Franks, Burgundians, and Alemanni, England by Angles and Saxons, Africa by the Vandals; and, with the deposition of Romulus Augustulus, Italy, too, became the prize of a Barbarian general.

The succeeding period of European history, in Gaul, Spain, Africa, and Italy, is the mingling or attempted mingling of the old populations of the Empire with the Barbarian conquerors. The process had, indeed, as I have intimated, begun before the fall of the Empire. For several generations Barbarians had not only been received as colonists and taken as soldiers, but even whole tribes had been admitted within the Roman boundaries. Imperial statesmen had realized that the Empire could only be upheld by an infusion of Barbarian virility, and they had favoured the process. But assimilation had not taken place, and now that the Empire had passed into the hands of the Barbarians there were two social strata,—the rude martial conquerors on top, and the civilized, feeble, subject race, ten times as numerous, underneath. It was obvious to the wiser Barbarian chiefs, trained as they were in Roman ways, that if they were to get stable dominion and civilized government, they must adopt the complicated Imperial machinery. They saw that unless the Barbarians learned Roman civilization, they would need hundreds of years to create any such civilization of their own. This was especially true in Italy. Odoacer, the general who deposed Romulus Augustulus, well knew that a state which had its military service all Barbarian and its civil service all Roman could not stand firm. Barbarian sovereignty needed support, especially legal support, in the eyes of the subject population. Such legitimacy could only come from the Empire. Odoacer and other intelligent Barbarians turned instinctively to Constantinople for recognition. They did not think that they had overturned or suppressed the Empire. Nobody thought that there were two Empires, one Eastern and one Western, one enduring and one destroyed in 476. To the Roman world the Empire had always been single, had always been a unit. The division into eastern and western parts had been made for convenience of administration; the Empire itself had never been divided. Even after the western countries of Europe had been overrun by the Barbarians, the Emperor at Constantinople remained the supreme and sole source of authority and law. The very Barbarians could not free themselves from this theory, however little heed they paid to it in practice. Odoacer acknowledged the sovereignty of the Empire without question. He merely wished to control the civil and military administration in Italy.

Before beginning a sketch of the attempts to found a permanent Barbarian government in Italy and to combine Barbarians and Romans in one people, it is necessary to speak of a rising power which already constituted the most important element in the situation. The Church was not only the one vigorous body in Italy, but it had already begun to foreshadow its future greatness. In the time of Constantine (323-337) and his immediate successors, the bishops of Rome had no primacy over other bishops, but they had claims to precedence, which they soon put to good use. Their city was the cradle and home of Roman dominion. St. Paul had lived and died there. Above all, as was universally acknowledged, the apostle Peter had founded their bishopric. Theirs, in an especial sense, was the Church to which Christ referred when He said to the apostle, "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." The bishops of Rome also derived immense advantage from the absence of a temporal prince; whereas their chief rivals, the patriarchs of Constantinople, were wholly eclipsed by the presence of the Emperor. The removal of the great offices of government to Constantinople and the absence of any real civil life, had left Rome even then a mere ecclesiastical city, and the head of the Church became the most important personage there. It was so generally acknowledged that Roman bishops were entitled to that precedence in rank over other bishops, which Rome enjoyed over other cities, that in 344 an Ecumenical Council submitted a most important question to the decision of the Roman See. One hundred years later the great pope, Leo I, merely gave utterance to the general opinion when he said: "St. Peter and St. Paul are the Romulus and Remus of the new Rome, as much superior to the old as truth is to error. If ancient Rome was at the head of the pagan world, St. Peter, prince of the Apostles, came to teach in the new Rome, so that from her the light of Christianity should be shed over the world."

The Roman Church gathered to herself whatever remained of the administrative ability of ancient Rome. With acute practical sense she condemned those subtle doctrines that kept springing up in the East, late flashes of Greek metaphysics; and though she may have cut herself off from certain spiritual Neoplatonic thought, and have set her heart too much upon domination, yet by her very adherence to dogma, by her very insistence upon uniform law and obedience, by steadfastly maintaining the purity and the unity of the Faith, she became the great cohesive force in Europe, and by creating Christendom contributed immensely to the cause of European civilization. Partly by good fortune, partly by her success in making her cause prevail, Rome was always orthodox. She remained staunchly Trinitarian. She fought the Arians, who believed that the Son, created by the Father, could not be identical with Him and could not have existed from the beginning. She fought the Nestorians, who alleged that the Virgin was the mother of Christ only in so far as He was man. She fought the Monophysites, who denied that Christ had two distinct natures, human and divine. She fought always gallantly, and always, or almost always, in the end triumphantly. In those days ecclesiastical affairs were inseparable from political affairs; no man dreamed of severing them either in fact or in theory; the State and the Church were one fabric under a double aspect. The idea of the State apart from the Church, or the Church apart from the State, was no more imagined than the Darwinian theory.

If we now go back to Odoacer, and to his Barbarian successors, we shall find that in their endeavours to establish an Italian kingdom they were confronted by a threefold task,—to blend the Barbarian conquerors and the subject Latins, to establish friendly relations with the Empire, and to win the confidence and support of the Orthodox Church. In all the long period of Barbarian dominion, each Barbarian chief in turn had to face the imminent danger that these three political powers, the subject people, the Church, and the Empire, should make common cause against him. The Barbarians, in fact, were always unsuccessful. They never were able to make Italy into one kingdom. These three enemies were too strong for them. The inherent difficulties of the situation appear at once on the deposition of Romulus Augustulus, and give whatever interest there is to Odoacer's brief career. Over that career, which bridges the years 476 to 489, we need not pause, for Odoacer's attempt to establish a permanent government over all Italy was so ephemeral, and also so similar in all essential features to that of the Ostrogoths, his successors, that an account of their attempt may serve for his as well.

FOOTNOTE: