www.facebook.com/groups/med.historY Salah Zyada m LTTDL I rü U U U UïIFïX Fifth-Century Byzantium and the Barbarians BY <• D* G O R D ON Foreword by Arthur E. R. Β oak The University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor © © www.facebook.com/groups/med.historY Salah Zyada DESIGNED BY GEORGE LENOX COPYRIGHT © BY THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN I960 SECOND PRINTING 1961 PUBLISHED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS AND SIMULTANEOUSLY IN TORONTO, CANADA, BY AMBASSADOR BOOKS LIMITED LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NO. 60-5019 MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY VAIL-BALLOU PRESS, INC., BINGHAMTON, NEW YORK .facebook.com/groups/med.historY To R. Κ. G. Uli debetur et a me gratia maior. www.facebook.com/groups/med.historY Salah Zyada www.facebook.com/groups/med.historY Salah Zyada Foreword by Arthur E. R. Boak DURING THE FIFTH CENTURY the writing of con- temporary history in the western part of the Roman world was limited virtually to the compilation of meager chronicles. In the East on the other hand, a sequence of historians writ- ing in Greek maintained the literary tradition of the Classical and Hellenistic periods and consciously sought to link the present with the past by adding to the works of their prede- cessors substantial narratives of their own times. Thus, they recorded the death throes of the Western Empire and the desperate yet in the end successful struggle for survival by its Eastern counterpart. Unfortunately, the remains of these fifth-century histories consist of fragments of varying length preserved in works of writers of a later age. But such as they are, they constitute an indispensable source for our interpretation of the history of the critical period in which they were written. Professor Gor- don has made the bulk of the fragments available for the first time in English translation. He has supplied an introduction that facilitates their interpretation and linked them together with short supplementary narratives in such a way as to pre- sent a fairly continuous account of the outstanding military and political developments from the death of the Emperor Theodosius I in 395 to the conquest of Italy by Theodoric the Ostrogoth in 493. Since these fragments were preserved by later writers of the Eastern Empire, who quoted them for various reasons, it is only natural that they should be passages which deal for the most part with persons or episodes that affected the East rather than the West. But this emphasis on the East probably reflects the original character of the Greek histories of the fifth century, for their authors wrote from the standpoint of vii viii FOREWORD residents of the Eastern Empire and tended to treat at greater length the happenings of which they had more direct and more detailed information. Events in the West seem to have been discussed in proportion to their importance for the East, especially for the relations existing between the two empires. The theme which dominates the secular history of the period is the struggle of the Romans against the barbarians— if we may use the latter term to describe all of the foreign enemies of the two empires, even though many of them had made considerable advances in civilization, particularly under stimulus of their contacts with the Romans themselves. We see both empires beset from within as well as from without. Along their northern frontiers from Britain to the Caucasus tribes were poised for assault upon the imperial defenses whenever the slightest hope of being able to break through appeared. Within the frontier line of defense were other peoples who had settled there with Roman assent as autono- mous military allies supported by Roman subsidies, but whose rulers sought to win better lands and ever greater independ- ence for their followers at the expense of their nominal over- lords. In addition, there were both individuals and sizable bands under their own chiefs enrolled in the imperial armies— for the most part composed of barbarian mercenaries, many of whom held the highest military commands under the emperors and only too often sought to take over control of the government. The historians do not disguise the fact that the empires depended for their existence upon barbarian arms and that their main problem was how to make use of and at the same time control their mercenaries and allies. Although most of these barbarians were of Teutonic origin, potentially the greatest menace to East and West alike dur- ing the earlier and middle parts of the fifth century came from the Huns, particularly when they were firmly united under the rule of Attila (445-53). These terrible warriors not only drove other barbarians to seek refuge within the empires and forced still others to follow them in their attacks upon the Romans, but they themselves raided far and wide on Ro- man territory and imposed crushing tribute on the West as FOREWORD ix well as on the East. And yet we find bands of Huns serving as mercenaries under the Roman standards. In one of the length- ier fragments we have a vividly drawn picture of Attila at the height of his power—and of the barbaric splendor in which he lived—from the pen of the historian and official Priscus, who visited him as a member of an embassy sent by the East- ern emperor, Theodosius II. From Priscus and other writers one gains the impression that on various occasions Attila could have overrun either or both empires had he pressed his attacks against them. That he refrained seems to have been due partly to a wish to preserve such a rich source of tribute in gold, partly to a mistrust of the influence of the civilized urban life led by those whom he considered to be his military inferiors. His sudden death in 453 was a factor of major im- portance in the survival of the empire in the East. Against the background of the barbarian pressure these his- torians describe a condition of almost incredible weakness and confusion in the imperial governments themselves. We see weak and incompetent emperors, dominated by corrupt and ambitious favorites, unable to distinguish between useful and ruinous policies, rewarding loyalty with treachery, success with assassination. The palaces are hotbeds of intrigue—min- isters against generals, members of each service against their colleagues, with palace eunuchs playing a sinister role. Honest and efficient public servants are so rare as to be singled out for exceptional praise. Standards of public conduct certainly had not improved with the Christianizing of the empire. Little is said directly of economic conditions, but the huge sums of gold paid by the Eastern Empire as tribute to the Huns are faithfully recorded, and we are told of the ruin of many persons under the heavy exactions of avaricious finance ministers. And the defense which Priscus offers of the adminis- tration of justice in the East is by no means as convincing to modern ears as he claims that it was to a Roman refugee liv- ing among the Huns. The fragments have a dramatic quality because they deal with the great personalities whose aims and actions were de- termining the course of events. Foremost among these are the χ FOREWORD three outstanding barbarian chieftains: Alaric the Visigoth, Attila the Hun, and Theodoric the Ostrogoth, with whom we should perhaps associate Gaiseric the Vandal. Others also, although somewhat less prominent, played roles of great sig- nificance. Such were the barbarians Stilicho and Ricimer, the Romans Constantius and Aëtius, and even the grand cham- berlains Eutropius and Chrysaphius. We see, too, the influ- ential part taken in public affairs by women of the imperial households, for example, by the much-married Galla Placidia in the West and by the Empress Pulcheria and the intriguing Verina in the East. One looks in vain for any discussion of the reasons for the fall of the empire in the West or the survival of its Eastern counterpart. But for the first, the factual narrative is self- explanatory. An inept military policy, ineffectual rulers, a lack of native military manpower, all in the face of unceasing barbarian attacks, made the collapse inevitable. As for the East, we see that the extinction of the dynasty of Theodosius the Great gave an opportunity for the appointment of a series of forceful energetic emperors, that a source of military strength with which to combat the Teutonic mercenaries was found within the Empire, that two indomitable foes, Alaric and Theodoric, were diverted from the East to the West, and that the capital of the Empire in the East, Constantinople, proved an impregnable refuge and base for military operations. All these factors were of prime importance for the survival of the East. Yet chance, too, played its part in the providential death of the most formidable of the enemies of the Empire, Attila the Hun. Preface THE FIFTH CENTURY of our era saw far-reaching politi- cal changes in the Mediterranean world. When the century began the Roman Empire controlled directly very nearly the whole area it had dominated at its widest extent, and, though under two rulers, was still a single entity from Yorkshire to the Upper Nile and from Portugal to the Caucasus. When the century ended all western Europe and western Africa were under the control of more or less independent Teutonic kings. Many thousands of these Teutons had been settled in restless semidependence within the empire before 400, and after 500 many of their kingdoms were still nominally held at the discretion of the ruler of Constantinople—Africa, Italy, and parts of Spain were even subsequently brought for a time again under direct Roman rule by Justinian in the sixth cen- tury. Nevertheless, the western regions of the empire were in this century very largely permanently alienated from the do- minions which the Roman emperor could say he really ruled. It is a great loss that not one competent contemporary his- torian for the period has been preserved intact. As a result the modern investigator is forced to rely on ecclesiastical historians of dubious veracity who only incidentally mention secular affairs, on very sketchy chroniclers, many of them of a later date, on a subsidiary literature primarily nonhistorical, and on tantalizing fragments of historical writings the chief part of which has been long lost. The dearth of adequate source material and the virtual absence of any source material whatever with pretentions to literary merit have long turned historians away from this cen- tury. Certainly, the writings of Julian the Apostate and Am- mianus in the fourth century and of Procopius and Justinian's legal works in the sixth have attracted scholarship toward their centuries to the comparative neglect of the fifth. Further- more, the spectacle of decay and defeat which this century xi xii PREFACE presents is not one that has appealed to ages prior to our own —which in many respects is better able than most to under- stand the spirit of the fifth century. But today the rapid decline in the knowledge of Latin and Greek has cut off even the educated reader from this fascinat- ing period, so similar to our own. He must rely on such epitomes as general histories provide—and even they are not so common as they might be—or on learned works based on authors he cannot check. To remedy this to a slight extent the translations on which this book is based give the reader with little or no Greek, a chance to see for himself how the writers nearest to the events described their age and its mo- mentous tragedies. With very few exceptions (noted in Ap- pendix B) all the passages here translated have, to the best of my knowledge, never appeared in full in English or any other modern language, though paraphrases and summaries of most of them are, of course, included in general histories of the period. I have tried to tell the story of this tragic period as nearly as possible in the words of contemporary or near contemporary authors, linking the pitiful fragments of history left to us by only such connective and introductory material from many scattered sources of less general interest as seemed necessary to give a coherent and complete narrative. The choice of authors I have translated is fairly obvious considering the custom of that age of one historian continuing the work of his predecessor. In that way Olympiodorus, Priscus, and Malchus overlap very little and together give a continuous history of most of the century. To them I have added the short summary of Candidus which throws additional light on the court history of Leo's and Zeno's reigns. All these men were more or less contemporaries of the events they describe, but the last author, Joannes Antiochenus, lived considerably later and my excuse for including the excerpts from his work per- taining to the years from 408-91 is that, as most scholars agree, he made wide use of the other authors, often indeed, it seems, copying them verbatim. Thus his work probably contains