Part 8 (1/2)
There, then, you have the picture of what held the levers of the machine of government during the period of its degradation and transformation, which followed the breakdown of central authority. Clovis, in the north of France, the Burgundian chieftain at Arles, Theodoric in Italy, Athanagild later at Toledo in Spain, were all of them men who had stepped into the shoes of an unbroken local Roman administration, who worked entirely by it, and whose machinery of administration wherever they went was called by the Roman and official name of _Palatium_.
Their families were originally of barbaric stock: they had for their small armed forces a military inst.i.tution descended and derived from the Roman auxiliary forces; often, especially in the early years of their power, they spoke a mixed and partly barbaric tongue [Footnote: The barbaric dialects outside the Empire were already largely latinized through commerce with the Empire and by its influence, and, of course, what we call ”Teutonic Languages” are in reality half Roman, long before we get our first full doc.u.ments in the eighth and ninth centuries.] more easily than pure Latin; but every one of them was a soldier of the declining Empire and regarded himself as a part of it, not as even conceivably an enemy of it.
When we appreciate this we can understand how insignificant were those changes of frontier which make so great a show in historical atlases.
The _Rex_ of such and such an auxiliary force dies and divides his ”kingdom” between two sons. What does that mean? Not that a nation with its customs and its whole form of administration was suddenly divided into two, still less that there has been what today we call ”annexation” or ”part.i.tion” of states. It simply means that the honor and advantage of administration are divided between the two heirs, who take, the one the one area, the other the other, over which to gather taxes and to receive personal profit. It must always be remembered that the personal privilege so received was very small in comparison with the total revenue to be administrated, and that the vast ma.s.s of public work as carried on by the judiciary, the officers of the Treasury and so forth, continued to be quite impersonal and fundamentally imperial. This governmental world of clerks and civil servants lived its own life and was only in theory dependent upon the _Rex_, and the _Rex_ was no more than the successor of the chief local Roman official. [Footnote: Our popular historical atlases render a very bad service to education by their way of coloring these districts as though they were separate modern nations. The real division right up to full tide of feudalism was Christian and Pagan, and, within the former, Eastern and Western: Greek and Latin.]
The _Rex_, by the way, called himself always by some definite inferior Roman t.i.tle, such as _Vir Ill.u.s.ter_, as an Englishman today might be called ”Sir Charles So and So” or ”Lord So and So,” never anything more; and often (as in the case of Clovis), he not only accepted directly from the Roman Emperor a particular office, but observed the old popular Roman customs such as, largesse and procession, upon his induction into that office.
Now why did not this man, this _Rex_, in Italy or Gaul or Spain, simply remain in the position of local Roman Governor? One would imagine, if one did not know more about that society, that he should have done this.
The small auxiliary forces of which he had been chieftain rapidly merged into the body of the Empire, as had the infinitely larger ma.s.s of slaves and colonists, equally barbarian in origin, for century after century before that time. The body of civilization was one, and we wonder, at first, why its moral unity did not continue to be represented by a central Monarch. Though the civilization continued to decline, its forms should, one would think, have remained unchanged and the theoretic attachment of each of these subordinates to the Roman Emperor at Constantinople should have endured indefinitely. As a fact, the memory of the old central authority of the Emperor was gradually forgotten; the _Rex_ and his local government as he got weaker also got more isolated. He came to coining his own money, to treating directly as a completely independent ruler. At last the idea of ”kings” and ”kingdoms” took shape in men's minds. Why?
The reason that the nature of authority very slowly changed, that the last links with the Roman Empire of the East--that is, with the supreme head at Constantinople--gradually dissolved in the West, and that the modern _nation arose_ around these local governments of the _Reges_, is to be found in that novel feature, the standing Council of great men around the _Rex_, with whom everything is done.
This standing Council expresses three forces, which between them, were transforming society. Those three forces were: first, certain vague underlying national feelings, older than the Empire, Gallic, Brittanic, Iberian; secondly, the economic force of the great Roman landowners, and, lastly, the living organization of the Catholic Church.
On the economic, or material, side of society, the great landowners were the reality of that time.
We have no statistics to go upon. But the facts of the time and the nature of its inst.i.tutions are quite as cogent as detailed statistics. In Spain, in Gaul, in Italy, as in Africa, economic power had concentrated into the hands of exceedingly few men. A few hundred men and women, a few dozen corporations (especially the episcopal sees) had come to own most of the land on which these millions and millions lived; and, with the land, most of the implements and of the slaves.
As to the descent of these great landowners none asked or cared. By the middle of the sixth century only a minority perhaps were still of unmixed blood, but quite certainly none were purely barbaric. Lands waste or confiscated through the decline of population or the effect of the interminable wars and the plagues, lay in the power of the _Palatium_, which granted them out again (strictly under the eye of the Council of Great Men) to new holders.
The few who had come in as original followers and dependents of the ”chieftain” of the auxiliary forces benefited largely; but the thing that really concerns the story of civilization is not the origin of these immensely rich owners (which was mixed), nor their sense of race (which simply did not exist), but the fact that they were so few. It explains both what happened and what was to happen.
That a handful of men, for they were no more than a handful, should thus be in control of the economic destinies of mankind--the result of centuries of Roman development in that direction--is the key to all the material decline of the Empire. It should furnish us, if we were wise, with an object lesson for our own politics today.
The decline of the Imperial power was mainly due to this extraordinary concentration of economic power in the hands of a few. It was these few great Roman landowners who in every local government endowed each of the new administrators, each new _Rex_, with a tradition of imperial power, not a little of the dread that went with the old imperial name, and the armed force which it connoted: everywhere the _Rex_ had to reckon with the strength of highly concentrated wealth. This was the first element in that standing ”Council of Great Men” which was the mark of the time in every locality and wore down the old official, imperial, absolute, local power.
There was, however, as I have said, another and a much more important element in the Council of Great Men, besides the chief landowners; it consisted of the Hierarchy of the Catholic Church.
Every Roman city of that time had a princ.i.p.al personage in it, who knew its life better than anybody else, who had, more than anyone else, power over its morals and ideas, and who in many cases actually administered its affairs. That person was the Bishop.
Throughout Western Europe at that moment men's interest and preoccupation was not race nor even material prosperity, but religion. The great duel between Paganism and the Catholic Church was now decided, after two hard centuries of struggle, in favor of the latter. The Catholic Church, from a small but definite and very tenacious organization within the Empire, and on the whole antagonistic to it, had risen, _first_, to be the only group of men which knew its own mind (200 A.D.); _next_ to be the official religion (300 A.D.); _finally_ to be the cohesive political principle of the great majority of human beings (400 A.D.).
The modern man can distinctly appreciate the phenomenon, if for ”creed” he will read ”capital,” and for the ”Faith,” ”industrial civilization.” For just as today men princ.i.p.ally care for great fortunes, and in pursuit of them go indifferently from country to country, and sink, as unimportant compared with such an object, the other businesses of our time, so the men of the fifth and sixth centuries were intent upon the _unity_ and _exact.i.tude_ of religion. That the religion to which the Empire was now converted, the religion of the Catholic Church, should triumph, was their one preoccupation. For _this_ they exiled themselves; for _this_ they would and did run great risks; as minor to _this_ they sank all other things.
The Catholic hierarchy with its enormous power at that moment, civil and economic as well as religious, was not the creator of such a spirit, it was only its leader. And in connection with that intense preoccupation of men's minds, two factors already appear in the fourth century and are increasingly active through the fifth and sixth. The first is the desire that the living Church should be as free as possible; hence the Catholic Church and its ministers everywhere welcome the growth of local as against centralized power. They do so unconsciously but none the less strongly. The second factor is Arianism: to which I now return.
Arianism, which both in its material success and in the length of its duration, as well as in its concept of religion, and the character of its demise, is singularly parallel to the Protestant movement of recent centuries, had sprung up as the official and fas.h.i.+onable Court heresy opposed to the orthodoxy of the Church.
The Emperor's Court did indeed at last--after many variations--abandon it, but a tradition survived till long after (and in many places) that Arianism stood for the ”wealthy” and ”respectable” in life.
Moreover, of those barbarians who had taken service as auxiliaries in the Roman armies, the greater part (the ”Goths,” for instance, as the generic term went, though that term had no longer any national meaning) had received their baptism into civilized Europe from Arian sources, and this in the old time of the fourth century when Arianism was ”the thing.” Just as we see in eighteenth century Ireland settlers and immigrants accepting Protestantism as ”gentlemanly” or ”progressive” (some there are so provincial as still to feel thus), so the _Rex_ in Spain and the _Rex_ in Italy had a family tradition; they, and the descendants of their original companions, were of what had been the ”court” and ”upper cla.s.s” way of thinking. They were ”Arians” and proud of it. The number of these powerful heretics in the little local courts was small, but their irritant effect was great.
It was the one great quarrel and problem of the time.
No one troubled about race, but everybody was at white heat upon the final form of the Church.