Ravenna, a Study Part 9

But there was something else beside the fact that the Lombards were pagan, and therefore to be converted, which was a part of the salvation of Italy.

It is possible that the Lombards might have been as Catholic as the Franks and yet, barbarians as they were, have destroyed civilisation in Italy, have broken the continuity of Europe, have obliterated all our traditions, and altogether undone the great work of Justinian. It is possible, but it is highly improbable; that it was impossible we owe to Ravenna.

Ravenna was impregnable and her seaward gate was always open. During all the years of the Lombard domination she was the citadel of the empire in Italy, the seat of the prefect and the exarch, the imperial representatives.

It must be grasped that even after the fall of Ticinum in 572, as the Byzantine historian tells us, perhaps no one, and certainly no one in Ravenna, regarded the invasion as anything but a pa.s.sing evil like all the other barbarian incursions. No one believed Italy to be irrevocably lost; on the contrary, everyone was a.s.sured that the lost provinces could soon be delivered again.

This may explain, though perhaps it cannot excuse, the pa.s.sive att.i.tude of Longinus, the successor of Na.r.s.es, who in Ravenna represented the emperor in Italy, perhaps till the year 584. We know nothing of any attempts he may have made to stem the barbarian flood, and indeed the only incident in his career with which we are acquainted is romantic rather than military or political. For when Rosamond, the queen of the Lombards, murdered her husband Alboin in his palace at Verona, because he had forced her to pledge him in a goblet fashioned from the skull of her father, she fled away with her stepdaughter Albswinda, the great Lombard spoil, and her two accomplices, Helmichis her lover and Peredeus the chamberlain, and came to seek shelter in Ravenna. It seems she had written to Longinus and he, perhaps, hoping for some political advantage, and certainly full of the tales of her beauty, sent a ship up the Po to bring her to him with her two companions. When he saw her he found that rumour had not lied, and longing for her, suggested that she should kill Helmichis and marry himself. Whether from fear or ambition she did this thing, and slew her lover with a cup of poison as he came from the bath. But he, even as he drank understanding all, suddenly forced the same cup upon her, and standing over her with a naked sword forced her to drink; so that they both lay dead upon the pavement.

Albswinda and the Lombard treasure, the spoil of the cities of Italy, were sent with Peredeus to Constantinople. And it may be that it was in them Longinus hoped to find his political advantage; in this, however, he was deceived. It is true that a pause in the Lombard advance followed the death of Alboin, and that Cleph, his successor, was soon murdered. But the pause in the advance, though, through it all, Rome was blockaded, was due to the fact that Authari, the heir to the Lombard throne, was but a boy. Nevertheless, this interval was used by Constantinople to despatch Baduarius, the son-in-law of the emperor Justin, to Italy with an army, but without success; and in 578, the year in which Justin died, the Lombards were bought off from Rome with imperial gold, only to turn upon the very citadel of the empire in Italy, Ravenna itself. In the year 579 Faroald, duke of Spoleto, fell upon Cla.s.sis, and took it and spoiled it.

This, however, was but an isolated effort, and though the Lombards held Cla.s.sis, they achieved little else in Italy till after Authari was chosen king in 584.

In the following year Smaragdus, as we may think, was appointed to succeed Longinus and apparently with new powers, and three years later, in the very year that the heroic Insula Comacina was taken by the Lombards, Cla.s.sis was recovered for the empire.

The Lombards had then been ravaging Italy for twenty years, an extraordinary change had come over the provinces that Justinian had so hardly recovered, and this change is at once visible in the imperial administration in Italy. The exarchate appears.

It has been maintained by many historians that the great reform of which the establishment of the exarch and the exarchate is the result was the work of that very great reformer Justinian. It was worthy of him; but the Italy he knew and saved was not in need of any change in her administrative divisions which, as I have said, remained under Na.r.s.es almost the same as they had been in the last days of the Western empire.[1]

[Footnote 1: For what follows cf. Diehl, _Etudes sur l'administration Byzantine dans l'Exarchat de Ravenne_ (1888).]

The transformation out of which the exarchate arose was slow and obscure, not the work of a great creative mind, but of necessity. It was the result of many causes which it is not difficult to name; they were the progress of the Lombard conquest, the condition imposed upon the unconquered parts of Italy by that conquest, and especially the new necessity for defence imposed on the imperial power.

It is obvious that the result of the first ten years of that conquest was a complete destruction of the limits of the old Roman provinces of Italy. A new grouping of territories was not only necessary but was already forming itself under the pressure of the conquest and its terror. The regions which had escaped the barbarians were drawing together without any regard for the ancient provincial divisions and were grouping themselves about the cities, where the resistance, such as it was, was concentrating itself, and where the imperial administration had taken refuge.

If we confine ourselves for the moment to Italy north of the Apennines, we shall find that in the old province of Liguria the vicar of the prefect of the praetorium had fled from Milan to Genoa, and that about that city the debris of the old province was slowly re-a.s.sembling itself. In Venetia we shall find that the governor had departed to Grado, and about this town as a centre the eastern part of the old province was gathered. The western part of that province, cut off from its capital, attached itself by force of circ.u.mstances to what remained of Aemilia and of Flaminia, whose neighbour she was, and these fragments of the ancient provinces all together grouped themselves about, or found their centre in, Ravenna, the capital of Flaminia and the residence of the prefect of Italy.

In these new groupings the great pre-occupation and the supreme interest are defence--the defence of civilisation against the barbarian.

Now, it was to regulate this new state of affairs that the exarchate was created; or rather the exarchate was the official acknowledgment of a state of affairs that the disastrous invasion of the Lombards had brought about. The new order was established at the end of the reign of Justin II. (565-578) under a new and supreme official. Without doing away with the prefect of Italy the emperor placed over him as supreme head of the new administration the exarch[1] who was both the military commander-in-chief and the governor-general of Italy; and, since the chief need of Italy was defence, without entirely suppressing the civil administration, he placed at the head of each of the re-organised provinces a certain military officer--the duke.

[Footnote 1: For the discussion of the derivation of the t.i.tle "Exarch," _see_ Diehl, _op. cit_. pp. 15-16.]

The earliest doc.u.ment that remains to us in which we find definite mention of the exarch is the famous letter, dated October 4, 584, of pope Pelagius II. to the deacon Gregory, his nuncio in Constantinople.

It is probable that the exarch at this time was Smaragdus, but it is extremely improbable that he was the first to bear the new t.i.tle. This it would seem was a much n.o.bler and more notable person.

It will be remembered that in the year 575 Baduarius, the son-in-law of the emperor, had appeared in Italy at the head of an army, had been beaten by the Lombards, and a little later had died, probably in 575.[1] This man was not only a great Byzantine official, but the destined successor of Justin and one of the first personages of the empire. It is obvious, if at such a moment he commanded the imperial armies in Italy, he was supreme governor of the province And it seems certain that it was to mark the amalgamation in him of the two offices, military and civil, that the new t.i.tle of exarch was created.[2]

[Footnote 1: Migne, lxxii. 865; Joannes Biclarensis, _s.a_. 575; cf.

Hodgkin, _op. cit_. v. p. 195, and Diehl, _u.s_.]

[Footnote 2: "It is only an hypothesis," says M. Charles Diehl, the originator of this theory, "but it explains how, between the prefect Longinus (569-572) and the exarch Smaragdus (584) was produced in the years 572-576 the administrative transformation out of which rose the exarchate."]

At the same time as the central government took on a new form the provincial administration was re-organised. Before the year 590, this had been certainly achieved. Istria, as we have seen, was divided from Venetia and formed a new and a special government. In Flaminia Rimini, which till now had been a part of the same province as Ravenna, was detached and became the capital of a new government in which a part of the Picenum, Ancona, and Osimo were involved. While the exarchate properly so called, that is the region of Ravenna from which Rimini and Picenum were now separate, formed a new province under the direct authority of the governors-general of Italy, that is to say, of the exarch of Ravenna. By the year 590, then, we see Italy thus divided into seven districts or governments: (1) the Duchy of Istria, (2) the Duchy of Venetia, (3) the Exarchate to which Calabria is attached, (4) the Duchy of Pentapolis, (5) the Duchy of Rome, (6) the Duchy of Naples, (7) Liguria.

Geographically the exarchate of Ravenna was bounded on the north by the Adige, the Tartaro, and the princ.i.p.al branch of the Po as far as its confluence with the Panaro. Hadria and Gabellum were its most northern towns in the hands of the imperialists. The western frontier is more difficult to determine with exact.i.tude; it may be said to have run between Modena and Bologna. On the south the Marecchia divided the exarchate from the duchy of Pentapolis whose capital was Rimini. The Pentapolis consisted of Rimini, Pesaro, Fano, Sinigaglia, and Ancona upon the sea and of the five inland cities of Urbino, Fos...o...b..one, Jesi, Cagli, and Gubbio; while the great towns of the exarchate were set along the Via Aemilia and were Bologna, Imola (Forum Cornelii), Faenza, Forli, Forlimpopoli, and Cesena.

Such then, before the year 590, was the new imperial administration in the Italy formed by the Lombard invasion.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SKETCH MAP]

In the year after the recapture of Cla.s.sis from the Lombards, that is to say, in 589, the exarch Smaragdus was recalled. He had apparently become insane and had been guilty of extraordinary violence towards the patriarch of Aquileia and three other bishops whom he dragged to Ravenna. His successor was Roma.n.u.s who held office till 597. In the same year, 589, Authari was married at Pavia to Theodelinda, who was to be so potent an instrument in the conversion of the Lombards and therefore in the salvation of Italy. And in the following year, 590, pope Pelagius II. died, and Gregory the Great was chosen to succeed him.

With the advent of the new exarch a brighter prospect seemed for a moment to open for Italy. In the first year of Roma.n.u.s's appointment the imperialists regained the greater part of the cities of the plain; they re-occupied Modena, Reggio, Parma, Piacenza, Altinum, and Mantua.

But the strength of the Latin position in Italy lay, and continued to lie, in the two great imperial cities, Ravenna and Rome. Little by little this position had crystallised and now a new state appeared, a state which in one way or another was to endure till our day and which our fathers knew as the States of the Church. With the two cities of Ravenna and Rome as _nuclei_, this state formed itself in the very heart of Italy along the Via Flaminia which connected them. It cut, and effectually, the Lombard kingdom in two, and isolated the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento from the real Lombard power in Cisalpine Gaul, with its great capital at Pavia; and indestructible as it was, it absolutely insured the final success of the Catholic Faith, the Latin nationality, and the imperial power, the three necessities for the resurrection of Europe.

This achievement was in the first place due to three great personalities: to Justinian who had succeeded in establishing the imperial power with its capital at Ravenna, and whose work had such life in it that, in spite of every adverse circ.u.mstance, it was able to develop and to maintain itself during more than two hundred years and uphold the imperial idea in Italy until the pope was able to re-establish the empire in the West as a self-supporting state; to Gregory the Great in whom we see personified the hope and strength of the papacy and the Latin idea which it was to uphold and to glorify; and to Theodelinda, that pa.s.sionately Catholic Lombard queen, who was able to lead her Lombards into the fold of the Roman church, and who in her son Adalwald by her second husband Agilulf, whom she had raised to the throne, presented the Lombard kingdom with its first Catholic king, and had thus done her part to secure the future.

Of these three powers those of Ravenna and Rome were, of course, by far the more important; for indeed the conversion of the Lombards was, rightly understood, but a part of the work of Gregory. Yet though both were working for the same end they did not always propose to march by the same road. In 592, for instance, the pope, seeing Naples the capital of the little isolated duchy upon his southern flank very hard pressed, proposed at all costs to relieve it; but the exarch Roma.n.u.s, perhaps seeing further, was not to be moved to the a.s.sistance of the peasants of Campania from the all-important business of the defence of central Italy and the Flaminian Way, the line of communication between Ravenna and Rome. He proposed to let Naples look after itself and at all costs to hold Perugia. Gregory, however, who claimed in an indignant letter of this date (592) to be "far superior in place and dignity" to the exarch, proceeded to save Naples by making a sort of peace with the Lombard duchy of Spoleto. It is possible that this peace saw the Lombard established in Perugia, which was the Roman key, till now always in Roman hands, of the great line of communication between Rome and Ravenna. However that may be, Gregory's peace not only aroused great anger in Constantinople, but brought Roma.n.u.s quickly south with an army to re-occupy Perugia, Orte, Todi, Ameria, and various other cities of Umbria. But Roma.n.u.s had been right. His movement southward alarmed Agilulf, who immediately left Pavia, and crossing the Apennines, we may suppose,[1] as Totila had done, threatened Rome itself. Then, however, he had to face something more formidable than an imperial army. Upon the steps of S. Peter's church stood the Vicegerent of G.o.d, great S. Gregory, who alone turned him back and saved the city.

[Footnote 1: All that Paulus Diaconus, _Hist. Lang_. lib. iv. cap. 8, says is: "Hac etiam tempestate Roma.n.u.s Patricius et Exarchus Ravennae Romam properavit. Qui dum Ravennam revert.i.tur retenuit civitates, quae a Langobardis tenebantur, quarum ista sunt nomma: Sutrium, Polimartium Hortas, Tuder, Ameria, Perusia, Luceolis et alias quasdam civitates.

Quod factum c.u.m regi Agilulfo nunciatum esset statim Ticino egressus c.u.m valido exercitu civitatem Perusium petiit ..."]

The truth of all this would appear to be that Gregory was really working for peace. The Lombards were in a fair way to becoming Catholic, and as such they were no longer really dangerous to Italy.

The real danger was, as the pope saw, the prolongation of a useless war. Two years later, in 595, we find Gregory writing to the "a.s.sessor" of the exarch enjoining peace. "Know then that Agilulf, king of the Lombards, is not unwilling to make a general peace, if my lord the patrician is of the same mood.... How necessary such a peace is to all of us you know well. Act therefore with your usual wisdom, that the most excellent exarch may be induced to come in to this proposal without delay, and may not prove himself to be the one obstacle to a peace so expedient for the state. If he will not consent, Agilulf again promises to make a separate peace with us; but we know that in that case several islands and other places will necessarily be lost. Let the exarch then consider these points, and hasten to make peace, that we may at least have a little interval in which we may enjoy a moderate amount of rest, and with the Lord's help may recruit the strength of the republic for future resistance."[1]

[Footnote 1: Gregory, _Ep_. v. 36 (34), trs. Hodgkin, _op. cit_. v. p.

382.]

It is obvious from this letter that the pope and the emperor no longer understood one another, and it is not surprising that the one thought the other a fool and told him so. Doubtless the emperor recalled the long and finally successful war against the Ostrogoths, in which Belisarius had always refused, not only terms of peace other than unconditional surrender, but even to treat. That policy had been, at least from the point of view of Constantinople, successful. From the point of view of the papacy and of Italy, it had had a more doubtful result, but the fact that the Ostrogoths were Arians had satisfied perhaps both, and certainly the papacy, that a truce could not be thought of.

From the imperial point of view things remained much the same in the Lombard war as they had been in the war with the Ostrogoths. From the papal and Italian point of view they were very different. To begin with, the Lombards were fast accepting the Catholic Faith, and then if Italy had suffered in the Ostrogothic wars, which were everywhere eagerly contested by Constantinople, what was she suffering now when the greater part of the country was open to a continual and an almost unopposed attack? "You think me a fool," the pope wrote to the emperor. In Ravenna the papal envoy was lampooned and laughed at. Then in the end of 596 the exarch Roma.n.u.s died.

Roma.n.u.s was succeeded by Callinicus (Gallicinus) in whom the pope found a more congenial and perhaps a more reasonable spirit. By 598 an armistice had been officially concluded between the imperialists and the Lombards, and at length in 599, after some foolish delays in which it would appear that the pope was not without blame, a peace was concluded. Gregory, however, for all his reluctance at the last, had won his way. Henceforth it would be impossible to regard the Lombards as mere invaders after the pattern of their predecessors, Visigoths, Vandals, Huns, and Ostrogoths. They were, or would shortly be, a Catholic people; they held a very great part of Italy; they had entered into a treaty with the emperor not as _foederati_ but as equals and conquerors. Gregory the Great had permanently established the barbarians in Italy, and in his act, the act be it remembered of the apostle of the English, of the apostle of the Lombards, we seem to see the shadowy power that had been Leo's by the Mincio suddenly appear, a new glory in the world. The new power in the West, the papacy, which thus shines forth really for the first time in the acts of Gregory, unlike the empire, whether Roman or Byzantine, will know no frontiers, but will go into all the world and compel men to come in as its divine commission ordained.

In Italy from the time of the peace with the Lombards (599) onwards what we see is the decline of the imperial power of Constantinople and the rise of the papacy. And this was brought about not only by the circ.u.mstances in which Italy and the West found themselves, but also by the character of the imperial government.

When Justin II. disappeared in 578, and made way for Tiberius II., he was already a madman, and though Tiberius was renowned for his virtues, he reigned but four years, and in 582 Maurice the Cappadocian sat upon the throne of Justinian and ruled for twenty years not unwisely, but, so far as Italy was concerned, without success. It was he who was at last brought to make peace with the Lombards and thus for the first time to acknowledge a barbarian state independent of the empire in Italy. He and his children were all murdered in 602 by Phocas, a centurion, whose shame and crimes and cruelties doubtless did much to weaken the moral power of the empire face to face with the papacy.

The peace of 599, the usurpation of Phocas in 602, and the death of Gregory the Great in 604, close a great period and stamp the seventh century in its very beginning with a new character.

That character is in a sense almost wholly disastrous. Those vague and gloomy years, of which we know so little, are almost unrelieved in their hopeless confusion. It is true that Italy had found a champion in the papacy which would one day restore the empire in the West, as Justinian himself had not been able to do; it is true that already Arianism was defeated if not stamped out. But it is in the seventh century that Mahometanism, the greater successor of the Arian heresy, first appears; and it is in the seventh century that it first becomes certain that East and West are philosophically and politically different and irreconcilable. The whole period is full of disasters, and is as we may think the darkest hour before the dawn.

As I have said, the history of those disastrous years is everywhere in the West vague and confused, and this is not least so in Italy and Ravenna.

Ravenna as always remains the citadel of the imperialists in Italy and the West, and as such we must regard her, pa.s.sing in review as well as we may those miserable years in which she played so great and so difficult a part.

When the Emperor Maurice was a.s.sa.s.sinated with his family in the year 602, Callinicus was, as we have seen, exarch in Ravenna, but with the usurpation of Phocas that Smaragdus who had already been exarch and had been recalled, perhaps for his too great violence, in 589, was again appointed. He seems to have ruled from 602 to 611. In the last year of the government of Callinicus an attempt had been made by the exarch to force the Lombards to renew the two years' peace established in 599, and on better terms, by the seizure of a daughter of Agilulf's, then in Parma, with her husband. They were carried off to Ravenna. But the imperialists got nothing by their treachery. Agilulf at once moved against Padua and took it and rased it to the ground. In the following year Monselice also fell to his arms, and though after the murder of the emperor Maurice in 602 the exarch Callinicus, the author of the abduction, fell, and Smaragdus was appointed by Phocas, the hostages were not returned, and in July 603, Agilulf, after a campaign of less than three months, had possessed himself of Cremona, Mantua, and Vulturina, and probably of most of those places which the imperialists had re-occupied in Cisalpine Gaul in 590. Smaragdus was forced to make peace and to give up his hostages. The peace he made, which left Agilulf in possession of all the cities he had taken, was to endure for eighteen months, but it seems to have been renewed from year to year, and when in 610 Phocas was a.s.sa.s.sinated and with the accession of Heraclius (610-641) Smaragdus was again recalled and Joannes appointed to Ravenna, the same policy seems to have been followed.

Joannes Lemigius Thrax, as Rubeus, the sixteenth-century historian of Ravenna, calls him, ruled in Ravenna from 611 to 615, and in the latter year was a.s.sa.s.sinated there apparently in the midst of a popular rising, though what this really was we do not know. His successor, the eunuch Eleutherius (616-620), seems to have found the now fragmentary imperial state in Italy in utter confusion, and indeed on the verge of dissolution. Naples had been usurped by a certain Joannes of Compsa, perhaps "a wealthy Samnite landowner," who proclaimed himself lord there, and it is obvious that even in Ravenna there was grave discontent. Eleutherius soon disposed of the usurper of Naples, but only to find himself faced by a renewal of the Lombard war, which he seems to have prevented by consenting to pay the yearly tribute which perhaps Gregory the Great had promised when he made a separate peace with the Lombard in 593, when Rome was practically in the hands of the barbarian. It was obvious that the imperial cause was failing. That the exarch thought so is obvious from the fact that in 619 he actually a.s.sumed the diadem and proclaimed himself emperor in Ravenna, and set out with an army along the Flaminian Way for Rome to get himself crowned by the pope Boniface V. But the eunuch was before his time; moreover, he was a defeated and not a victorious general. At Luceoli upon the Flaminian Way, not far from Gualdo Tadino where Na.r.s.es had broken Totila, in that glorious place his own soldiers slew him and sent his head to Heraclius.

Of his immediate successor we know nothing--not even his name,[1] but in or about 625 Isaac the Armenian was appointed and he ruled, as his epitaph tells us, for eighteen years (625-644). Isaac's rule was not fortunate for the imperialists. He is probably to be acquitted of the murder of Taso, Lombard duke of Tuscia, but it is certain that Rothari, the Lombard king in his time, "took all the cities of the Romans which are situated on the sea-coast from Luna in Tuscany to the boundary of the Franks; also he took and destroyed Opitergium, a city between Treviso and Friuli, and with the Romans of Ravenna he fought at the river of Aemilia which is called Scultenna (Panaro). In this fight 8000 fell on the Roman side, the rest fleeing away."[2]

[Footnote 1: Mr. Hodgkin (_op. cit_. vi. 157) suggests that the predecessor of Isaac was that Euselnus who, as amba.s.sador for Constantinople, persuaded, or is said to have persuaded, Adalwald, King of the Lombards since the death of his father, Agilulf (615), to slay all his chief men and n.o.bles, and to hand over the Lombard kingdom to the empire; but was poisoned, it is suggested, by Isaac in Ravenna, whither he had fled when he had killed twelve among them.

Ariwald succeeded him (625).]

[Footnote 2: Paulus Diaconus, cf. Hodgkin, vi. 168.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE SARCOPHAGUS OF EXARCH ISAAC]