Chaos in Italy was now complete. A half century of invasion, famine, and pestilence had left thousands of farms ruined, thousands of acres untilled, not through exhaustion of the soil but through the exhaustion of man. St. Ambrose (c. 420) mourned the devastation and depopulation of Bologna, Modena, Piacenza; Pope Gelasius (c. 480) described great regions of northern Italy as almost denuded of the human species; Rome itself had shrunk from 1,500,000 souls to some 300,000 in one century;49 all the great cities of the Empire were now in the East. The Campagna around Rome, once rich in villas and fertile farms, had been abandoned for the security of walled towns; the towns themselves had been contracted to some forty acres as a means of economically walling them for defense; and in many cases the walls were improvised from the debris of theaters, basilicas, and temples that had once adorned the municipal splendor of Italy. In Rome some wealth still remained even after Gaiseric, and Rome and other Italian cities would recover under Theodoric and the Lombards; but in 470 a general impoverishment of fields and cities, of senators and proletarians, depressed the spirits of a once great race to an epicurean cynicism that doubted all gods but Priapus, a timid childlessness that shunned the responsibilities of life, and an angry cowardice that denounced every surrender and shirked every martial task. Through all this economic and biological decline ran political decay: aristocrats who could administer but could not rule; businessmen too absorbed in personal gain to save the peninsula; generals who won by bribery more than they could win by arms; and a bureaucracy ruinously expensive and irremediably corrupt. The majestic tree had rotted in its trunk, and was ripe for a fall.
The final years were a kaleidoscope of imperial mediocrities. The Goths of Gaul proclaimed one of their generals, Avitus, emperor (455); the Senate refused to confirm him, and he was transformed into a bishop. Majorian (456–61) labored bravely to restore order, but was deposed by his patricius or prime minister, the Visigoth Ricimer. Severas (461–5) was an inefficient tool of Ricimer. Anthemius (467–72) was a half-pagan philosopher, unacceptable to the Christian West; Ricimer besieged and captured him and had him killed. Olybrius, by grace of Ricimer, ruled for two months (472), and surprised himself by dying a natural death. Glycerius (473) was soon deposed, and for two years Rome was ruled by Julius Nepos. At this juncture a new conglomeration of barbarians swept down into Italy—Heruli, Sciri, Rugii, and other tribes that had once acknowledged the rule of Attila. At the same time a Pannonian general, Orestes, deposed Nepos, and established his son Romulus (nicknamed Augustulus) on the throne (475). The new invaders demanded from Orestes a third of Italy; when he refused they slew him, and replaced Romulus with their general Odoacer (476). This son of Attila’s minister Edecon was not without ability; he convened the cowed Senate, and through it he offered to Zeno, the new Emperor of the East, sovereignty over all the Empire, provided that Odoacer might as his patricius govern Italy. Zeno consented, and the line of Western emperors came to an end.
No one appears to have seen in this event the “fall of Rome”; on the contrary, it seemed to be a blessed unification of the Empire, as formerly under Constantine. The Roman Senate saw the matter so, and raised a statue to Zeno in Rome. The Germanization of the Italian army, government, and peasantry, and the natural multiplication of the Germans in Italy, had proceeded so long that the political consequences seemed to be negligible shifts on the surface of the national scene. Actually, however, Odoacer ruled Italy as a king, with small regard for Zeno. In effect the Germans had conquered Italy as Gaiseric had conquered Africa, as the Visigoths had conquered Spain, as the Angles and Saxons were conquering Britain, as the Franks were conquering Gaul. In the West the great Empire was no more.
The results of the barbarian conquest were endless. Economically it meant reruralization. The barbarians lived by tillage, herding, hunting, and war, and had not yet learned the commercial complexities on which cities thrived; with their victory the municipal character of Western civilization ceased for seven centuries. Ethnically the migrations brought a new mingling of racial elements—a substantial infusion of Germanic blood into Italy, Gaul, and Spain, and of Asiatic blood into Russia, the Balkans, and Hungary. The mixture did not mystically reinvigorate the Italian or Gallic population. What happened was the elimination of weak individuals and strains through war and other forms of competition; the compulsion laid upon everyone to develop strength, stamina, and courage, and the masculine qualities that long security had suppressed; the renewal, by poverty, of healthier and simpler habits of life than those which the doles and luxuries of the cities had bred. Politically the conquest replaced a higher with a lower form of monarchy; it augmented the authority of persons, and reduced the power and protection of laws; individualism and violence increased. Historically, the conquest destroyed the outward form of what had already inwardly decayed; it cleared away with regrettable brutality and thoroughness a system of life which, with all its gifts of order, culture, and law, had worn itself into senile debility, and had lost the powers of regeneration and growth. A new beginning was now possible: the Empire in the West faded, but the states of modern Europe were born. A thousand years before Christ northern invaders had entered Italy, subdued and mingled with its inhabitants, borrowed civilization from them, and with them, through eight centuries, had built a new civilization. Four hundred years after Christ the process was repeated; the wheel of history came full turn; the beginning and the end were the same. But the end was always a beginning.
CHAPTER III
The Progress of Christianity
364–451
THE foster mother of the new civilization was the Church. As the old order faded away in corruption, cowardice, and neglect, a unique army of churchmen rose to defend with energy and skill a regenerated stability and decency of life. The historic function of Christianity was to re-establish the moral basis of character and society by providing supernatural sanctions and support for the uncongenial commandments of social order; to instill into rude barbarians gentler ideals of conduct through a creed spontaneously compounded of myth and miracle, of fear and hope and love. There is an epic grandeur, sullied with superstition and cruelty, in the struggle of the new religion to capture, tame, and inspire the minds of brute or decadent men, to forge a uniting empire of faith that would again hold men together, as they had once been held by the magic of Greece or the majesty of Rome. Institutions and beliefs are the offspring of human needs, and understanding must be in terms of these necessities.