and Justinian died within months of each other in 565, having brought to Byzantium a sort of restored self-confidence.

The cost had been dreadful. In less than half a century, Justinian had taken an Italy that Theodoric had set on the path to statehood and torn it apart. Rome’s aqueducts were cut, its senate disbanded, its people reduced to plague and starvation. As Tacitus had once said (quoting a Scottish chieftain), ‘They make a wasteland and they call it peace.’ Within three years of Justinian’s death, old factions re-emerged. Constantinople’s walls could hold the capital secure, but the shrinking empire was still assailed by Persians to the east and Slavs and Bulgars to the north. The city was cut off from a distant Europe which it had just devastated and where now only the fittest would survive. Justinian’s empire had been one ruler’s fantasy and one general’s triumph. Of the many dates offered for the Roman empire’s final demise, I find the death of Justinian in 565 the most evocative.

From this point onwards, we can see the definition of Europe’s outline changing. Like an amoeba, it swells to the west and shrinks from the east, where contact increases with the new empires, economies and cultures of Asia. Not since the Battle of Salamis had the concept of a ‘continent’ of Europe seemed so vulnerable. To the north, old Germanic tribes begin to move out of Scandinavia, to trade and often clash with neighbouring peoples, as the earlier Greeks had moved out of the Aegean. The western Mediterranean was now debilitated. Justinian’s wars had left north Africa, Spain and Italy less a restored empire, more its despoiled relics. Europe was ill prepared for new invaders from the east.