Ravenna, A Study by Edward Hutton
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Edward Hutton >> Ravenna, A Study
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That, theoretically at least, is how Odoacer regarded the state in
which, by the good pleasure of the emperor Zeno, he held the title of
patrician. He was an unlettered man, an Arian, as were all the
barbarians, and he held what he held by permission of Constantinople,
though he had won it by his own strength in the weakness and misery of
the time. He never aspired, it would seem, to make himself emperor.
Certainly for the first four years of his rule in Ravenna that great
office was filled by Julius Nepos in exile at Salona, whose deposition
at the hands of Orestes had never been recognised by Constantinople.
Thereafter, the western and the eastern empire were in theory
reunited, with New Rome upon the Bosphorus for their true capital; and
both before and after that event Odoacer ruled in Italy with the title
of patrician conferred upon him by Constantinople. When that consent
was withdrawn, as it was immediately Odoacer showed signs of ambition,
he fell.
Odoacer had ruled in Ravenna from 476 to 493, when he fell in that
city after sustaining a siege of three years. He ruled well and
strongly and by the laws of the empire. He was compelled by the
barbaric confederates, who had placed him where he was, to grant them
a third of the lands, certainly, of the great Italian landowners; but
he created nothing new; like all the barbarians he was sterile, his
only service was a service of destruction. With him even this service
was small.
His fall was curious and is exceedingly significant.
In 481, after the murder of the emperor Julius Nepos in Salona,
Odoacer led an expedition into Dalmatia to chastise the murderers and
seized the opportunity to make himself master of Dalmatia. This action
at once renewed the suspicion of Constantinople; but when in 484
Odoacer entered into negotiations with Illus, the last of the
insurgents who disturbed the reign of Zeno, Constantinople decided
that he must be broken; therefore Feletheus, king of the Rugians upon
the Danube, was stirred up against him, and when that failed, for
Odoacer defeated him, Constantinople sent Theodoric and his
Ostrogothic host into Italy to dispose of Odoacer the patrician[1].
[Footnote 1: Cf. Anon. Valesii, "Missus ab imperatore Zenone de
partibus orientis ad defendendam sibi Italiam...."]
Theodoric, another unlettered barbarian and heretic, but a man of a
great and noble character, set out for Italy from Nova on the southern
bank of the Danube, where he had been a constant danger to the Eastern
provinces, in the autumn of 488. His purpose, set forth in his own
words to the Emperor Zeno, was as follows: "Although your servant is
maintained in affluence by your liberality, graciously listen to the
wishes of my heart. Italy, the inheritance of your predecessors, and
Rome itself, the head and mistress of the world, now fluctuate under
the violence and oppression of Odoacer the mercenary. Direct me with
my national troops to march against this tyrant. If I fall, you will
be delivered from an expensive and troublesome friend; if, with the
Divine permission, I succeed, I shall govern, in your name and to your
glory, the Roman senate and the part of the republic delivered from
slavery by my victorious arms."
That march was an exodus. Procopius tells us that, "with Theodoric
went the people of the Goths, putting their wives and children and as
much of their furniture as they could take with them into their
waggons," and as Ennodius, bishop of Ticinum, asserts, it was "a world
that migrated" with Theodoric into Italy, "a world of which every
member is nevertheless your kinsman." "Waggons," says he, "are made to
do duty as houses, and into these wandering habitations all things
that can minister to the needs of the occupants are poured. Then were
the tools of Ceres, and the stones with which the corn is ground,
dragged along by the labouring oxen. Pregnant mothers, forgetful of
their sex and of the burden which they bore, undertook the toil of
providing food for the families of thy people. Followed the reign of
winter in thy camp. Over the hair of thy men the long frost threw a
veil of snowy white; the icicles hung in a tangle from their beards.
So hard was the frost that the garment which the matron's persevering
toil had woven had to be broken before a man might fit it to his body.
Food for thy marching armies was forced from the grasp of the hostile
nations around, or procured by the cunning of the hunter."[1] It has
been supposed by Mr. Hodgkin that not less than 40,000 fighting men
and some 200,000 souls in all thus entered Italy. To us it might seem
that no such number of people could have lived without commissariat
during that tremendous march of seven hundred miles through some of
the poorest land of Europe in the depth of winter. However that may
be, Theodoric after many an encounter with barbarians wilder than his
own descended from the Julian Alps into Venetia in August 489, after a
march of not less than ten months.
[Footnote 1: Ennodius, _Panegyricus_, p. 173. Trs. by Hodgkin, _op.
cit_. iii. 179-80.]
Odoacer was waiting for him. He met him near the site of the old
fortress of Aquileia, which Attila had annihilated, that once held the
passage of the Sontius (Isonzo). He was defeated and all Venetia fell
into the hands of the Ostrogoth. Odoacer retreated to Verona, that red
fortress on the Adige; once more and more certainly he was beaten. He
retreated to Ravenna,[2] while Theodoric advanced to Milan, to Milan
which now led nowhere.
[Footnote 2: "Et Ravennam cum exercitu fugiens pervenit." Anon.
Valesii, 50.]
After Verona, Theodoric had received the submission of a part of
Odoacer's army under Tufa. When he had possessed himself of Milan, he
sent these renegades and certain nobles with their men from his own
army, apparently under the leadership of Tufa, to besiege Ravenna.
They came down the Aemilian Way as far as Faventia (Faenza). There no
doubt a road left the great highway for the impregnable city of the
marshes. At Faventia, then, Theodoric expected to begin to blockade
Ravenna. In this he was mistaken. Suddenly Tufa deserted his new
master, was joined by Odoacer, who came to Faventia, and certain of
the Ostrogothic nobles, if not all of them, were slaughtered. The
expedition was lost and not the expedition alone: Milan was no longer
safe. Therefore Theodoric evacuated that city, always almost
indefensible, and occupied Ticinum (Pavia), which was naturally
defended by the Ticino and the Po. There he established himself in
winter quarters.
A new diversion from the west, a frustrated attack of Gundobald and
his Burgundians, kept Theodoric busy for a year. Meantime Odoacer
appeared in the plain, retook and held all the country between
Faventia and Cremona and even visited Milan, which he chastised. Then
in August 490 Theodoric met him on the Adda, and again Odoacer was
defeated, and again he fled back to Ravenna. All over Italy his cause
tottered, was betrayed, or failed. A general massacre of the
confederate troops throughout the peninsula seems to have occurred.
And by the end of the year there remained to him but Ravenna, his
fortress, and the two cities that it commanded, Cesena upon the
Aemilian Way and Rimini in the midst of the narrow pass at the head of
the Via Flaminia. Theodoric himself began the siege of Ravenna.
This siege, the first that Ravenna had ever experienced, endured for
near three years, from the autumn of 490 to the spring of 493. "_Et
mox_" says a chronicle of the time, "_subsecutus est eum patricius
Theodoricus veniens in Pineta, et fixit fossatum, obsidiens Odoacrem
clausum per trienum in Ravenna et factus est usque ad sex solidos
modicus tritici_...."[1] Theodoric established himself in a fortified
camp in the Pineta with a view to preventing food or reinforcements
arriving to his enemy from the sea. Ravenna was closed upon all sides
and before the end of the siege corn rose in the beleaguered city to
famine price, some seventy-two shillings of our money per peck, and
the inhabitants were forced to eat the skins of animals and all sorts
of offal, and many died of hunger.
[Footnote 1: Anon. Valesii.]
In 491, according to the same chronicler,[1] a sortie was made by
Odoacer and his barbarians, but after a desperate fight in the Pineta
this was repelled by Theodoric. In 492, another chronicle tells us,[2]
Theodoric took Rimini and from thence brought a fleet of ships to the
Porto Leone, some six miles from Ravenna, thus cutting off the city
from the sea. Till at last in the beginning of 493 Odoacer was
compelled to open negotiations for surrender. He gave his son Thelane
as a hostage, and on the 26th February Theodoric entered Classis, and
on the following day the treaty of peace was signed. Upon the 5th
March 493, according to Agnellus, "that most blessed man, the
archbishop John, opened the gates of the city which Odoacer had
closed, and went forth with crosses and thuribles and the Holy Gospels
seeking peace, with the priests and clergy singing psalms, and
prostrating himself upon the ground obtained what he sought. He
welcomed the new king coming from the East and peace was granted to
him, not only with the citizens of Ravenna, but with the other Romans
for whom the blessed John asked it."
[Footnote 1: Anon. Valesii.]
[Footnote 2: Agnellus, _Liber Pontificalis Rav_.]
The terms of that treaty are extraordinarily significant of the
importance of Ravenna in the defence of Italy. It would seem that
Theodoric had possessed himself of everything but Ravenna easily
enough, yet without Ravenna everything else was nothing. The city was,
in spite of blockade and famine, impregnable, and it commanded so
much, was still indeed, as always, the key to Italy and the plain and
the very gate of the West, that not to possess it was to lose
everything. Its surrender was necessary and Theodoric offered
extraordinary terms to obtain it. Odoacer was not only to keep his
life but his power. He was to rule as the equal of Theodoric. This
mighty concession shows us at once what Ravenna really was, what part
she played in the government of Italy, and how unique was her position
in the military scheme of that country.
Theodoric had certainly no intention of carrying out the terms of his
treaty. In the very month in which he signed it, he invited Odoacer to
a feast at the Palace "in Lauro" to the south-east of Ravenna. When
the patrician arrived two petitioners knelt before him each clasping
one of his hands, and two of Theodoric's men stepped from hiding to
kill him. Perhaps they were not barbarians: at any rate, they lacked
the courage and the contempt alike of law and of honour necessary to
commit so cold a murder. It was Theodoric himself who lifted his sword
and hewed his enemy in twain from the shoulder to the loins. "Where is
God?" Odoacer, expecting the stroke, had demanded. And Theodoric
answered, "Thus didst thou to my friends." And after he said, "I think
the wretch had no bones in his body."
The barbarian it might seem had certainly nothing to learn from the
worst of the emperors in treachery and dishonour.
Theodoric set up his seat in the city he had so perfidiously won, and
for the next thirty years appears as the governour of Italy. He had
set out, it will be remembered, as the soldier of Constantinople, had
asked for leave to make his expedition, and had protested his
willingness to govern in the name of the emperor and for his glory. It
is not perhaps surprising that a barbarian, and especially Theodoric
who knew so well how to win by treachery what he could not otherwise
obtain, should after his victory forget the promise he had made to his
master. After the battle of the Adda he had the audacity to send an
embassy to the emperor to request that he might be allowed to clothe
himself in the royal mantle. This was of course refused. Nevertheless
the Goths "confirmed Theodoric to themselves as king without waiting
for the order of the new emperor Anastasius."[1] This "confirmation,"
whatever it may have meant to the Goths, meant nothing to the Romans
or to the empire. For some years Constantinople refused all
acknowledgment to Theodoric, till in 497 peace was made and Theodoric
obtained recognition, much it may be thought as Odoacer had done, from
Constantinople; but the ornaments of the palace at Ravenna, which
Odoacer had sent to New Rome, were brought back, and therefore it
would seem that the royalty of Theodoric was acknowledged by the
empire; but we have no authority to see in this more than an
acknowledgment of the king of the Goths, the vicegerent perhaps of the
emperor in Italy. What Theodoric's title may have been we have no
means of knowing: _de jure_ he was the representative of the emperor
in Italy: _de facto_ he was the absolute ruler, the _tyrannus_, as
Odoacer had been, of the country; but he never ventured to coin money
bearing his effigy and superscription and he invariably sent the names
of the consuls, whom he appointed, to Constantinople for confirmation.
He ruled too, as Odoacer had done, by Roman law, and the Arian heresy,
which he and his barbarians professed as their religion, was not till
the very end of his reign permitted precedence over the Catholic
Faith. For the most part too he governed by means of Roman officials,
and to this must be ascribed the enormous success of his long
government.
[Footnote 1: Anon. Valesu, 57.]
[Illustration: CAPITAL FROM THE COLONNADE IN PIAZZA MAGGIORE]
For that he was successful, that he gave Italy peace during a whole
generation, is undeniable. In all the chronicles there is little but
praise of him. The chief of them[1] says of him: "He was an
illustrious man and full of good-will towards all. He reigned
thirty-three years[2] and during thirty of these years so great was
the happiness of Italy that even the wayfarers were at peace. For he
did nothing evil. He governed the two nations, the Goths and the
Romans, as though they were one people. Belonging himself to the Arian
sect, he yet ordained that the civil administration should remain for
the Romans as it had been under the emperors. He gave presents and
rations to the people, yet though he found the treasury ruined he
brought it by hard work into a flourishing state. He attempted nothing
against the Catholic Faith. He exhibited games in the circus and
amphitheatre, and received from the Romans the names of Trajan and
Valentinian, for the happy days of those most prosperous emperors he
did in truth seek to restore, and at the same time the Goths rendered
true obedience to their valiant king according to the edict which he
had given them.
[Footnote 1: Anon. Valesii. This was probably Bishop Maximian, a
Catholic bishop of Ravenna. I follow, with a few changes, Mr.
Hodgkin's translation.]
[Footnote 2: Thirty-two years and a half from the death of Odoacer;
thirty-seven from his descent into Italy.]
"He gave one of his daughters in marriage to the king of the Visigoths
in Gaul, another to the son of the Burgundian king; his sister to the
king of the Vandals and his niece to the king of the Thuringians. Thus
he pleased all the nations round him, for he was a lover of
manufactures and a great restorer of cities. He restored the Aqueduct
of Ravenna which Trajan had built, and again after a long interval
brought water into the city. He completed but did not dedicate the
Palace, and he finished the Porticoes about it. At Verona he erected
Baths and a Palace, and constructed a Portico from the Gate to the
Palace. The Aqueduct, which had been destroyed long since, he renewed,
and brought in water through it. He also surrounded the city with new
walls. At Ticinum (Pavia) too he built a Palace, Baths, and an
Amphitheatre and erected walls round the city. On many other cities he
bestowed similar benefits.
"Thus he so delighted the nations near him that they entered into a
league with him hoping that he would be their king. The merchants,
too, from many provinces flocked to his dominions, for so great was
the order which he maintained, that, if any one wished to keep gold
and silver in the country it was as safe as in a walled city. A proof
of this was that he never made gates for any city of Italy, and the
gates that already existed were never closed. Any one who had business
to do, might go about it as safely by night as by day."
But if such praise sound fulsome, let us hear what the sceptical and
censorious Procopius has to say:
"Theodoric," he tells us, "was an extraordinary lover of justice and
adhered vigorously to the laws. He guarded the country from barbarian
invasions, and displayed the greatest intelligence and prudence. There
was in his government scarcely a trace of injustice towards his
subjects, nor would he permit any of those under him to attempt
anything of the kind except that the Goths divided among themselves
the same proportion of the land of Italy as Odoacer had given to his
confederates. Thus then Theodoric was in name a tyrant, in fact a true
king, not inferior to the best of his predecessors, and his popularity
increased greatly both with the Goths and the Italians, and this was
contrary to the ordinary course of human affairs. For generally as
different classes in the state want different things, the government
which pleases one party incurs the hatred of the other. After a reign
of thirty-seven years he died having been a terror to all his enemies,
but leaving a deep regret for his loss in the hearts of his subjects."
In these panegyrics, which we cannot but accept as sincere, mention is
made of one of the greatest virtues of Theodoric, his reparation of
and care for the great monuments of the empire. In Ravenna we read he
repaired the Aqueduct which Trajan had built and which had long been
out of repair, so that Ravenna always deficient in water had for many
years suffered on this account. In the _Variae_ of Cassiodorus, his
minister and a Roman, we read as follows:--
"_King Theodoric to all Cultivators_.
"The Aqueducts are an object of our special care. We desire you at
once to root up the shrubs growing in the Signine channel, which will
before long become big trees scarcely to be hewn down with an axe and
which interfere with the purity of the water in the Aqueduct of
Ravenna. Vegetation is the peaceable overturner of buildings, the
battering-ram which brings them to the ground, though the trumpets
never sound for siege. Now we shall have Baths again that we may look
upon with pleasure; water which will cleanse not stain[1]; water after
using which we shall not require to wash ourselves again; drinking
water too, such as the mere sight of it will not take away all
appetite for food[2]."
[Footnote 1: Cf. Sidonius Apollinaris above.]
[Footnote 2: Cassiodorus, _Variae_, v. 38. Trs. Hodgkin, _The Letters
of Cassiodorus_ (Oxford, 1886).]
The general restoration of the great material works of the empire was
characteristic of the reign of Theodoric and could only have been
carried out by Roman officials and workmen. It is especially frequent
in Ravenna and in Rome. Theodoric will, if he can help it, have
nothing more destroyed. He is afraid of destruction, and that is a
mark of the barbarian. He wishes, Cassiodorus tells us, "to build new
edifices without despoiling the old. But we are informed that in your
municipality (of Aestunae) there are blocks of masonry and columns,
formerly belonging to some building, now lying absolutely useless and
unhonoured. If this be so, send these slabs of marble and columns by
all means to Ravenna that they may again be made beautiful and take
their place in a building there."[1] And again: "We rely upon your
zeal and prudence to see that the required blocks of marble are
forwarded from Faenza to Ravenna without any extortion from private
persons; so that, on the one hand, our desire for the adornment of
that city may be gratified, and, on the other, there may be no cause
for complaint on the part of our subjects.[2]
His care and adornment of Ravenna are remarkable. It was his capital
and he built there with a truly Roman splendour. We hear vaguely of a
Basilica of Hercules which was to be adorned with a mosaic, though
what this may have been we do not know; but we still have the
magnificent Arian church of S. Apollinare, which he called S. Martin
_de Coelo Aureo_ because of its beautiful gilded roof; and less
perfectly there remains to us the Arian church he built, called then
S. Theodore and now S. Spirito, and the Arian baptistery beside it;
the ruin, known as his palace, and his mighty tomb.
The government of Theodoric was great and generous, Roman in its
completeness and in its largeness; but he did not succeed in
establishing a new kingdom, a nation of Goths and Romans in Italy.
Why?
The answer to that question must be given and it is this: Theodoric
and his Goths were Arians. Much more than race or nationality religion
forms and inspires a people, welds them into one or divides them
asunder. Even though there had been no visible difference in culture
and civilisation between the Goths, when for a generation they had
been settled south of the Alps, and the Romans of the plain and of
Italy, nevertheless they would have remained barbarians, for Arianism
at this time was the certain mark of barbarism.[3] Had the barbarians
not fallen into this strange heresy, had the Goths, above all, been
Catholics, who knows what new nation might have arisen upon the ruin
of the Western empire to create, more than five hundred years before,
as things were, it was to blossom, the rose of the Middle Age?
[Footnote 1: Cassiodorus, op cit. iii. 9. Trs. Hodgkin, op. cit.]
[Footnote 2: Cassiodorus, op. cit. v. 8.]
[Footnote 3: Heathenism even more so of course. It cannot be
altogether a cooincidence that those barbarians which first became
Catholic, though they had been ruder and rougher than the rest, were
destined to re-establish the empire in the West--the Franks.]
[Illustration: S. APOLLINARE IN CLASSE]
[Illustration: Colour Plate THE MAUSOLEUM OF THEODORIC]
But this was not to be. The work of Theodoric, a useful work as we
shall see, was serving quite another purpose than that of establishing
a new Gothic kingdom. As for him and his government, they were utterly
to pass away and by reason of the religion they professed.
The first blow at the endurance and security of the Ostrogothic
hegemony was the conversion of Clovis to Catholicism in 496. This
changed the political relations, not only of every state in Gaul, but
of every state in Europe, and enormously to the disadvantage of the
Arians. The second was the reconciliation, in 519, of the pope and the
emperor, which rightly understood was the death warrant of the Gothic
kingdom. Had the Goths been Catholic, either that reconciliation would
not have taken place, or it would have been without ill results for
them. As it was it was fatal, though not all at once.
The Arian heresy, if we are to understand it aright, must be
recognised as an orientalism having much in common with Judaism and
the later Mahometanism. It denied several of the statements of the
Nicene Creed, those monoliths upon which the new Europe was to be
founded. It maintained that the Father and the Son are distinct
Beings; that the Son though divine is not equal to the Father; that
the Son had a state of existence previous to His appearance upon
earth, but is not from Eternity; that Christ Jesus was not really man
but a divine being in a case of flesh. Already against it the future
frowned dark and enormous as the Alps.
Such was the heresy at the root of the Ostrogothic kingdom, and it is
significant that the cause of the first open alienation between
Theodoric and the Catholics of Italy was concerned with the Jews. It
seems that the Jews, whom Theodoric had always protected, had, during
his absence from Ravenna, mocked the Christian rite of baptism and
made sport of it by throwing one another into one of the two muddy
rivers of that city, and also by some blasphemous foolishness aimed at
the Mass. The Catholic population had naturally retaliated by burning
all the Jewish synagogues to the ground. Theodoric, like all the
Gothic Arians, sided with the Jews and fined the Catholic citizens of
Ravenna, publicly flogging those who could not pay, in order that the
synagogues might be rebuilt. Such was the first open breach between
the king and the Romans, who now began to remind themselves that there
was an Augustus at Constantinople. This memory, which had slumbered
while pope and emperor were in conflict--such is the creative and
formative power of religion--was stirred and strengthened by the
reconciliation between the emperor Justin and the Holy See. It is
curious that the man who was to lead the Catholic party and to suffer
in the national cause had translated thirty books of Aristotle into
Latin; his name was Boethius and he was master of the offices.
This great and pathetic figure had been till the year 523 continually
in the favour of Theodoric. In that year suddenly an accusation was
brought against the patrician Albinus of "sending letters to the
emperor Justin hostile to the royal rule of Theodoric." In the debate
which followed, Boethius claimed to speak and declared that the
accusation was false, "but whatever Albinus did, I and the whole
senate of Rome with one purpose did the same." We may well ask for a
clear statement of what they had done; we shall get no answer.
Boethius himself speaks of "the accusation against me of having hoped
for Roman freedom," and adds: "As for Roman freedom, what hope is left
to us of that? Would that there were any such hope." To the charge of
"hoping for Roman freedom" was added an accusation of sorcery.
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