The Dark Ages Collection. David Hume
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A.D. 416).
These engagements were carried out. After five years spent among the Goths, as captive and queen, Placidia returned to Italy,83 and she was persuaded, against her own wishes, to give her hand to the Patrician Constantius. They were married on January 1, A.D. 417, the day on which he entered on his second consulship.84
Wallia set about the congenial task of making war on the four barbarian peoples who had crossed the Pyrenees seven years before and entered the fair land of Spain, rich in corn and crops, rich in mines of gold and precious stones. For two years they seem to have devastated it far and wide. Then they settled down with the intention of occupying permanently the various provinces. The Siling Vandals, under their king Fredbal, took Baetica in the south; the Alans, under their king Addac, made their abode in Lusitania, which corresponds roughly to Portugal;85 the Suevians, and the Asding Vandals, whose king was Gunderic, occupied the north-western province of Gallaecia north of the Douro. The eastern provinces of Tarraconensis and Carthaginiensis, though the western districts may have been seized, and though they were doubtless constantly harried by raids, did not pass under the power of the invaders.
Wallia began operations by attacking the Silings in Baetica. Before the end of the year he had captured their king by a ruse and sent him to the Emperor. The intruders in Spain were alarmed, and their one thought was to make peace with Honorius, and obtain by formal grant the lands which they had taken by violence. They all sent embassies to Ravenna. The obvious policy of the Imperial Government was to sow jealousy and hostility among them by receiving favourably the proposals of some and rejecting those of others.86 The Asdings and the Suevians appear to have been successful in obtaining the recognition of Honorius as Federates, while the Silings and Alans were told that their presence on Roman soil would not be tolerated. Their subjugation by Wallia was a task of about two years.87 The Silings would not yield, and they were virtually exterminated. The king of the Alans was slain, and the remnant of the people who escaped the sword of the Goths fled to Gallaecia and attached themselves to the fortunes of the Asding Vandals. Gunderic thus became “King of the Vandals and Alans,” and the title was always retained by his successors.
After these successful campaigns, the Visigoths were recompensed by receiving a permanent home. The Imperial government decided that they should be settled in a Gallic not a Spanish province, and Constantius recalled Wallia from Spain to Gaul. A compact was made by which the whole rich province of Aquitania Secunda, extending from the Garonne to the Loire, with parts of the adjoining provinces (Narbonensis and Novempopulana), were granted to the Goths. The two great cities on the banks of the Garonne, Bordeaux and Toulouse, were handed over to Wallia. But Narbonne and the Mediterranean coast were reserved for the Empire. As Federates the Goths had no authority over the Roman provincials, who remained under the control of the Imperial administration. And the Roman proprietors retained one-third of their lands; two-thirds were resigned to the Goths. Thus, from the point of view of the Empire, south-western Gaul remained an integral part of the realm; part of the land had passed into the possession of Federates who acknowledged the authority of Honorius; the provincials obeyed, as before, the Emperor’s laws and were governed by the Emperor’s officials. From the Gothic point of view, a Gothic kingdom had been established in Aquitaine, for the moment confined by restraints which it would be the task of the Goths to break through, and limited territorially by boundaries which it would be their policy to overpass. Not that at this time, or for long after, they thought of renouncing their relation to the Empire as Federates, but they were soon to show that they would seize any favourable opportunity to increase their power and extend their borders.
This final settlement of the Visigoths, who had moved about for twenty years, in the three peninsulas of the Mediterranean, to find at last a home on the shores of the Atlantic, was a momentous stage in that process of compromise between the Roman Empire and the Germans which had been going on for many years and was ultimately to change the whole face of western Europe. Constantius was doing in Gaul what Theodosius the Great had done in the Balkans. There were now two orderly Teutonic kingdoms on Gallic soil under Roman lordship, the Burgundian on the Rhine, the Visigothic on the Atlantic.
Wallia did not live to see the arrangements which he had made for his people carried into effect. He died a few months after the conclusion of the compact, and a grandson of Alaric88 was elected to the throne, Theoderic I (A.D. 418). Upon him it devolved to superintend the partition of the lands which the Roman proprietors were obliged to surrender to the Goths. It must have taken a considerable time to complete the transfer. The Visigoths received lion’s share. Each landlord retained one-third of his property for himself and handed over the remaining portion to one of the German strangers.89 This arrangement was more favourable to the Goths than arrangements of the same kind which were afterwards made in Gaul and Italy, as we shall see in due course, with other intruders. For in these other cases it was the Germans who received one-third, the Romans retaining the larger share. And this was the normal proportion. For the principle of these arrangements was directly derived from the old Roman system of quartering soldiers on the owners of land. On that system, which dated from the days of the Republic, and was known as hospitalitas, the owner was bound to give one-third of the produce of his property to the guests whom he reluctantly harboured. This principle was now applied to the land itself, and the same term was used; the proprietor and the barbarian with whom he was compelled to share his estate were designated as host and guest (hospites).
This fact illustrates the gradual nature of the process by which western Europe passed from the power of the Roman into that of the Teuton. Transactions which virtually meant the surrender of provinces to invaders were, in their immediate aspect, merely the application of an old Roman principle, adapted indeed to changed conditions. Thus the process of the dismemberment of the Empire was eased; the transition to an entirely new order of things was masked; a system of Federate States within the Empire prepared the way for the system of independent states which was to replace the Empire. The change was not accomplished without much violence and continuous warfare, but it was not cataclysmic.
The problem which faced the Imperial Government in Gaul was much larger than the settlement of the Gothic nation in Aquitaine. The whole country required reorganisation, if the Imperial authority was to be maintained effectively as of old in the provinces. The events of the last ten years, the ravages of the barbarians, and the wars with the tyrants had disorganised the administrative system. The lands north of the Loire, Armorica in the large sense of the name, had in the days of the tyrant Constantine been practically independent, and it was the work of Exuperantius to restore some semblance of law and order in these provinces.90 Most of the great cities in the south and east had been sacked or burned or besieged. We saw how Imperial Trier, the seat of the Praetorian Prefect, had been captured and plundered by the Vandals; since then it had been, twice at least, devastated by the Franks with sword and fire.91 The Prefect of the Gauls translated his residence from the Moselle to the Rhone, and Arles succeeded to the dignity of Trier.
What Constantius and his advisers did for the restoration of northern Gaul is unknown, but the direction of their policy is probably indicated by the measure which was adopted in the south, in the diocese of the Seven Provinces. On April 17, A.D. 418, Honorius issued an edict enacting that a representative assembly was to meet every autumn at Arles, to debate questions of public interest. It was to consist of the seven governors of the Seven Provinces,92 of the highest class of the decurions,93 and of representatives of the landed proprietors. The council had no independent powers; its object was to make common suggestions for the removal of abuses or for improvements in administration, on which the Praetorian Prefect might act himself or make representations to the central government. Or it might concert measures for common action in such a matter as a petition to the Emperor or the prosecution of a corrupt official.94
Such a council was not a new experiment. The old provincial assemblies of the early Empire had generally fallen into disuse in the third century, but in the fourth we find provincial assemblies in Africa, and diocesan assemblies in Africa and possibly in Spain.95 Already in the reign of Honorius a Praetorian Prefect, Petronius, had made an attempt to create a diocesan assembly in Southern Gaul, probably in the hope that time and labour might be saved, if the affairs