Читать книгу A Short History of Italy (476-1900) - Henry Dwight Sedgwick - Страница 14

Table of Contents

The Imperial dominion over all Italy had lasted scarce a dozen years before another Barbarian nation, the Lombards, came and repeated the experiment in which the Goths had failed. The period of Lombard dominion lasted two hundred years (568–774). It is rather an uninteresting time; nevertheless, like most history, it has a dramatic side. It makes a play for four characters. The Lombards occupy the larger part of the stage, but the protagonist is the Papacy. The Empire is the third character. Finally, the Franks come in and dispossess the Lombards. The plot, though it must spread over several chapters, is simple.

The scene of the play was pitiful. For nearly twenty years (535–553) Italy had been one perpetual battlefield; whichever side won, the unfortunate natives had to lodge and feed a foreign army, and endure all the insolence of a brutal soldiery. Plague, pestilence, and famine followed. The ordinary business of life came to a stop. Houses, churches, aqueducts went to ruin; roads were left unmended, rivers undiked. Great tracts of fertile land were abandoned. Cattle roamed without herdsmen, harvests withered up, grapes shrivelled on the vines. From lack of food came the pest. Mothers abandoned sick babies, sons left their fathers' bodies unburied. The inhabitants of the cities fared no better. Rome, for instance, had been captured five times. Before the war her population had been 250,000; at its close not one tenth was left. It is said that in one period every living thing deserted the city, and for forty days the ancient mistress of the world lay like a city of the dead. With peace came some respite; but the frightful squeeze of Byzantine taxation was as bad as Barbarian conquest. Italy sank into ignorance and misery. The Latin inhabitants hardly cared who their masters were. They never had spirit enough to take arms and fight, but meekly bowed their heads. Such was the scene on which these three great actors, the Lombards, the Papacy, and the Empire, played their parts. It is now time to describe the actors. We give precedence to the Empire, as is its due.

This remnant of the Roman Empire, with its capital on the confines of Europe and Asia, was an anomalous thing. It is a wonder that it continued to exist at all. In fact, there is no better evidence of the immense solidity of Roman political organization than the prolonged life of the Eastern Empire. The countries under its sway, Thrace, Illyria, Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, had no bond to hold them together, except common submission to one central authority. By the end of the sixth century, the Roman Empire was really Greek. The Greek language was spoken almost exclusively in Constantinople, Latin having dropped even from official use. Yet the Empire was still regarded as the Roman Empire, and was looked up to by the young Barbarian kingdoms of Europe with the respect which they deemed due to the Empire of Augustus and Trajan. For instance, a king of the Franks addresses the Emperor thus: "Glorious, pious, perpetual, renowned, triumphant Lord, ever Augustus, my father Maurice, Imperator," and is content to be called in return, "Childipert, glorious man, king of the Franks." Yet it must be remembered that Constantinople at this time was the chief city of Europe. Greek thought and Greek art lingered there. Justinian had just built St. Sophia. In fact, Constantinople continued for centuries to be the most civilized city in the world.

The Imperial government was an autocracy; all the reins, civil, military, ecclesiastical, were gathered into the hands of the Emperor. Its foreign policy was to repel its enemies, Persians to the east, Avars to the north, Arabs to the south; its domestic policy was to hold its provinces together and to extort money. The Emperors, many of whom were able men, usually spent such time as could be spared from questions of national defence and of finance in the study of theology, for at Constantinople the problems of government were in great measure religious. Next to the actual physical needs of life, the main interest of the people was religion. A statesman who sought to preserve the Empire whole, of necessity endeavoured to hold together its incohesive parts by means of religious unity. This political need of religious unity is the explanation, in the main, of the frequent theological edicts and enactments.

The Emperors governed Italy, after the reconquest, by an Imperial lieutenant, the Exarch, who resided at Ravenna, under a system of administration preserved in mutilated form from times prior to the fall of Romulus Augustulus. An attempt was made to keep civil and military affairs separate, but the pressure of constant war threw all the power into military hands. The peninsula, or such part of it as remained Imperial after the Lombard invasion, was divided for administrative and military purposes into dukedoms and counties, which were governed by dukes and generals. The Byzantine officials were usually Greeks, bred in Constantinople and trained in the Imperial system; they regarded themselves as foreigners, and had neither the will nor the skill to be of use to Italy. Their public business was to raise money for the Empire, their private business to raise money for themselves.

In spite of these oppressions the Latin people preferred the Greeks to the Lombards, partly because of their common Greco-Roman civilization, partly because the Empire was still the Roman Empire; and this popular support stood the Empire in good stead in the long war which it waged with the Lombards. The Latin people did not fight, but they gave food and information. The Empire, however, was ill prepared for a contest. The recall of Narses removed from Italy the last bulwark against Barbarian invasion. The Imperial army was weak, cities were poorly garrisoned, fortifications badly constructed; and, but for the control of the sea which enabled the Empire to hold the towns on the sea-coast, the whole of Italy would have fallen, like a ripe apple, into the hands of the invaders. The Empire, in fact, was exhausted by the effort of reconquest and had neither moral nor material strength to spare from its home needs.

The Lombards, if inferior in dignity to the Empire, played a far more active part in this historic drama. They came originally from the mysterious North, and after wandering about eastern Europe had at last settled near the Danube, where part of them were converted to Arian Christianity. Discontented with their habitation, and pressed by wilder Barbarians behind them, they were glad to take advantage of the defenceless condition of Italy. They knew how pleasant a land it was, for many of them had served as mercenaries under Narses. The whole nation, with a motley following from various tribes, amounted to about two or three hundred thousand persons. They crossed the Alps in 568.

There were many points of difference between these invaders and the Goths. The Lombards had had little intercourse with the Empire, and were far less civilized than their predecessors, and far inferior in both military and administrative capacity. Their leader, Alboin, cannot be compared in any respect with Theodoric. Moreover, Theodoric came, nominally at least, as lieutenant of the Emperor, and affected to deem his sovereignty the continuation of Imperial rule; whereas the Lombards regarded only the title of the sword and invariably fought the Empire as an enemy.

The invaders met little active resistance; if they had had control of the sea, they would readily have conquered the whole peninsula. They overran the North and strips of territory down the centre within a few years, and afterwards gradually spread little by little; but they never conquered the South, the duchy of Rome, or the Adriatic coast. For the greater part of the two hundred years during which the Lombard dominion existed, the map of Italy bore the following aspect: the Empire retained the little peninsula of Istria; the long strip of coast from the lowlands of Venetia to Ancona, protected by its maritime cities, Ravenna, Rimini, Pesaro, Sinigaglia; and the duchy of Rome, which spread along the Tyrrhene shore from Civita Vecchia to Gaeta; Naples and Amalfi; the territories of the heel and toe; and also Sicily and Sardinia. The boundaries were never fixed. Of the Lombard kingdom all one need remember is that it was a loose confederation of three dozen duchies; and that of these duchies, Spoleto, a little north of Rome, and Benevento, a little northeast of Naples, were the most important, as well as the most detached from the kingdom. In fact, these two were independent duchies, and rarely if ever took commands from Pavia, the king's capital, except upon compulsion.

At the time of the invasion the Lombards were barbarians; and they did not make rapid progress in civilization. Fond of their native ways, of hunting and brawling, they were loath to adopt the arts of peace, and left most forms of craft and industry to the conquered Latins. Nevertheless, it was impossible to avoid the consequences of daily contact with a far more developed people, and their manners became more civilized with each generation. The royal house affords an indication of the change which was wrought during the two hundred years. Alboin, the original invader (died 573), killed another Barbarian king, married his daughter, and forced her to drink from a cup made of her father's skull. The last Lombard king, Desiderius (died about 780), cultivated the society of scholars, and his daughter learned by heart "the golden maxims of philosophy and the gems of poetry." Each advance of the Lombards in civilization was a gain to the Latins, who, especially in the country where they worked on farms, were little better than serfs. The two races drew together slowly. The conversion of the Lombards from Arian to Catholic Christianity (600–700) diminished the distance between them. Intermarriage must soon have begun; but not until the conquest by the Franks does there seem to have been any real blending of the races.

The most conspicuous trait in the Lombard character was political incompetence. It would have required but a little steadiness of purpose, a little political foresight, a little spurt of energy, to conquer Ravenna, Rome, Naples and the other cities held by the Byzantines, and make Italy into one kingdom. Failure was due to the weakness of the central government, which was unable to weld the petty dukedoms together. This cutting up of Italy into many divisions left deep scars. Each city, with the territory immediately around it, began to regard itself as a separate state, with no sense of duty towards a common country; each cultivated individuality and jealousy of its neighbours, until these qualities, gradually growing during two hundred years, presented insuperable difficulties to the formation of an Italian national kingdom.

In spite of their political incompetence the Lombards left their mark on Italy, especially on Lombardy and the regions occupied by the strong duchies of Spoleto and Benevento. For centuries Lombard blood appears in men of vigorous character; and Lombard names, softened to suit Italian ears, linger on among the nobility. In fact, the aristocracy of Italy from Milan to Naples was mainly Teutonic, and the principal element of the Teutonic strain was Lombard.