Читать онлайн «Теодорих»

Ross Laidlaw

Theodoric

HISTORICAL NOTE

AD 468, when this story begins, was a critical year for the Western half of the Roman Empire; nothing less than its survival or extinction hung in the balance. How had this ‘moment of truth’ come about?

The beginning of the fifth century had witnessed successive waves of barbarians — Visigoths, Vandals, Suevi et al.  — break through the West’s frontiers and rampage through Gaul and Spain, with Britain being abandoned in the chaos. But cometh the hour, cometh the man. Just when it seemed that nothing could halt the West’s slide towards disintegration, a remarkable Roman general, Constantius, took on the German invaders and forced them to settle peacefully on Roman soil as federate ‘guests’. After his premature death, Constantius’ work was continued and consolidated by an even greater Roman commander, Flavius Aetius. For thirty years, Aetius was able, most of the time, with the help of his allies the Huns, to maintain stability and some form of imperial control. Ironically, it was the Huns, a formidable horde of nomadic horse-archers from Central Asia who, by pressing the German tribes from the rear, had set off a chain reaction of migration resulting in the barbarian invasions. These were largely confined to the West, whose long Rhine-Danube frontier was especially vulnerable to attack by the confederations of German tribes beyond the northern banks. In contrast, the Eastern Empire — wealthy, stable, the home of ancient civilizations — had only the Lower Danube frontier to defend; also it became adept at passing on barbarian invaders, such as Alaric’s Visigoths, to the West. (Persia, to the east, potentially a far greater threat than any barbarian confederation, was a civilized power which on the whole kept its peace treaties with Rome. )

The great exception to Aetius’ entente with the German invaders was Gaiseric, king of the Vandals.

As ambitious as he was cunning and cruel, in 429 Gaiseric had transported his tribe from Spain across the Straits of Gibraltar, wrested North Africa — the West’s richest and most productive diocese — from Roman control, and set up an independent Vandal kingdom in its place. Unlike other German immigrant leaders, Gaiseric never showed the least desire for an accommodation with Rome, towards whom he maintained a stance of unvarying hostility.

In 451, Aetius’ policy of forging bonds with the federates was triumphantly vindicated. In that year, his old friend Attila, king of the Huns, abandoned a long-running campaign against the Eastern Empire to launch a full-scale attack on the West. Heading a coalition of Roman troops and German confederates, Aetius defeated Attila and his Huns in an epic battle on the Catalaunian Plains — the West’s greatest, though final, victory. Yet from this high point things began to go rapidly downhill for the West. Two years later Attila died, then in the following year, 454, Aetius was murdered by his jealous emperor, Valentinian III, himself assassinated in 455 by loyal followers of Aetius, thus ending the long Theodosian dynasty. (Whatever its faults, the House of Theodosius had provided a valuable measure of stability. ) With the threat of Attila gone, and no general of the stature of Aetius to keep them in line, the federates took advantage of the constitutional vacuum resulting from the murder of Valentinian, and began to flex their muscles with a view to expanding their territories.