The Romans were not satisfied with trouble. In 408, for mere reasons of court jealousy and intrigue, they basely beheaded their great general Stilicho. The Roman court had established itself among the impassable marshes of Ravenna, on the Adriatic. There they felt secure in themselves, so they did not care what became of Italy. Honorius trembled and exulted. He agreed to the execution of Stilicho.
Alaric heard of the shameful death of his great rival. Then cunningly, smiling to himself, he began to negotiate with the foolish Honorius, thus keeping Ravenna quiet, whilst with his Gothic armies he marched past, down the Flaminian Way, straight to Rome. On he went, till he passed the stately arches, and pitched his camp under the walls of the great city. This was in 408. For six hundred and nineteen years, since the invasion of the Cimbri and Teutons, barbarians from the same lands the Goths came from, Rome had been inviolate. Now it was reduced by famine. But Alaric was a Christian, and declared himself no enemy of the sacred city. He demanded a ransom of all the gold and silver and costly furniture in Rome, and a surrender of all the German slaves. ‘ What have you left us? ‘ asked the trembling Romans. ‘ Your lives,’ said the contemptuous Visigoth. And he marched quietly away.
In 409 Alaric again besieged Rome. The Emperor Honorius and his court were still enjoying themselves in safety behind the marshes of Ravenna. Alaric sent bishops of the Italian towns into Rome, offering peace. But Rome would not accept Alaric as an ally. Still he did not attack the town, but marched down to the Port of Rome, and held up the food ships till Rome herself submitted.
Yet still the stupid Honorius would not come to terms with Alaric. Instead he actually sent a rival barbarian chieftain with an army against the great Goth. The third time, Rome paid for the cowardice of Ravenna. In the year 410 Alaric appeared in wrath before the city. At the hour of midnight the Salarian Gate was treacherously opened, and the fury of the tribes of Germany and Russia and Asia, Teutons and Celts and Slavs and Tartars, poured through the ancient, inviolate streets. Alaric, a Christian himself, exhorted his Christian Goths to spare life, but to seize treasure. This they no doubt did. But there was no controlling the fierce Slavonic Alani and Sarmatians, the bloodthirsty Huns, the still heathen Germans who found themselves in the vast, medley army. Terrible slaughter took place in the streets, in the houses, even in the churches. Rome had fallen, her pride was gone for ever.
For six days the barbarian armies occupied Rome. Then they proceeded to ravage Italy. After this they scattered, to enjoy their spoil. The rich Romans were dead. In their lovely villas by the sea the Germans sprawled their huge limbs, lying drinking, gambling, singing, feasting, as at home. But now they lay on warm, marble terraces, stretched on silken cushions, looking out past the orange and almond trees to the blue waves of the Mediterranean. Beautiful delicate slaves attended the huge warriors, bringing wine cooled with snow, and rare food, and exquisite sweetmeats made of honey, and apricots, and oranges, and raisins, also beautiful bunches of grapes, and peaches each one laid sweet and downy on its own leaf. There the savage heroes shouted and sang, telling stories of the far-off grey Baltic, or of the bleak steppes of Russia.
But Alaric died in 410, when he was preparing to cross to Sicily. He was only 34 years of age. It is said that the river Busento was turned aside by the Goths, and that Alaric with all his arms and treasure was buried in the river bed. The river was then brought back to its own course, so that it rolled its waves above the great Visigoth. And then the workmen and slaves were all killed, the secret kept for ever.
The Goths began to sicken with diseases in Italy. Ataulf, their new chief, made peace with Honorius and later married Placidia, the Emperor’s sister. Then he led his hosts out of Italy, leaving the land at peace. He moved into Gaul, and then he decided to cross the Pyrenees.
The legions of Spain, like the legions of Britain, had revolted from their Roman allegiance, and in 407 they had invited into their lands the wild barbarians who had crossed the Rhine into Gaul. Of these the Vandals were the chief tribe. They were a much more ferocious, destructive race than the Goths, so that we still speak of an act of wilful destruction as an act of vandalism. Spain, a lovely and highly civilised Roman province, was lost when her treacherous legions invited the Vandals over the Pyrenees.
In 415, however, Ataulf, the successor of Alaric, being now friendly to Rome, determined to march with his Visigoths over the Pyrenees and dispossess the destructive Vandals. This he did, defeated the barbarians, and established his kingdom in North Spain, his capital in Barcelona. And thus began the Visigoth rule in Spain. The Visigoths in Spain became the nobility and freemen of Spain, as did the Normans in England, the natives forming the lower classes. Later the Moors came and overthrew the Visigoth rule, but after some hundreds of years the Moors were driven out, and the proud Spaniards, in whose veins runs the Gothic blood of Alaric, resumed their sway over the Peninsula.
Whilst the Visigoths settled themselves in North Spain, the Vandals still held the south. In 428 the Roman governor of North Africa rebelled against Rome. He sent across the Straits of Gibraltar and asked the fierce Vandals to come to his help. The Vandals, who were ready shipbuilders, saw their chance. Under their king, Genseric, they sailed across to the lovely and rich North African provinces, once the granary of Rome. Genseric was a terrible, inhuman leader. The Vandals fell upon the sunny African cities like a cloud of death. Soon they had dispossessed the Romans, and then was established a powerful, sea-faring kingdom of Vandals in the lands we now call Tripoli, having the capital in Carthage, one of the ancient great cities of the world. This Vandal empire in Africa was not destroyed till 534.
Meanwhile Europe was in chaos. African Vandals ravaged the sea, Vandals landed in Italy and again sacked Rome, in 455. In Gaul the Visigoths under Theodoric had established a kingdom in the south of France, in the fair land known as Aquitaine. There they settled down to peace and prosperity, spreading their kingdom over Northern Spain, and ruling a splendid Visigoth realm. They were already Christians.
The Burgundians, another German tribe, settled down peacefully in the fertile fields on the Rhone, the Jura, and by the upper waters of the Rhine. They too became Christians. The Franks, also German, settled in the north of Gaul, around the Scheldt and Somme and the Moselle.
In 490 another Theodoric, the Ostrogoth, founded the Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy, and the Roman empire in the West disappeared. The empire in the East still persisted, governed from Constantinople. But it was hopelessly weak. About 510 the emperor of Constantinople invited the help of the Langobardi. This brought down the ferocious tribe of Lombards into Southern Europe, where their descendants still remain.
These are the real Dark Ages, when Europe was a welter of fighting barbarians. The splendour and peace of the Roman Empire utterly disappeared, Italy was almost depopulated by war and pestilence. The earth fell back into its wild state; a traveller in the once smiling, wonderful Italian country might have imagined himself in a savage land, save for the ruins and presence of Roman buildings, Roman roads.
Still the tide of barbarians flowed over the Danube. But it was no longer German, but Slavonic or Asiatic. The warlike Bulgarians came down upon the Balkan Peninsula, followed by Slavonic tribes, tall, fair, like Germans, but having Asiatic dress and manners, and a Slavonic speech.
So, as the great empire dwindled to the confines of Constantinople, the rest of Europe was flooded with barbarians from Germany, Russia, and Asia. These barbarians settled down at last, and, mingling or not mingling with the natives of the lands they occupied, formed the base of the great modern nations: English, French, Spanish, Lombard, Swiss, Bulgarian, and so on. All these are formed from a wild mixture of races, in which, except perhaps in the case of the Slavs, the Germanic element was dominant during the Dark Ages.
Chapter VI. The Huns
The great flood of Germanic barbarians that broke over Europe in the decline of the Roman Empire changed for ever the disposition of Europe, and even changed or modified the very race
s of the different countries. Where the Germans stayed, they settled, and out of their rooting in the new lands rose in time the perfected civilisations of our history. Thus in England the Saxons, Danes, and Normans were all of Germanic blood, and the fusion of these tribes with the native Briton has resulted in our modern English race. In the south of France the Visigoth kingdom of Aquitaine soon developed into civilisation. Aquitaine was perhaps the most cultured land in Europe in the time of Richard Coeur de Lion. Spain had two distinct developments: in the north the Gothic, and in the south the Arabic or Moorish. In the end the Gothic triumphed and dominated Spain. In .Italy we have the Langobardi in Lombardy, the Veneti in Venice, and later, the Northmen in Sicily and Naples. These are the races which, fused with the native Italian, brought Italy to her second and greatest flowering, in the fifteenth century. France had the more peaceful German Burgundian settled along the Rhone and the Jura, bringing the land into beautiful cultivation, whilst in the north the fiercer Franks, who gave their name to the whole country, occupied the land from the Rhine to the Loire.
Thus we see that from the distribution of German tribes among native nations, in the fourth, fifth, sixth centuries — even on to the eleventh — the modern nations of Europe have arisen. There is one great barbarian race, however, which we have not considered, and this is the race whose name rang terror through the whole ancient world. We have said that the year 375 is marked as an epoch in the world’s history, by the crossing of the Huns over the Volga. More startling than the name of Goth or Vandal is the name of Hun. Yet the Hunnish force was only the black hammer which smashed up the already broken Roman world; it did nothing towards building up a new world. The Germanic races entered in and formed the basis of a new Europe. The Hunnish force rolled away like a thunder-cloud that has burst and struck the land.
Beyond the Volga lie the vast tracts of Middle Asia, still hardly known to us. In Roman days this enormous region was one dim shadow, whose fringes alone were known. Out of this enormous unknown, from time to time there issued black clouds of human beings, savage and horrible. The black cloud burst on Europe, first on Russia, then on the Germanic lands beyond the Danube and the Vistula. And every time the black swarm broke out of the east, the white clouds of German and Slavonic barbarians came rolling over Europe to the south. And thus we say the Huns destroyed the Roman world, by displacing the German and Slavonic races and impelling them southwards.
For thousands of years the Huns must have roamed between China and the Volga, and between the Arctic regions and Persia, in that immeasurable basin of dreary land called Tartary or Scythia. They were of Tartar or Mongolian race, dark yellow in colour, Asiatic. The distinguishing marks of the Tartars were that they lived in tents, roaming from place to place: that they tilled no ground: that they lived on horseback: that they had no beards, and wore loose garments.
The Huns, however, were the most terrible of all Tartars. They lived together in families or clans. These families had, in course of time, grown enormous. Thousands of individuals kept together in one moving host, called a horde. When they pitched their round, black tents, made of horse-hair cloth stretched over a frame shaped like a bee-hive, or like a barrel, then the plain would be blackened for miles around with the vast encampment. Their cattle and horses were guarded in innumerable herds. They fed on the dreary plains surrounding the camp. Then, when all the grass was eaten, there would be a loud, buzzing activity, as of a world of bees. The black tents disappeared, wagons were harnessed, men on horseback were darting here and there over the plain like clouds of flies, and the great swarm moved on, on into the vast unknown, over the horizon.
The darting, horse-riding Hunnish men were dreaded on both sides of the world. Long before they troubled Europe, they had brought ruin on the beautiful, civilised empire of China. Twice they conquered the great, cultivated lands of China, and had to be paid off with enormous tribute. They even demanded every year a band of the fairest maidens of China: for the Tartar women were hideous and savage. Thus we have still a poem written by an unhappy Chinese princess who was given to a Tartar chief as tribute. She weeps and complains that she, who had been brought up so delicate, silken and flowery in the fair palace of her father in China, should be condemned to be carried off into far exile by a savage Tartar, mingled with his gruesome wives, her only food raw meat, her only drink sour milk, her only palace a tent of woven horsehair, and her only music the shrill noise of Tartar speech. If she could but be a bird, she cries, and fly back to her dear home in China! But no doubt the poor princess perished among the savages, carried hither and thither with the herds in Central Asia.
About the year 300 B.C. the Chinese began to build that wonder of the world, the Great Wall of China, to keep back these Tartars. But continually the pitiless Huns broke through, carrying devastation and slaughter into the gentle lands. At last, however, in the course of centuries, the Chinese strengthened themselves against this hated foe. They drilled and perfected their armies, and steeled their courage, till at last, about the year 300 A.D., six hundred years after the commencement of the Great Wall, the Chinese armies began to inflict crushing defeat upon the Tartars and Huns. The victory was carried away into Tartary, and far in the wastes, far beyond the Wall the proud Chinese armies erected their trophies of triumph, carven pillars which still exist, with their record of battles won.
It was after this date that the Huns turned west. Gradually those that refused to submit to Chinese rule gathered and roved west, band after band. The first hordes approached Europe. They defeated the fierce Slavonic Alani who dwelt along the Volga. In 375 the hordes crossed the Volga on rafts and flat boats. And then we know how they swept down on the Goths near the Danube, and on the Germanic tribes by the Baltic. On their hideous, swift little horses the Huns overran the land in an incredibly short time.
The Hunnish men were dreadful to look at. They lived on their horses, ate, drank, and even slept on horseback. Whether they gathered their assemblies, or whether they traded in a market-place, they were always seated on their savage little steeds. Mounted, they fought at a distance with bows and arrows and spears, or close at hand, fiercely wheeling and flying on horseback, with swords.
When a Hun did dismount and stand on the earth, he was very ugly. Bow-legged, he waddled as he walked. He was little, short in build, but very broad and powerful. His head was big and like an animal’s, with coarse, straight black hair. Tiny black eyes sparkled deep in the flesh of the flat face, the great wide mouth opened and shut. There was no beard, only a few bristles here and there; for the practice of cutting their faces whilst young prevented the hair from growing.
These untamable people were like animals. They were very swift and sudden in their movements, and the first hordes seem to have been almost without human feelings. When they came down on the Goths they slaughtered indiscriminately, opening their wide mouths and slashing and slaying anything that was alive and was not Hunnish. They spoke with shrill, high voices, calling shrilly, using strange, savage gestures. And when they had finished killing, they collected all the booty they wanted, for they were very greedy, and then they set fire to all that would burn, and that they did not want.
No wonder the fleeing Goths were horrified. They felt that behind these fearful faces there was no human spirit. They felt that no human speech could reach these creatures. The Hunnish speech seemed like the shrill, neighing communication of animals. And the Huns were avaricious as demons.
The Christian Romans said that the Huns were not human. They were bom of evil spirits who mated with witches in the dreary deserts of Asia.
Human or not, the Romans soon had to reckon with the Huns. The main body of the horde moved slowly. The women were in the great clumsy wagons, that were drawn by five or six yoke of oxen. There were huge wagon-loads of plunder, besides prisoners, slaves, who were on foot. Then there were the herds of cattle. So that the main tribe advanced at a slow pace.
The warriors were just as swift as the horde was slow. No one kn
ew where they would turn up next. They carried no baggage. For food, they cut some slices of raw meat, and these, placed like a saddle, cooked a little between the heat of the horse’s body and the warrior’s thigh. This made strong, savage food. Beyond this, the horsemen carried little balls of hard curd cheese, which they broke, dissolved in water, and so ate. They could live for many days on this poor sustenance, if they found no other food.
Bands of Huns crossed the Danube and ravaged the land. Then they joined the Gothic and Vandal hosts against the common enemy Rome. At the taking of Rome by Alaric many Huns were present — indeed they formed part of almost every barbarian army. They despised the Romans, particularly the Byzantines. They would not deign to speak Greek. But both Goths and Huns were proud when they learned to speak the military Latin.
Whilst these bands roved, the bulk of the Hunnish nation stayed beyond the Danube. They occupied the great open plains of the land that is still theirs — or still bears their name — Hungary, the land of the Huns. There they roved and hunted, and in time they built large villages of wooden huts, where they dwelt more permanently, although still they would leave the village empty at times, and set off wandering.
Gradually, however, they learned from the Goths and the Romans. The Huns were quick and intelligent in their way; they very quickly picked up Latin, and learned Roman methods of life. But they kept their own habits. They loved money. They would go to the Roman markets over the Danube to sell cattle, cheese, hides, horse-hair, and to buy Roman goods. But they liked to sell more than they bought.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 898