in fighting Alaric, preferred to enlist slaves rather than the Italian freemen, because the Italian populace was unused to obedience and discipline. There is a third reason, which is of more than military importance, but it is military too. Italy had become impoverished. The government of the Empire was enormously expensive, quite apart from its defence. The methods of taxation were bad, tended to be futile, and were frequently corrupt. Many of the municipalities were bankrupt and the middle-class capitalist was taxed out of existence and frequently fell into a servile condition. In consequence the population was declining. We must, in fact, admit that civic virtue, health and strength had long been failing. We do not admit that the moral and spiritual condition of the individual had deteriorated. The Empire was Christian when it fell that is a sufficient answer to the fantastic nonsense that has been written on this subject, which would be absurd were it not too often corrupt. The citizen of the Empire, whatever else he may have been, was, by whatever standard you try him, a better man than the Goth, the Vandal or the Hun. The barbarians were barbarian: their victory, if victory it can be called, does not proclaim their superiority. War is not a test for chastity, frugality, justice and honour any more than it is a test for right and wrong. To think so is itself barbarian, it forces us back to the ordeal. The very virtue of the Roman citizen, his discontent with the world he lived in, the idealism of the saint and the poet is forced into evidence against the Empire when it is in fact the strongest possible evidence in its favour. Society, it would appear, had become enervated, fascinated by the past, enslaved by it and hypnotised by it. Thus the greatest, indeed the only service the barbarians rendered, was a service of destruction. They created nothing. They built nothing, they contrived nothing; but they destroyed so much that we became sure that there would be no return, we realised that the Church had saved what could be saved and was leading us to a new and a higher form of that unity which suddenly in a little. hundred years we had seen so ruthlessly destroyed. The attack of the barbarians under which that old unity disappeared but did not die, of which Cisalpine Gaul may be called the cockpit, appears to us in history. as several great waves of invasion and one mighty raid. We may note them somewhat as follows: I. THE VISIGOTHIC INVASION; LED BY ALARIC AND MET BY STILICHO In November, 401, Alaric entered Venetia1 by the Julian Alps and passed by Aquileia without taking it. Honorius fled from Milan to Ravenna. In 402, on Easter Day, Stilicho met him at Pollentia and defeated him, and, following his retreat, broke him again at Asta so that he compelled him to cross the Alps. In 403 Alaric entered Venetia again. Stilicho met him by Verona and once more hurled him back. 2. THE INVASION OF RADAGAISUS; MET BY STILICHO In 405, Radagaisus invaded Venetia by the same passes, passed Aquileia, crossed the Po and the Apennines without opposition. Stilicho, who was at Pavia, met him at Fiesole and cut him to pieces. The remnant of his army returned through Cisalpine Gaul and fell upon Gaul proper. Stilicho was murdered in 408 at Ravenna. 3. THE SECOND VISIGOTHIC INVASION; LED BY ALARIC In 408, Alaric again invaded Venetia by the Julian Alps and succeeded in crossing the Po and the Apennines." He marched to Rome and pillaged it, to die in 410. Adolphus, his successor, concluded a peace with Honorius 1 At the same time Radagaisus invaded Rhætia, north of the Alps. and marched back through the valley of the Po into Gaul. 4. THE HUNNISH INVASION; MET BY LEO the Great In 452, Attila, defeated in the previous year in Gaul by Ætius, invaded Venetia, took Aquileia and burnt it with Concordia and Altinum, which henceforth disappear from the pages of history. Padua, too, was ravaged and burnt, for she resisted, as did Modena, which shared her fate. Vicenza, Verona, Brescia, Bergamo, Milan and Pavia opened their gates; they were but spoiled and their inhabitants exchanged death for slavery. When Italy was threatened, Pope Leo set out from Rome to meet Attila, whom he found at Pescheria on the Mincio. He was completely successful in his attempt to save Italy, and Attila consented to return across the Danube and to live henceforth at peace with the Romans. Thus Italy, though not Cisalpine Gaul, was saved. Attila died in 452 and his Empire fell to pieces. The Vandal Raid; met by Leo the Great In 455 the Vandals under Gaiseric made a raid on Rome from Africa. They spoiled though they did not. destroy the City, thanks again to the intervention of the Pop. They departed with an enormous treasure to that fair province of Africa which had boasted more than three hundred cities and which the Vandals, entering by way of Gaul and Spain, had utterly destroyed. S. Augustine had died in Hippo in the third month of the Vandal siege (430). 5. THE OSTROGOTHIC INVASION. In 476, Odoacer had headed the Herulian revolt, and stormed and burnt Pavia, deposed the Emperor and put Romulus Augustulus in his place, only to depose him in the same year in Ravenna. When he became too powerful the Byzantine Emperor encouraged Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, to enter Italy. Theodoric entered Venetia by the old passes that had seen Alaric and Attila go by, in 489. He came at the head of a nation of some 250,000 souls. He met Odoacer on the Isonzo, at Verona, on the Adige, and later on the Adda, and each time defeated him. He became master of Italy. His reign, with his capital at Ravenna, of more than thirty years gave Italy a peace and prosperity she had not known for a century. On his death in 526 her wounds were fast healing. Indeed, his reign prepared the way for Justinian's attempt to restore the Empire and the unity of east and west by the genius of his generals, Belisarius and Narses. In this enormous and heroic effort, which occupied the years 535-553, the city of Rome was taken and retaken five times: in 536 by Belisarius, in 546 by Totila, in 547 by Belisarius, in 549 by Totila, and in 552 by Narses. In these wars all Italy was devastated, Cisalpine Gaul was turned into a wilderness and a morass. Milan was totally destroyed, and Rome, when Totila had done with her in 546, remained during the space of forty days without a single inhabitant. Nor was all finished, at least in Cisalpine Gaul, when Narses finally secured the City in 552. In the following year the Franks and the Alemanni descended the Rhætian Alps into the plain of Milan, broke the Roman army at Parma, ravished what was left of the cities and went on through Italy to pillage; but between Trent and Verona God smote their allies and Narses at last utterly destroyed them in Campania. Narses, the representative of the Emperor at Byzantium, was established at Ravenna and administered above fifteen years the entire kingdom of Italy, though he did not assume the title of Exarch. But it was not for long that Italy was to enjoy the peace Narses had won for her. In 565 Justinian died, and two years later his great minister had fallen and, as it is said, to avenge himself had invited his old allies the Lombards into Italy. 6. THE LOMBARD INVASION The sixth and last barbarian invasion, that of the Lombards, was in many respects the most terrible, and was certainly the most enduring in its results, as it was the least resisted of all the barbarian incursions. In particular, its effects upon Cisalpine Gaul were fundamental; they endure to this day, for in this invasion alone we see a permanent settlement made south of the Alps, a settlement that was virtually an annexation of the whole territory of the plain from the Ticino to the Mincio, so that here alone in all Italy the name of the province is changed and henceforth it bears the title of its conquerors. Cisalpine Gaul becomes after the Lombard conquest Lombardy. It was in 568 that Alboin and his Teutonic multitudes crossed the Julian Alps and descended upon the plain and everywhere found or left it a ruin, incapable of resistance. The lines of their march through and conquest of Italy may most easily be expressed in a table, according to the years of their progress: In 568 they seized all Venetia except the coast, In 569 they seized all Cisalpine Gaul and Liguria In 570-572 they seized most of Tuscany with the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento. In the latter year Pavia fell after three years' siege, as well as Piacenza and Mantua. After the year 572 and the death of Alboin their successes were less uniform and a certain resistance was forthcoming, but by the year 600 they held all Italy with the exception of Rome and its territory, the Adriatic coast, Perugia, Orvieto, and a good part of |