Part 2 (1/2)
In Greece it was first the rude h.e.l.lenes who overran the Pelasgians.
And again, long after that, there was another descent of fierce northern barbarians,--the Dorians from Epirus,--who, when they took possession of the Peloponnesus and became the _Spartans_, infused that vigorous strain without which the history of Greece might have been a very tame affair. In the British Isles it was the Picts and Scots, who would have done the same thing with England, perhaps, if the Angles and Saxons had not come to the rescue, while Spain had her own Picts and Scots in the mountain tribes of the Pyrenees. But in the fifth century there was the most stupendous ill.u.s.tration of this tendency, when all of Southern Europe was at last inundated by that northern deluge, and the effete Roman Empire was effaced.
The process had been a gradual one; had commenced, in fact, two centuries before the overthrow of the Roman Republic. But not until the fourth century, after the wicked old empire had espoused Christianity, did it become obvious that its foundations were undermined by this flood of barbarians. In 410 A.D., when the West-Goths, under Alaric, entered and sacked Rome, her power was broken. The roots no longer nourished the distant extremities in Britain and Gaul, and it was only a question of time when these, too, should succ.u.mb to the inflowing tide.
The Ostro-Goths--or East-Goths--in Northern Italy, and the Visigoths--or West-Goths--in Gaul, were setting up kingdoms of their own, under a Roman protectorate. The long period of peace in Spain was broken. The Pyrenees, with their warlike tribes, defended her for a time; but the Suevi and the Vandals--the latter a companion tribe of the Goths--had found an easier entrance by the sea on the east. They flowed down toward the south, and from thence across to the northern coast of Africa, which they colonized, leaving a memorial in Spain, in the lovely province of Andalusia, which was named after them--_Vandalusia_. But before the sacking of Rome a wave of the Gothic invasion had overflowed the Pyrenees, and Northern Spain had become a part of the Gothic kingdom in Gaul, with the city of Toulouse as its head.
A century of contact with Roman civilization had wrought great changes in this conquering race. They were untamed in strength, but realized the value of the civilities of life, and of intellectual superiority; and even strove to acquire some of the arts and accomplishments of the race they were invading. They were not yet acknowledged entire masters of Gaul and northern Spain. On condition of military service they had undisputed possession of their territory, with their own king, laws, and customs, but were nominally subjects of the Roman Emperor, Honorius.
Their att.i.tude toward the Romans at this period cannot better be told than in the words of Ataulf himself (or Ataulfus, or Adolphus), whose interesting story will be briefly related. He says:
”It was my first wish to destroy the Roman name and erect in its place a Gothic Empire, taking to myself the place and the powers of Caesar Augustus. But when experience taught me that the untamable barbarism of the Goths would not suffer them to live under the sway of law, and that the abolition of the inst.i.tutions on which the state rested would involve the ruin of the state itself, I chose instead the glory of renewing and maintaining by Gothic strength the fame of Rome; preferring to go down to posterity as the restorer of that Roman power which it was beyond my power to replace.”
These are not the words of a barbarian; although by the corrupt and courtly n.o.bles in Rome he was considered one; but no doubt he towered far above the barbarous host whom he helped to lead into Rome in the year 410 A.D.
Ataulf was the brother-in-law of Alaric, and succeeded that great leader in authority after his death (410 A.D.).
At the time of the sacking of Rome this Gothic prince fell in love with Placidia, the sister of the Emperor Honorius; and after the fas.h.i.+on of his people, carried her away as his captive; not an unwilling one, we suspect, for we learn of her great devotion to her brave, strong wooer, with blond hair and blue eyes. Ataulf took his fair prize to the city of Narbonne in southern France, and made her his Queen. But when Constantius, a disappointed Roman lover of Placidia's, instigated Honorius to send an army against him and his Goths, he withdrew into Spain, and established his court with its rude splendor in the ancient city of Barcelona.
He seems to have had not an easy task between the desire to please his haughty Roman bride and, at the same time, to repel the charge of his people that he was becoming effeminate and Romanized; and, finally, so jealous did they become of her influence that Ataulf was a.s.sa.s.sinated in the presence of his wife, all his children butchered, and the proud Placidia compelled to walk barefoot through the streets of Barcelona.
Constantius, the faithful Roman lover, came with an army and carried back to Rome the royal widow, who married him and became the mother of Valentinian III., who succeeded his uncle Honorius as Emperor of Rome in 425 A.D., under the regency of Placidia during his infancy.
This romance, lying at the very root of a Gothic dynasty in Spain, marks the earliest beginnings of a line of Visigoth kings. Ataulf's successor removed his court to Toulouse in France, and Spain for many years remained only an outlying province of the Gothic kingdom; her turbulent northern tribes refusing to accept or to mingle with the strange intruders. When driven by the Romans from their mountain fastnesses the Basques, many of them, were at that time dispersed through southern and central France; which accounts for the presence of that race in France, before alluded to.
In the second half of the fifth century Attila, ”the Scourge of G.o.d,”
swept down upon Europe with his Huns,--mysterious, terrible, as a fire out of heaven, and more like an army of demons than men,--destroying city after city, and driving the people before them, until they came to Orleans. There they met the combined Roman and Gothic armies.
Theodoric, the Visigoth king, was killed on the battlefield. But to him, and to the Roman general aetius, belongs the glory of the defeat of the Huns (451 A.D.).
It was Evaric, the son of this Theodoric, who finally completed the conquest of the Spanish Peninsula, and with him really commences the line of Visigoth kings in Spain, and the conversion of that country into a Gothic empire,[A] entirely independent of Rome.
The German _Franks_, under Clovis, established their kingdom in Gaul 481 A.D. The _Angles_ and _Saxons_ in 446 A.D. did the same in Britain. The _Ostrogoths_ had their own kingdom in northern Italy and southern Gaul (Burgundy). So, with the _Visigoths_ ruling in Spain, the ”northern deluge” had in the fifth century practically submerged the whole of Europe, and above its dark waters showed only the somber wreck of a Roman empire.
From this fusing of Roman and Teutonic races there were to arise two types of civilization, utterly different in kind, the _Anglo-Saxon_ and the _Latin_. In one the prevailing element, after the fusing was complete, was to be the Teutonic; in the other, the Roman. Herein lies the difference between these two great divisions of the human family, and this is the germinal fact in the war raging to-day between Spain and the United States. It is a difference created not by the mastery of arms, but by the more efficient mastery of ideas.
When the Angles and Saxons conquered Britain, after a Roman occupation of over three hundred years, they swept it clean of Roman laws, literature, and civilization. Untamed pagan barbarians though they were, they had fine instincts and simple ideals of society and government, and they cast out the corrupt old empire, root and branch.
The Visigoths in Spain, more enlightened than they, already Christianized, and, perhaps, even superior in intelligence, were content in the words of Ataulf--”to renew and maintain by Gothic strength the fame of Rome.” So they built upon the ruins of decaying inst.i.tutions of a corrupt civilization, a kingdom which flourished with the enormous vitality drawn from the conquering race, which race was in turn conquered by Roman ideals.
So, in the conflict now existing between Spain and the United States, we see the Spaniard, the child of the Romans; valorous, picturesque, cruel, versed in strategic arts, and with a savor of archaic wickedness which belongs to a corrupt old age. In the American we see the child of the simple Angles and Saxons, no less brave, but just, and with an enthusiasm and confiding integrity which seems to endow him with an imperishable youth.
[Footnote A: The famous Gothic code established by him still linger in much of Spanish jurisprudence.]
CHAPTER VI.
The story of Ulfilas, who Christianized the pagan Goths in the last half of the fourth century, is really the first chapter not alone in the history of Gothic civilization but in that of the German and English literatures; which, with their vast riches, had their origin in the strange achievement of Ulfilas. He had, while a boy, been captured by some Goths off the coast of Asia Minor, and was called by them ”_Wulf-ilas_” (little wolf). In his desire to translate the Bible to his captors Wulf-ilas reduced the Gothic language to writing. He had first to create an alphabet; taking twenty-two Roman letters, and inventing two more: the letter _w_, and still another for _th_. So while, after Constantine, the Christian religion was being adopted by the Roman Empire, and while its simple dogmas were being discussed and refined into a complicated and intricate system by men versed in Greek philosophy, and then formulated by minds trained in logic and rhetoric, the same religion was being spelled out in simple fas.h.i.+on by the Goths in central Europe from the book translated for them by Ulfilas.
All they found was that Jesus Christ was the beloved son of G.o.d and the Saviour of the world; that he was the long-promised Messiah, and to believe in him and to follow his teachings was salvation. They knew nothing of the Trinity nor of any theologic subtleties, and this was the simple faith which the Goths carried with them into the lands they conquered.