Part 9 (2/2)

Then they moved on again, we know not why, and dwelt in the open plains, which are called feld. One says 'Moravia;' but that they had surely left behind. Rather it is the western plain of Hungary about Comorn. Be that as it may, they quarrelled there with the Heruli. Eutropius says that they paid the Herules tribute for the land, and offered to pay more, if the Herules would not attack them. Paul tells a wild saga, or story, of the Lombard king's daughter insulting a Herule prince, because he was short of stature: he answered by some counter-insult; and she, furious, had him stabbed from behind through a window as he sat with his back to it. Then war came. The Herules, old and practised warriors, trained in the Roman armies, despised the wild Lombards, and disdained to use armour against them, fighting with no clothes save girdles. Rodulf their king, too certain of victory, sat playing at tables, and sent a man up a tree to see how the fight went, telling him that he would cut his head off if he said that the Herules fled; and then, touched by some secret anxiety as to the end, spoke the fatal words himself; and a madness from G.o.d came on the Herules; and when they came to a field of flax, they took the blue flowers for water, and spread out their arms to swim through, and were all slaughtered defencelessly.

Then they fought with the Suevi; and their kings' daughters married with the kings of the Franks; and then ruled Aldwin (a name which Dr. Latham identifies with our English Eadwin, or Edwin, 'the n.o.ble conqueror,'

though Grotius translates it Audwin, 'the old or auld conqueror'), who brought them over the Danube into Pannonia, between the Danube and the Drave, about the year 526. Procopius says, that they came by a grant from the Emperor Justinian, who gave as wife to Aldwin a great niece of Dietrich the Good, carried captive with Witigis to Byzant.

Thus at last they too have reached the forecourt of the Roman Empire, and are waiting for their turn at the Nibelungen h.o.a.rd. They have one more struggle, the most terrible of all; and then they will be for a while the most important people of the then world.

The Gepidae are in Hungary before them, now a great people. Ever since they helped to beat the Huns at Netad, they have been holding Attila's old kingdom for themselves and not attempting to move southward into the Empire; so fulfilling their name.

There is continual desultory war; Justinian, according to Procopius'

account, playing false with each, in order to make them destroy each other. Then, once (this is Procopius' story, not Paul's) they meet for a great fight; and both armies run away by a panic terror; and Aldwin the Lombard and Thorisend the Gepid are left alone, face to face.--It is the hand of G.o.d, say the two wild kings--G.o.d does not mean these two peoples to destroy each other. So they make a truce for two years. Then the Gepidae call in Cutuguri, a Hunnic tribe, to help them; then, says Procopius, Aldwin, helped by Roman mercenaries, under Amalfrid the Goth, Theodoric's great nephew, and brother-in-law of Aldwin, has a great fight with the Gepidae. But Paul knows naught of all this: with him it is not Aldwin, but Alboin his son, who destroys the Gepidae. Alboin, Grotius translates as Albe-win, 'he who wins all:' but Dr. Latham, true to his opinion that the Lombards and the Angles were closely connected, identifies it with our AElfwine, 'the fairy conqueror.'

Aldwin, Paul says, and Thorisend fought in the Asfeld,--wherever that may be,--and Alboin the Lombard prince slew Thorisend the Gepid prince, and the Gepidae were defeated with a great slaughter.

Then young Alboin asked his father to let him sit at the table with him.

No, he could not do that, by Lombard custom, till he has become son-at- arms to some neighbouring king.

Young Alboin takes forty thanes, and goes off to Thorisend's court, as the guest of his enemy. The rites of hospitality are sacred. The king receives him, feasts him, seats him, the slayer of his son, in his dead son's place. And as he looks on him he sighs; and at last he can contain no longer. The seat, he says, I like right well: but not the man who sits in it. One of his sons takes fire, and begins to insult the Lombards and their white gaiters. You Lombards have white legs like so many brood mares. A Lombard flashes up. Go to the Asfeld, and you will see how Lombard mares can kick. Your brother's bones are lying about there like any sorry nag's. This is too much; swords are drawn; but old Thorisend leaps up. He will punish the first man who strikes. Guests are sacred. Let them sit down again, and drink their liquor in peace.

And after they have drunk, he gives Alboin his dead son's weapons, and lets them go in peace, like a n.o.ble gentleman.

This grand old King dies in peace. Aldwin dies likewise, and to them succeed their sons, Alboin and Cunimund--the latter probably the prince who made the jest about the brood-mares--and they two will fight the quarrel out. Cunimund, says Paul, began the war--of course that is his story. Alboin is growing a great man; he has married a daughter of Clotaire, king of the Franks: and now he takes to his alliance the Avars, who have just burst into the Empire, wild people who afterwards founded a great kingdom in the Danube lands, and they ravage Cunimund's lands. He will fight the Lombards first, nevertheless: he can settle the Avars after. He and his, says Paul, are slain to a man. Alboin makes a drinking-cup of his skull, carries off his daughter Rosamund ('Rosy-mouth'), and a vast mult.i.tude of captives and immense wealth. The Gepidae vanish from history; to this day (says Paul) slaves either of the Lombards or the Huns (by whom he rather means Avars); and Alboin becomes the hero of his time, praised even to Paul's days in sagas, Saxon and Bavarian as well as Lombard, for his liberality and his glory. We shall see now how he has his chance at the Nibelungen h.o.a.rd.

He has heard enough (as all Teutons have) of Italy, its beauty, and its weakness. He has sent five thousand chosen warriors to Na.r.s.es, to help him against Totila and the Ostrogoths; and they have told him of the fair land and large, with its vineyards, olive-groves, and orchards, waste by war and pestilence, and crying out for human beings to come and till it once more.

There is no force left in Italy now, which can oppose him. Hardly any left in the Roman world. The plague is come; to add its horrors to all the other horrors of the time--the true old plague, as far as I can ascertain; bred, men say, from the Serbonian bog; the plague which visited Athens in the time of Socrates, and England in the seventeenth century: and after the plague a famine; woe on woe, through all the dark days of Justinian the demon-emperor. The Ostrogoths, as you know, were extinct as a nation. The two deluges of Franks and Allmen, which, under the two brothers Buccelin and Lothaire, all on foot (for the French, as now, were no hors.e.m.e.n), had rolled into Italy during the Gothic war, had been swallowed up, as all things were, in the fatal gulf of Italy.

Lothaire and his army, returning laden with plunder, had rotted away like sheep by Lake Benacus (Garda now) of drink, and of the plague. Buccelin, entrenched among his plunder-waggons by the Volturno stream in the far south, had waited in vain for that dead brother and his dead host, till Na.r.s.es came on him, with his army of trained Herules and Goths; the Francisc axe and barbed pike had proved useless before the arrows and the cavalry of the Romans; and no more than five Allmen, says one, remained of all that mighty host. Awful to think of: 75,000 men, they say, in one column, 100,000 in the other: and like water they flowed over the land; and like water they sank into the ground, and left no trace.

And now Na.r.s.es, established as exarch of Ravenna, a sort of satrap, like those of the Persian Emperors, and representing the Emperor of Constantinople, was rewarded for all his conquests and labours by disgrace. Eunuch-like, he loved money, they said; and eunuch-like, he was harsh and cruel. The Empress Sophia, listening too readily to court- slanders, bade him 'leave to men the use of arms, and come back to the palace, to spin among the maids.'--'Tell her,' said the terrible old imp, 'I will spin her such a thread as she shall not unravel.'

He went, superseded by Longinus; but not to Constantinople. From Naples he sent (so says Paul the Deacon) to Alboin, and bade him come and try his fortune as king of Italy. He sent, too, (so says old Paul) presents to tempt the simple Lombard men--such presents as children would like--all fruits which grew in Italian orchards. Though the gold was gone, those were still left. Great babies they were, these Teutons, as I told you at the first; and Na.r.s.es knew it well, and had used them for his ends for many a year.

Then were terrible signs seen in Italy by night; fiery armies fighting in the sky, and streams of blood aloft, foreshadowing the blood which should be shed.

Sent for or not, King Alboin came; and with him all his army, and a mighty mult.i.tude, women, and children, and slaves; Bavarians, Gepidae, Bulgars, Sarmatae, Pannonians, Sueves, and Noricans; whose names (says Paul) remain unto this day in the names of the villages where they settled. With Alboin, too, came Saxons, twenty thousand of them at the least, with wife and child. And Sigebert king of the Franks put Suevic settlers into the lands which the Saxons had left.

Alboin gave up his own Hungarian land to his friends the Avars, on the condition that he should have them back if he had to return. But return he never did, he nor his Lombard host. This is the end. The last invasion of Italy. The sowing, once for all, of an Italian people. Fresh nations were still pressing down to the rear of the Alps, waiting for their turn to enter the Fairy Land--not knowing, perhaps, that nothing was left therein, but ashes and blood:--but their chance was over now: a people were going into Italy who could hold what they got.

On Easter Tuesday, in the year of grace 568, they came, seemingly by the old road; the path of Alaric and Dietrich and the rest; the pa.s.s from Carniola, through which the rail runs now from Laybach to Trieste. It must have been white, in those days, with the bones of nigh 200 years.

And they found bisons, aurochsen, in the mountains, Paul says, and is not surprised thereat, because there are plenty of them in Hungary near by.

An old man told him he had seen a skin in which fifteen men might lie side by side. None, you must know, are left now, save a very few in the Lithuanian forests. Paul goes out of his way to note this fact, and so shall I.

Alboin left a strong guard in Friuli, and Paul's ancestor among them, under Gisulf his nephew, and Marphrais or master of the horse, who now became duke of Friuli and warden of the marches, bound to prevent the Avars following them into their new abode. Then the human deluge spread itself slowly over the Lombard plains. None fought with them, and none gainsaid; for all the land was waste. The plague of three years before, and the famine which followed it had, says Paul, reduced the world into primaeval silence. The villages had no inhabitants but dogs; the sheep were pasturing without a shepherd; the wild birds swarmed unhurt about the fields. The corn was springing self-sown under the April sun, the vines sprouting unpruned, the lucerne fields unmown, when the great Lombard people flowed into that waste land, and gave to it their own undying name.

The scanty population, worn out with misery, fled to rocks and islands in the lakes, and to the seaport towns; but they seem to have found the Lombards merciful masters, and bowed their necks meekly to the inevitable yoke. The towns alone seem to have offered resistance. Pavia Alboin besieged three years, and could not take. He swore some wild oath of utter destruction to all within, and would have kept it. At last they capitulated. As Alboin rode in at St. John's gate, his horse slipped up; and could not rise, though the grooms beat him with their lance-b.u.t.ts. A ghostly fear came on the Lombards. 'Remember, lord king, thy cruel oath, and cancel it; for there are Christian folk in the city.' Alboin cancelled his oath, and the horse rose at once. So Alboin spared the people of Pavia, and entered the palace of old Dietrich the Ostrogoth, as king of Italy, as far as the gates of Rome and Ravenna.

And what was his end? Such an end as he deserved; earned and worked out for himself. A great warrior, he had destroyed many nations, and won a fair land. A just and wise governor, he had settled North Italy on some rough feudal system, without bloodshed or cruelty. A pa.s.sionate savage, he died as savages deserve to die. You recollect Rosamund his Gepid bride? In some mad drinking-bout (perhaps cheris.h.i.+ng still his old hatred of her family) he sent her her father's skull full of wine, and bade her drink before all. She drank, and had her revenge.

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