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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12542 ***
+
+RAVENNA
+A STUDY
+
+BY
+EDWARD HUTTON
+
+ILLUSTRATED IN COLOUR AND LINE
+BY
+HARALD SUND
+
+1913
+
+TO MY FRIEND
+ARTHUR SYMONS
+IN AFFECTIONATE HOMAGE
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+My intention in writing this book has been to demonstrate the unique
+importance of Ravenna in the history of Italy and of Europe, especially
+during the Dark Age from the time of Alaric's first descent into the
+Cisalpine plain to the coming of Charlemagne. That importance, as it seems
+to me, has been wholly or almost wholly misunderstood, and certainly, as I
+understand it, has never been explained. In this book, which is offered to
+the public not without a keen sense of its inadequacy, I have tried to show
+in as clear a manner as was at my command, what Ravenna really was in the
+political geography of the empire, and to explain the part that position
+allowed her to play in the great tragedy of the decline and fall of the
+Roman administration. If I have succeeded in this I am amply repaid for all
+the labour the book has cost me.
+
+The principal sources, both ancient and modern, which I have consulted in
+the preparation of this volume have been cited, but I must here acknowledge
+the special debt I owe to the late Dr. Hodgkin, to Professor Diehl, to
+Dr. Corrado Ricci, and to the many contributors to the various Italian
+Bollettini which I have ransacked.
+
+E.H.
+
+_March_ 1913.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAP.
+
+I. THE GEOGRAPHICAL AND POLITICAL POSITION OF RAVENNA
+
+II. JULIUS CAESAR IN RAVENNA
+
+III. RAVENNA IN THE TIME OF THE EMPIRE
+
+IV. THE RETREAT UPON RAVENNA Honorius and Galla Placidia
+
+V. THE FALL OF THE EMPIRE IN THE WEST
+
+VI. THEODORIC
+
+VII. THE RECONQUEST Vitiges, Belisarius, Totila, Narses
+
+VIII. MODICA QUIES The Pragmatic Sanction and the Settlement of Italy
+
+IX. THE CITADEL OF THE EMPIRE IN ITALY The Lombard Invasion
+
+X. THE PAPAL STATE Pepin and Charlemagne
+
+XI. THE CATHOLIC CHURCHES OF THE FIFTH CENTURY The Cathedral, Baptistery,
+Arcivescovado, S. Agata, S. Pietro Maggiore, S. Giovanni Evangelista, S.
+Giovanni Battista, and the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia
+
+XII. THE ARIAN CHURCHES OF THE SIXTH CENTURY The Palace of Theodoric,
+S. Apollinare Nuovo, S. Spirito, S. Maria in Cosmedin, the Mausoleum of
+Theodoric
+
+XII. THE BYZANTINE CHURCHES S. Vitale and S. Apollinare in Classe
+
+XIV. RAVENNA IN THE MIDDLE AGE
+
+XV. DANTE IN RAVENNA
+
+XVI. MEDIAEVAL RAVENNA The Churches
+
+XVII. RAVENNA IN THE RENAISSANCE The Battle of 1512
+
+XVIII. RENAISSANCE RAVENNA Churches and Palaces
+
+XIX. THE GALLERY AND THE MUSEUM
+
+XX. THE PINETA
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+COLOURED PLATES
+
+S. APOLLINARE NUOVO
+
+S. AGATA
+
+THE MAUSOLEUM OF THEODORIC
+
+S. VITALE: THE GALLERY
+
+S. GIOVANNI EVANGELISTA
+
+THE MAUSOLEUM OF GALLA PLACIDIA
+
+S. VITALE: THE PRESBYTERY
+
+S. GIOVANNI BATTISTA
+
+S. MARIA IN PORTO
+
+PORTA SERRATA
+
+
+LINE DRAWINGS
+
+SKETCH MAP
+
+SKETCH MAP
+
+SKETCH MAP
+
+GREEK RELIEF FROM A TEMPLE OF NEPTUNE
+
+SARCOPHAGUS OF THE EMPEROR HONORIUS
+
+THE APSE OF S. GIOVANNI EVANGELISTA
+
+THE MAUSOLEUM OF GALLA PLACIDIA
+
+CAPITAL FROM THE COLONNADE IN PIAZZA MAGGIORE
+
+S. APOLLINARE IN CLASSE
+
+CAPITAL FROM S. VITALE
+
+CAPITAL FROM SANTO SPIRITO
+
+SKETCH MAP
+
+SKETCH MAP OF CITIES IN IMPERIAL HANDS
+
+SKETCH MAP SHOWING NARSES' MARCH TO MEET TOTILA
+
+SKETCH MAP
+
+THE SARCOPHAGUS OF THE EXARCH ISAAC
+
+GUARDHOUSE OF THE PALACE OF THEODORIC
+
+THE CATHEDRAL (_Basilica Ursiana_)
+
+THE BAPTISTERY AND CAMPANILE OF THE CATHEDRAL
+
+THE CAMPANILE OF S. GIOVANNI EVANGELISTA
+
+S. VITALE
+
+CAPITAL FROM S. VITALE
+
+INTERIOR OF S. APOLLINARE IN CLASSE
+
+CAPITAL FROM S. VITALE
+
+THE CAMPANILE OF S. APOLLINARE
+
+CASA POLENTANA
+
+DANTE'S TOMB
+
+CAMPANILE OF S. FRANCESCO
+
+INTERIOR OF S. MARIA IN PORTO FUORI
+
+TORRE DEL COMUNE
+
+PORTAL OF S. GIOVANNI EVANGELISTA
+
+ROCCA VENIZIANA
+
+MONUMENT OF GASTON DE FOIX
+
+THE CLOISTER OF S. GIOVANNI EVANGELISTA
+
+THE PINETA
+
+THE PINETA
+
+TO PORTO CORSINI
+
+PLAN OF RAVENNA _see front end paper_
+
+[Illustration: Colour Plate S. APOLLINARE NUOVO]
+
+RAVENNA
+
+A STUDY
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE GEOGRAPHICAL AND POLITICAL POSITION OF RAVENNA
+
+
+Upon the loneliest and most desolate shore of Italy, where the vast
+monotony of the Emilian plain fades away at last, almost
+imperceptibly, into the Adrian Sea, there stands, half abandoned in
+that soundless place, and often wrapt in a white shroud of mist, a
+city like a marvellous reliquary, richly wrought, as is meet,
+beautiful with many fading colours, and encrusted with precious
+stones: its name is Ravenna.
+
+It stands there laden with the mysterious centuries as with half
+barbaric jewels, weighed down with the ornaments of Byzantium, rigid,
+hieratic, constrained; and however you come to it, whether from Rimini
+by the lost and forgotten towns of Classis and Caesarea, or from
+Ferrara through all the bitter desolation of Comacchio, or across the
+endless marsh from Bologna or Faenza, its wide and empty horizons, its
+astonishing silence, and the difficulty of every approach will seem to
+you but a fitting environment for a place so solitary and so
+imperious.
+
+For this city of mute and closed churches, where imperishable mosaics
+glisten in the awful damp, and beautiful pillars of most precious
+marbles gleam through a humid mist, of mausoleums empty but
+indestructible, of tottering _campanili_, of sumptuous splendour and
+incredible decay, is the sepulchre of the great civilisation which
+Christianity failed to save alive, but to which we owe everything and
+out of which we are come; the only monument that remains to us of
+those confused and half barbaric centuries which lie between Antiquity
+and the Middle Age.
+
+Mysteriously secured by nature and doubly so after the failure of the
+Roman administration, Ravenna was the death-bed of the empire and its
+tomb. To her the emperor Honorius fled from Milan in the first years
+of the fifth century; within her walls Odoacer dethroned the last
+emperor of the West, founded a kingdom, and was in his turn supplanted
+by Theodoric the Ostrogoth. It was from her almost impregnable
+isolation that the attempt was made by Byzantium--it seemed and
+perhaps it was our only hope--to reconquer Italy and the West for
+civilisation; while her fall before the appalling Lombard onset in the
+eighth century brought Pepin into Italy in 754, to lay the foundation
+of a new Christendom, to establish the temporal power of the papacy,
+and to prophesy of the resurrection of the empire, of the unity of
+Europe.
+
+But though it is as the imperishable monument of those tragic
+centuries that we rightly look upon Ravenna: before the empire was
+founded she was already famous. It was from her silence that Caesar
+emerged to cross the Rubicon and all unknowing to found what, when all
+is said, was the most beneficent, as it was the most universal,
+government that Europe has ever known. In the first years of that
+government Ravenna became, and through the four hundred years of its
+unhampered life she remained, one of its greatest bulwarks. While upon
+its failure, as I have said, she suddenly assumed a position which for
+some three hundred and fifty years was unique not only in Italy but in
+Europe. And when with the re-establishment of an universal government
+her importance declined and at length passed away, she yet lived on in
+the minds and the memory of men as something fabulous and still,
+curiously enough, as a refuge, the refuge of the great poet of the new
+age; so that to-day, beside the empty tombs of Galla Placidia and
+Theodoric, there stands the great sarcophagus which holds the dust of
+Dante Alighieri.
+
+We may well ask how it was that a city so solitary, so inaccessible,
+and so remote should have played so great a part in the history of
+Europe. It is to answer this question that I have set myself to write
+this book, which is rather an essay _in memoriam_ of her greatness,
+her beauty, and her forlorn hope, than a history properly so called of
+Ravenna. But if we are to come to any real understanding of what she
+stood for, of what she meant to us once upon a time, we must first of
+all decide for ourselves what was the fundamental reason of her great
+renown. I shall maintain in this book that the cause of her greatness,
+of her opportunity for greatness, was always the same, namely, her
+geographical position in relation to the peninsula of Italy, the
+Cisalpine plain, and the sea. Let us then consider these things.
+
+Italy, the country we know as Italy, properly understood, is
+fundamentally divided into two absolutely different parts by a great
+range of mountains, the Apennines, which stretches roughly from sea to
+sea, from Genoa almost but not quite to Rimini.
+
+The country which lies to the south of that line of mountains is Italy
+proper, and it consists as we know of a long narrow mountainous
+peninsula, while its history throughout antiquity may be said to be
+altogether Roman.
+
+What lies to the north of the Apennines is not Italy at all, but
+Cisalpine Gaul.
+
+In its nature this country is altogether continental. It consists for
+the most part of a vast plain divided from west to east by a great
+river, the Po, and everywhere it is watered and nourished by its two
+hundred tributaries.
+
+Shut off as it is on the south from Italy proper by the Apennines,
+this plain is defended from Gaul and the Germanics, on the west and
+the north, by the mightiest mountains in Europe, the Alps, which here
+enclose it in a vast concave rampart that stretches from the
+Mediterranean to the Adriatic. On the east it is contained by the sea.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch Map of northern Italy]
+
+The history of this vast country before the Roman Conquest is, as is
+history everywhere in the West before that event, vague and obscure.
+But this at least may be said: it was first in the occupation of the
+Etruscans, who in time were turned out, destroyed, or enslaved by the
+Gauls, those invaders who crossed the Alps from the west and who
+during nearly two hundred years, continually, though never with an
+enduring success, invaded Italy, and in 388 B.C. actually captured the
+City. Rome, however, had by the year 223 B.C. succeeded in planting
+her fortresses at Placentia and Cremona and in fortifying Mutina
+(Modena), when suddenly in 218 B.C. Hannibal unexpectedly descended
+into the Cisalpine plain and destroyed all she had achieved. With his
+defeat, however, the conquest of Cisalpine Gaul was undertaken anew,
+and at some time after 183 B.C.--we do not know exactly when--the
+whole of this vast lowland country passed into Roman administration,
+to become the chief province of Caesar's great triple command, and one
+of the most valuable parts of the empire.
+
+What, then, is the relation of this vast lowland country between the
+Alps and the Apennines to Italy proper? It stands as it has always
+stood to her as a great defence. For if, as we must, we consider Italy
+as the shrine, the sanctuary, and the citadel of Europe, a place apart
+and separate--and because of this she has been able to do her work
+both secular and religious--what has secured her but Cisalpine Gaul?
+The valley of the Po, all this vast plain, appears in history as the
+cockpit of Europe, the battlefield of the Celt, the Phoenician, the
+Latin, and the Teuton, of Catholic and Arian, strewn with victories,
+littered with defeats, the theatre of those great wars which have
+built up Europe and the modern world. If the Gauls had not been broken
+by the plain, they would perhaps have overwhelmed Italy and Rome; if
+Hannibal had found there enemies instead of friends, the Oriental
+would not so nearly have overthrown Europe. It broke the Gothic
+invasion, Attila never crossed it, it absorbed the worst of the
+appalling Lombard flood; Italy remains to us because of it.
+
+Now since Cisalpine Gaul thus secured Italy, the entry from the one to
+the other, the road between them must always have been of an immense
+importance. That entry and that road, whenever they were in dispute,
+Ravenna commanded, and a good half of her importance lies in this.
+
+I say whenever they were in dispute: in time of peace that road and
+that entry were not in the keeping of Ravenna but of Rimini.
+
+A study of the map will show us that though the Apennines shut off
+Italy proper from Cisalpine Gaul along a line roughly from Genoa to
+Rimini, actually that difficult and barren range just fails to reach
+the Adriatic as it curves southward to divide the peninsula in its
+entire length into two not unequal parts. This failure of the
+mountains quite to reach the sea leaves at this corner a narrow strip
+of lowland, of marshy plain in fact, between them. Therefore the
+Romans, though they were compelled to cross the Apennines, for Rome
+lay upon their western side, were able to do so where they chose and
+not of necessity to make the difficult passage at a crucial point.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch Map of Ravenna region]
+
+The road they planned and laid out, the Flaminian Way, the great north
+road of the Romans, was built by Caius Flaminius the Censor about 220
+B.C.[1], that is to say, immediately after the first subjection of the
+Gauls south of the Po which had been largely his achievement, and for
+military and political business which that achievement entailed. This
+road ran from Rome directly to Ariminum (Rimini) and it crossed the
+Apennines near the modern Scheggia and by the great pass of the
+Furlo.[2]
+
+[Footnote 1: It is, of course, certain that a road was in existence
+long before; but not as a constructed, permanent, and military Way.]
+
+[Footnote 2: The Furlo was to be held in the time of Aurelius Victor,
+if not of Vespasian, by the fortress of Petra Pertusa.]
+
+The first act of the Romans after the defeat of Hannibal was the
+re-establishment of their fortresses at Placentia, Cremona, and Mutina
+(Modena), the second was the construction of a great highway which
+connected Placentia through Mutina with the Via Flaminia at Rimini.
+This was the work of the Consul Aemilius Lepidus in 187 B.C. and the
+road still bears his name.
+
+It is obvious then that the command of the way from Italy into
+Cisalpine Gaul, or _vice versa_, lay in the hands of Rimini, and it is
+significant that the political boundary between them was here marked
+by a little river, the Rubicon, a few miles to the north of that city.
+The command which Rimini thus held was purely political; it passed
+from her to Ravenna automatically whenever that entry was threatened.
+Why?
+
+The answer is very simple: because Rimini could not easily be
+defended, while Ravenna was impregnable.
+
+Ravenna stood from fifteen to eighteen miles north and east of the
+Aemilian Way and some thirty-one miles north and a little west of
+Rimini. Its extraordinary situation was almost unique in antiquity and
+is only matched by one city of later times--Venice. It was built as
+Venice is literally upon the waters. Strabo thus describes it:
+"Situated in the marshes is the great Ravenna, built entirely on
+piles, and traversed by canals which you cross by bridges or
+ferry-boats. At the full tides it is washed by a considerable quantity
+of sea water, as well as by the river, and thus the sewage is carried
+off and the air purified; in fact, the district is considered so
+salubrious that the (Roman) governors have selected it as a spot in
+which to bring up and exercise the gladiators. It is a remarkable
+peculiarity of this place that, though situated in the midst of a
+marsh, the air is perfectly innocuous."[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Strabo, v. i. 7, tells us Altinum was similarly
+situated.]
+
+[Illustration: Sketch Map or Ravenna region in more detail]
+
+Ravenna must always have been impregnable to any save a modern army,
+so long as it was able to hold the road in and out and was not taken
+from the sea. The one account we have of an attack upon it before the
+fall of the empire is given us by Appian and recounts a raid from the
+sea. It is but an incident in the civil wars of Marius and Sulla when
+Ravenna, we learn, was occupied for the latter by Metellus his
+lieutenant. In the year 82 B.C., says Appian, "Sulla overcame a
+detachment of his enemies near Saturnia, and Metellus sailed round
+toward Ravenna and took possession of the level wheat-growing country
+of Uritanus."
+
+This impregnable city, the most southern of Cisalpine Gaul,
+immediately commanded the pass between Cisalpine Gaul and Italy
+directly that pass was threatened, and to this I say was due a good
+half of its fame. The rest must be equally divided between the fact
+that the city was impregnable, and therefore a secure refuge or _point
+d'appui_, and its situation upon the sea.
+
+Strabo in his account of Ravenna, which I have quoted above,
+emphasises the fact rather of its situation among the marshes than of
+its position with regard to the sea. This is perhaps natural. The
+society to which he belonged (though indeed he was of Greek descent)
+loathed and feared the sea with an unappeasable horror. No journey was
+too long to make if thereby the sea passage might be avoided, no road
+too rough and rude if to take it was to escape the unstable winds and
+waters. That too was a part of Ravenna's strength. She was as much a
+city of the sea as Venice is; but of what a sea?
+
+The Adriatic, upon whose western shore she stood at the gate of Italy
+and Cisalpine Gaul, was--and this partly because of the Roman horror
+of the sea--the fault between Greek and Latin, East and West. To this
+great fact she owes much of her later splendour, much of her unique
+importance in those centuries we call the Dark Age.
+
+Even to-day as one stands upon the height of the republic of S. Marino
+and catches, faintly at dawn, the sunlight upon the Dalmatian hills,
+one instinctively feels it is the Orient one sees.
+
+This, then, is the cause of the greatness, of the opportunity for
+greatness, of Ravenna: her geographical position in regard to the
+peninsula of Italy, the Cisalpine plain, and the sea. Each of these
+exalt her in turn and all together give her the unique and almost
+fabulous position she holds in the history of Europe.
+
+Because she held the gateway between Italy and the Cisalpine plain,
+Caesar repaired to her when he was treating with the Senate for the
+consulship, and from her he set out to possess himself of all that
+great government.
+
+Because she was impregnable, and held both the plain where the enemy
+must be met and the peninsula with Rome within it, Honorius retreated
+to her from Milan when Alaric crossed the Alps.
+
+Because she was set upon the sea, and that sea was the fault between
+East and West, and because she held the key as it were of all Italy
+and through Italy of the West, Justinian there established his
+government when the great attempt was made by Byzantium to reconquer
+us from the barbarian.
+
+"_Ravenna Felix_" we read on many an old coin of that time, and
+whatever we may think of that title or prophecy, which indeed might
+seem never to have come true for her, this at least we must
+acknowledge, that she was happy in her situation which offered such
+opportunities for greatness and so certain an immortality.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+JULIUS CAESAR IN RAVENNA
+
+
+When we first come upon Ravenna in the pages of Strabo, its origin is
+already obscured; but this at least seems certain, that it was never a
+Gaulish city. Strabo tells us that "Ravenna is reputed to have been
+founded by Thessalians, who, not being able to sustain the violence of
+the Tyrrheni, welcomed into their city some of the Umbri who still
+possess it, while they themselves returned home."[1] The Thessalians
+were probably Pelasgi, but apart from that Strabo's statement would
+seem to be reasonably accurate. At any rate he continually repeats it,
+for he goes on to tell us that "Ariminum (Rimini), like Ravenna, is an
+ancient colony of the Umbri, but both of them received also Roman
+colonies." Again, in the same book of his Geography, he tells us: "The
+Umbri lie between the country of the Sabini and the Tyrrheni, but
+extend beyond the mountains as far as Ariminum and Ravenna." And again
+he says: "Umbria lies along the eastern boundary of Tyrrhenia and
+beginning from the Apennines, or rather beyond these mountains
+(extends) as far as the Adriatic. For commencing from Ravenna the
+Umbri inhabit the neighbouring country ... all allow that Umbria
+extends as far as Ravenna, as the inhabitants are Umbri."
+
+[Footnote 1: Strabo _ut supra_.]
+
+We may take it, then, that when Rome annexed Ravenna it was a city of
+the Umbri, and we may dismiss Pliny's statement[1] that it was a
+Sabine city altogether for it is both improbable and inexplicable.
+
+[Footnote 1: Pliny, III. 15; v. 20.]
+
+When Ravenna received a Roman colony we do not know, for though Strabo
+states this fact, he does not tell us when it occurred and we have no
+other means of knowing. All we can be reasonably sure of is that this
+Umbrian city on the verge of Cisalpine Gaul, hemmed in on the west by
+the Lingonian Gauls, received a Roman colony certainly not before 268
+B.C. when Ariminum was occupied. The name of Ravenna, however, does
+not occur in history till a late period of the Roman republic, and the
+first incident in which we hear of Ravenna having any part occurs in
+82 B.C., when, as I have already related, Metellus, the lieutenant of
+Sulla, landed there or thereabouts from his ships and seems to have
+made the city, already a place of some importance, the centre of his
+operations.
+
+Ravenna really entered history--and surely gloriously enough--when
+Julius Caesar chose it, the last great town of his command towards
+Italy, as his headquarters while he treated with the senate before he
+crossed the Rubicon.
+
+"Caesar," says Appian, "had lately recrossed the straits from Britain,
+and, after traversing the Gallic country along the Rhine, had passed
+the Alps with 5000 foot and 300 horse, and arrived at Ravenna which
+was contiguous to Italy and the last town in his government." This was
+in 50 B.C. The state of affairs which that act was meant to elucidate
+may be briefly stated as follows.
+
+The Roman republic, still in the midst of the political, social, and
+economic revolution whose first phase was the awful civil wars of
+Marius and Sulla, had long been at the mercy of Pompey the
+opportunist, Crassus the plutocrat, and Julius Caesar--the first
+Triumvirate. Crassus had always leaned towards Caesar and the
+_entente_ between Caesar and Pompey had been strengthened by the
+marriage of the latter with Caesar's daughter Julia, who was to die in
+the midst of the crisis 54 B.C. In 58 B.C., the year following this
+marriage, Caesar went to take up his great command in the Gauls, but
+Pompey remained in Rome, where every day his influence and popularity
+were failing while the astonishing successes of Caesar made him the
+idol of the populace. In 55 B.C. Pompey was consul for the second time
+with Crassus. He received as his provinces the two Spains, but he
+governed them by his legates and remained in the neighbourhood of the
+City. Crassus received the province of Syria, and the appalling
+disasters of the Parthian war, in which he most miserably lost life
+and honour, seemed to give Pompey the opportunity for which he had
+long been waiting. He encouraged the growing civil discord which was
+tearing the state in pieces, and with such success that the senate was
+compelled to call for his assistance. In 52 B.C. he became sole
+consul, restored order, and placed himself at the head of the
+aristocratic party which he had deserted to become the great popular
+hero when he was consul with Crassus in 70 B.C.
+
+Now Caesar had long watched the astonishing actions of Pompey, and had
+no intention of leaving the fate of the republic to him and the
+aristocracy. He does not seem to have wished to break altogether with
+Pompey, but only to hold him in check. At his meeting with Pompey at
+Luca (Lucca) in 56 B.C. he had been promised the consulship for 48
+B.C. when his governorship came to an end, and he now determined to
+insure the fulfilment of this promise which would place him upon a
+legal equality with his rival. For the rest he knew that he was as
+superior to Pompey as a statesman as he was as a soldier, and he did
+not apparently anticipate any difficulty in out-manoeuvring him in the
+senate and in the forum. Caesar, then, claimed no more than an
+equality with Pompey and the fulfilment of his promise; but these he
+determined to have. All through the winter of 52-51 B.C. he was
+arming. Well served by his friends, among whom were Mark Antony and
+Curio the tribunes, in 50 B.C., "having gone the circuit for the
+administration of justice," as Suetonius tells us, "he made a halt at
+Ravenna resolved to have recourse to arms if the senate should proceed
+to extremity against the tribunes of the people, who had espoused his
+cause." But first he determined for many reasons to send ambassadors
+to Rome, to request the fulfilment of the promise made to him at Luca.
+Pompey, who was not yet at open enmity with him, determined, although
+he had made the promise, neither to aid him by his influence nor
+openly to oppose him on this occasion. But the consuls Lentulus and
+Marcellus, who had always been his enemies, resolved to use all means
+in their power to prevent him gaining his object.
+
+At this juncture Caius Curio, tribune of the people, came to Caesar in
+Ravenna. Curio had made many energetic struggles in behalf of the
+republic and Caesar's cause; but at last, when he perceived that all
+his efforts were in vain, he fled through fear of his enemies and
+Caesar's to Ravenna and told Caesar all that had taken place; and,
+seeing that war was openly being prepared against Caesar, advised him
+to bring up his army and to rescue the republic.
+
+Now Caesar was not ignorant of the real state of affairs, but he was
+perhaps not yet ready to act, or he hoped in fact to save the ancient
+state; at any rate, he gave it as his opinion that particular regard
+should be had to the tranquillity of the republic, lest any one should
+assert that he was the originator of civil war. Therefore he sent
+again to his friends, making through them this very moderate request,
+that two legions and the provinces of Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum
+should be left him. No one could openly quarrel with such a reasonable
+demand and the patience with which it was more than once put forward;
+for when Caesar could not obtain a favourable answer from the consuls,
+he wrote a letter to the senate in which he briefly recounted his
+exploits and public services, and entreated that he should not be
+deprived of the favour of the people who had ordered that he, although
+absent, should be considered a candidate for the consulship at the
+next election. He stated also that he would disband his army if the
+senate and the Roman people desired it, provided that Pompey would do
+the same. But he stated also that, as long as Pompey retained the
+command of his army, there could be no just reason why Caesar should
+disband his troops and expose himself to the power of his enemies.
+
+This was Caesar's third offer to his opponents. He entrusted the
+letter to Curio, who travelled one hundred and sixty miles in three
+days and reached the City early in January. He did not, however,
+deliver the letter until there was a crowded meeting of the senate and
+the tribunes of the people were present; for he was afraid lest, if he
+gave it up without the utmost publicity, the consuls would suppress
+it. A sort of debate followed the reading of the letter, but when
+Scipio, Pompey's mouthpiece, spoke and declared, among other things,
+that Pompey was resolved to take up the cause of the senate now or
+never, and that he would drop it if a decision were delayed, the
+majority, overawed, decreed that Caesar should "at a definite and not
+distant day give up Transalpine Gaul to Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus,
+and Cisalpine Gaul to Marcus Servilius Nonianus and should dismiss his
+army, failing which he should be esteemed a traitor. When the
+tribunes, of Caesar's party, made use of their right of veto against
+this resolution not only were they, as they at least asserted,
+threatened in the senate house itself by the swords of Pompeian
+soldiers and forced, in order to save their lives, to flee in slaves'
+clothing from the capital, but the senate, now sufficiently overawed,
+treated their interference as an attempt at revolution, declared the
+country in danger, and in the usual form called the burgesses to take
+up arms, and all the magistrates faithful to the constitution to place
+themselves at the head of the armed."
+
+That was on January 7th. Five days later Caesar was on his way at the
+head of his troops to invade Italy and, without knowing it, to found
+the empire, that universal government out of which we are come.
+
+It was with one legion[1] that Caesar undertook his great adventure.
+That legion, the Thirteenth, had been stationed near Tergeste
+(Trieste), but at Caesar's orders it had marched into Ravenna in the
+first days of January. Upon the fateful twelfth, with some secrecy,
+while Caesar himself attended a public spectacle, examined the model
+of a fencing school, which he proposed to build, and, as usual, sat
+down to table with a numerous party of friends,[2] the first companies
+of this legion left Ravenna by the Rimini gate, to be followed after
+sunset by its great commander; still with all possible secrecy it
+seems, for mules were put to his carriage, a hired one, at a mill
+outside Ravenna and he went almost alone.
+
+[Footnote 1: Plutarch says "Caesar had not then with him more than 300
+horse and 5000 foot. The rest of his forces were left on the other
+side of the Alps."]
+
+[Footnote 2: So Suetonius; but Plutarch says "As for himself, he spent
+the day at a public show of gladiators, and a little before evening
+bathed, and then went into the apartment, where he entertained
+company. When it was growing dark, he left the company, having desired
+them to make merry till his return, which they would not have long to
+wait for."]
+
+The road he travelled was not the great way to Rimini, but a by-way
+across the marshes, and it would seem to have been in a wretched
+state. At any rate Caesar lost his way, the lights of his little
+company were extinguished, his carriage had to be abandoned, and it
+was only after wandering about for a long time that, with the help of
+a peasant whom he found towards daybreak, he was able to get on, afoot
+now, and at last to reach the great highway. That night must have
+tried even the iron nerves and dauntless courage of the greatest
+soldier of all time.
+
+Caesar came up with his troops on the banks of the Rubicon, the sacred
+boundary of Italy and Cisalpine Gaul in the narrow pass between the
+mountains and the sea. "There," says Suetonius, whose account I have
+followed, "he halted for a while revolving in his mind the importance
+of the step he was about to take. At last turning to those about him,
+he said: 'We may still retreat; but if we pass this little bridge
+nothing is left us but to fight it out in arms.'"
+
+Now while he was thus hesitating, staggered, even he, by the greatness
+of what he would attempt, doubtless resolving in silence arguments for
+and against it, and, if we may believe Plutarch, "many times changing
+his opinion," the following strange incident is said to have happened.
+
+A person, remarkable, says Suetonius, for his noble aspect and
+graceful mien, appeared close at hand sitting by the wayside playing
+upon a pipe. When not only the shepherds herding their flocks
+thereabout, but a number of the legionaries also gathered round to
+hear this fellow play, and there happened to be among them some
+trumpeters, the piper suddenly snatched a trumpet from one of these,
+ran to the river, and, sounding the advance with a piercing blast,
+crossed to the other side. Upon which Caesar on a sudden impulse
+exclaimed: "Let us go whither the omens of the gods and the iniquity
+of our enemies call us. The die is cast." And immediately at the head
+of his troops he crossed the river and found awaiting him the tribunes
+of the people who, having fled from Rome, had come to meet him. There
+in their presence he called upon the troops to pledge him their
+fidelity, with tears in his eyes, Suetonius assures us, and his
+garments rent from his bosom. And when he had received their oath he
+set out, and with his legion marched so fast the rest of the way that
+he reached Ariminum before morning and took it.
+
+The fall of Ariminum was but a presage, as we know, of Caesar's
+triumph. In three months he was master of all Italy. From Ravenna he
+had emerged to seize the lordship of the world, and out of a misery of
+chaos to create Europe.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+RAVENNA IN THE TIME OF THE EMPIRE
+
+
+That great revolutionary act of Julius Caesar's may be said to have
+made manifest, and for the first time, the unique position of Ravenna
+in relation to Italy and Cisalpine Gaul. In the years which followed,
+that position remained always unchanged, and is, indeed, more
+prominent than ever in the civil wars between Antony and Octavianus
+which followed Caesar's murder; but with the establishment of the
+empire by Octavianus and the universal peace, the _pax romana_, which
+it ensured, this position of Ravenna in relation to Italy and to
+Cisalpine Gaul sank into insignificance in comparison with her other
+unique advantage, her position upon the sea. For Octavianus, as we
+shall see, established her as the great naval port of Italy upon the
+east, and as such she chiefly appears to us during all the years of
+the unhampered government of the empire.
+
+In the civil wars between Antony and Octavianus, however, she appears
+still as the key to the narrow pass between Italy and Cisalpine Gaul.
+Let us consider this for a moment.
+
+Antony, as we know, after that great scene in the senate house when
+the supporters of Pompey and the aristocrats had succeeded in denying
+Caesar everything, had fled to Caesar at Ravenna. In the war which
+followed he had been Caesar's chief lieutenant and friend. At the
+crucial battle of Pharsalus in 48 B.C. he had commanded, and with
+great success, the left wing. In 44 B.C. he had been consul with
+Caesar and had then offered him the crown at the festival of the
+_Lupercalia_. After Caesar's murder he had attempted, and not without
+a sort of right, to succeed to his power. It was he who pronounced the
+speech over Caesar's body and read his will to the people. It was he
+who obtained Caesar's papers and his private property. It cannot then
+have been without resentment and surprise that he found presently a
+rival in the young Octavianus, the great-nephew and adopted son of the
+dictator, who joined the senate with the express purpose of crushing
+him.
+
+Now Antony, perhaps remembering his master, had obtained from the
+senate the promise of Cisalpine Gaul, then in the hands of Decimus
+Brutus, who, encouraged by Octavianus, refused to surrender it to him.
+Antony proceeded to Ariminum (Rimini), but Octavianus seized Ravenna
+and supplied it both with stores and money.[1] Antony was beaten and
+compelled to retreat across the Alps. In these acts we may see which
+of the two rivals understood the reality of things, and from this
+alone we might perhaps foresee the victor.
+
+[Footnote 1: Appian, III. 42.]
+
+That was in 44 B.C. A reconciliation between the rivals followed and
+the government was vested in them and in Lepidus under the title of
+_Triumviri Reipublicae Constituendae_ for five years. In 42 B.C.
+Brutus and Cassius and the aristocratic party were crushed by Antony
+and Octavianus at Philippi; and Antony received Asia as his share of
+the Roman world. Proceeding to his government in Cilicia, Antony met
+Cleopatra and followed her to Egypt. Meanwhile Fulvia, his wife, and
+L. Antonius, his brother, made war upon Octavianus in Italy, for they
+like Antony hoped for the lordship of the world. In the war which
+followed, Ravenna played a considerable part. In 41 B.C., for
+instance, the year in which the war opened, the Antonine party secured
+themselves in Ravenna, not only because of its strategical importance
+in regard to Italy and Cisalpine Gaul, but also because as a seaport
+it allowed of their communication with Antony in Egypt from whom they
+expected support. All this exposed and demonstrated more and more the
+importance of Ravenna, and we may be sure that the wise and astute
+Octavianus marked it.
+
+But it was the war with Sextus Pompeius which clearly showed what the
+future of Ravenna was to be. In that affair we find Ravenna already
+established as a naval port apparently subsidiary, on that coast, to
+Brundusium, as Misenum was upon the Tyrrhene sea to Puteoli; and there
+Octavianus built ships.
+
+It was not, however, till Octavianus, his enemies one and all disposed
+of, had made himself emperor at last, that, on the establishment and
+general regulation of his great government, he chose Ravenna as the
+major naval port of Italy upon the east, even as he chose Misenum upon
+the west.
+
+Octavianus had learned two things, certainly, in the wars he had
+fought to establish himself in the monarchy his great-uncle had
+founded. He had learned the necessity and the value of sea power, and
+he had understood the unique position of Ravenna in relation to the
+East and the West. That he had been able to appreciate both these
+facts is enough to mark him as the great man he was.
+
+Julius Caesar, for all his mighty grasp of reality, had not perceived
+the enormous value, nay the necessity, of sea power, and because of
+this failure his career had been twice nearly cut short; at Ilerda,
+where the naval victory of Decimus Brutus over the Massiliots alone
+saved him; and at Alexandria. Both the liberators and Antony had
+possessed ships; but both had failed to use them with any real effect.
+It was Sextus Pompeius who forced Octavianus to turn to the sea, and
+when Octavianus became Augustus he did not forget the lesson. Sole
+master of the Mediterranean and of all its ships of war, he understood
+at once how great a support sea power offered him and his principate.
+Nor was the empire, while it was vigorous, though always fearful of
+and averse from the sea, ever to forget the power that lay in that
+command.
+
+Thus it was that among the first acts of Augustus was the
+establishment of two fleets, as we might say, "in being" in the
+Mediterranean; the fleet of Misenum and the fleet of Ravenna; the
+latter with stations probably at Aquileia, Brundusium, the Piraeus,
+and probably elsewhere.
+
+The fleet of Ravenna was, certainly after A.D. 70, probably about A.D.
+127, entitled _Praetoria_. The origin of this title is unknown, but it
+was also borne by the fleet of Misenum and it distinguishes the
+Italian from the later Provincial fleets, the former being in closer
+relation to the emperor, just as the Praetorian cohorts were
+distinguished from the legions.
+
+The emperor was, of course, head of all the fleets, which were, each
+of them, commanded by a prefect and sub-prefect appointed by him; and
+if we may judge from the recorded promotions we have, it would seem
+that the Misenate prefect ranked before the Ravennate and both before
+the Provincial. But in the general military system the navy stood
+lowest in respect of pay and position. The fleets were manned by freed
+men and foreigners who could not obtain citizenship until after
+twenty-six years' service. We find Claudius employing the marines of
+the _Classis Ravennas_ to drain lake Fucinus, and it was probably
+Vespasian who formed the Legion II. _Adjutrix_ from the Ravennate,
+even as Nero had formed Legion I. _Adjutrix_ from the Misenate
+marines.
+
+The Ravenna that Augustus thus chose to be the great base and port of
+his fleet in the eastern sea was, as we have seen, a place built upon
+piles in the midst of the marshes, impregnable from the land, and,
+because impregnable, able, whenever it was in dispute, to command the
+narrow pass between the mountains and the sea that was the gate of
+Italy and Cisalpine Gaul. Such a place, situated as it was upon the
+western shore of that sea which was the fault between East and West,
+was eminently suitable for the great purpose of the emperor. Pliny[1]
+indeed would seem to tell us that from time immemorial Ravenna had
+possessed a small port; but such a place, well enough for the small
+traders of those days, could not serve usefully the requirements of a
+great fleet. Therefore the first act of Augustus, when he had chosen
+Ravenna as his naval base, was the construction of a proper port and
+harbour, and these came to be named, after the fleet they served and
+accommodated, Classis. Classis was situated some two and a half miles
+from the town of Ravenna to the east-south-east. We may perhaps have
+some idea both of its situation and of its relation to Ravenna if we
+say that it was to that city what the Porto di Lido is to Venice.
+
+[Footnote 1: Pliny, iii. 20; cf. also Strabo, v. 7.]
+
+It is very difficult, in looking upon Ravenna as we see it to-day, to
+reconstruct it, even in the imagination, as it was when Augustus had
+done with it. To begin with, the sea has retreated several miles from
+the city, which is no longer within sight of it, while all that is
+left of Classis, which is also now out of sight of the sea, is a
+single decayed and deserted church, S. Apollinare in Classe. Strabo,
+however, who wrote his _Geography_ a few years after Augustus had
+chosen Ravenna for his port upon the Adriatic, has left us a
+description both of it and the country in which it stood, from which
+must be drawn any picture we would possess of so changed a place. He
+speaks of it, as we have seen, as "a great city" situated in the
+marshes, built entirely upon piles, and traversed by canals which were
+everywhere crossed by bridges or ferry-boats. While at the full tide
+he tells us it was swept by the sea and always by the river, and thus
+the sewage was carried off and the air purified, and this so
+thoroughly, that even before its establishment by Augustus the
+district was considered so healthy that the Roman governors had chosen
+it as a spot in which to train gladiators.[1] That river we know from
+Pliny[2] was called the Bedesis; and the same writer tells us that
+Augustus built a canal which brought the water of the Po to Ravenna.
+
+[Footnote 1: Strabo, v. 7.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Pliny, iii. 20.]
+
+Tacitus in his _Annals_[1] merely tells us that Italy was guarded on
+both sides by fleets at Misenum and Ravenna, and in his _Histories_[2]
+speaks of these places as the well known naval stations without
+stopping to describe them. While Suetonius,[3] though he mentions the
+great achievement of Augustus, does not emphasise it and does not
+attempt to tell us what these ports were like.
+
+[Footnote 1: Tacitus, Ann. iv. 5.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Tacitus, Hist. ii. 100; iii. 6, 40.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Suetonius, _Augustus_.]
+
+Perhaps the best description we have of Augustan Ravenna comes to us
+from a writer who certainly never saw the port in its great Roman
+days, but who probably followed a well established tradition in his
+description of it. This is Jornandes, who was born about A.D. 500 and
+was first a notary at the Ostrogothic court and later became a monk
+and finally bishop of Crotona. In his _De Getarum Origins et Rebus
+Gestis_ he thus describes Ravenna:
+
+"This city (says he) between the marshes, the sea, and the Po is only
+accessible on one side. Situated beside the Ionian Sea it is
+surrounded and almost submerged by lagoons. On the east is the sea, on
+the west it is defended by marshes across which there remains a narrow
+passage, a kind of gate. The city is encircled on the north by a
+branch of the Po, called the Fossa Asconis, and on the south by the Po
+itself, which is called the Eridanus, and which is there known as the
+King of Rivers. Augustus deepened its bed and made it larger; it
+flowed quite through the city, and its mouth formed an excellent port
+where once, as Dion reports [this passage of Dion Cassius is lost], a
+fleet of 250 ships could be stationed in all security.... The city has
+three names with which she glorifies herself and she is divided into
+three parts to which they correspond; the first is Ravenna, the last
+Classis, that in the midst is Caesarea between Ravenna and the sea.
+Built on a sandy soil this quarter is easily approached and is
+commodiously situated for trade and transport."
+
+We thus have a picture of Ravenna as a triune city, consisting of
+Ravenna proper, the port Classis, and the long suburb between them,
+Caesarea, connected by a great causeway and everywhere watered by
+canals, the greatest of which was the Fossa Augusta by which a part of
+the waters of the Po were carried to Ravenna and thence to Classis and
+the sea; a city very much, we may suppose, what we know Venice to be,
+if we think of her in connection with the Riva, the great suburb of
+the Marina, and the Porto di Lido. At Classis we must understand there
+was room for a fleet of two hundred and fifty ships and accommodation
+for arsenals, magazines, barracks, and so forth, while there is one
+other thing we know of this port, and that from Pliny,[1] who tells us
+that it had a Pharos like the famous one of Alexandria. "There is
+another building (says he) that is highly celebrated, the tower that
+was built by a king of Egypt on the island of Pharos at the entrance
+to the harbour of Alexandria.... At present there are similar fires
+lighted up in numerous places, Ostia and Ravenna for example. The only
+danger is that when these fires are thus kept burning without
+intermission they may be mistaken for stars."
+
+[Footnote 1: Pliny xxx. vi. 18]
+
+Such was the splendour of Ravenna in the time of Augustus. His
+achievement so far as Ravenna was concerned was to understand her
+importance not only in regard to Italy and Cisalpine Gaul, an
+importance already discounted by the universal peace he had
+established, but in regard to the sea. He turned Ravenna into a
+first-class naval port and based his eastern fleet upon her; and this
+was so wise an act that, so long as the empire remained strong and
+unhampered, Ravenna appears as the great base of its sea power in the
+East.
+
+In that long peace which Italy enjoyed under the empire we hear little
+of Ravenna. We know Claudius built a great gate called Porta Aurea,
+which was only destroyed in 1582; and we know that the great sea port
+had one weakness, the scarcity of good water for drinking purposes.
+Martial writes
+
+  "I'd rather at Ravenna have a cistern than a vine
+  Since I could sell my water there much better than my wine,"
+
+and again:
+
+  "That landlord at Ravenna is plainly but a cheat
+  I paid for wine and water, but he served wine to me neat"[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Martial, _Fp_ iii. 56, 57. Trs Hodgkin]
+
+This weakness would seem, however, to have been overcome by Trajan,
+who built an aqueduct nearly twenty miles long, which Theodoric
+restored, after the fall of the empire, in 524. This aqueduct, of
+which some arches remain in the bed of the Bedesis (Ronco), seems to
+have run, following the course of the river, from near Forli, where
+there still remains a village called S. Maria in Acquedotto, to
+Ravenna.
+
+[Illustration: GREEK RELIEF FROM A TEMPLE OF NEPTUNE]
+
+The great city-port thus became one of the most important and
+considerable of the cities of Italy, at a time when the whole of the
+West was rapidly increasing in wealth and population, and especially
+the old province of Cisapline Gaul, which had indeed become, during
+the _pax romana_, the richest part of the new Italy. Always an
+important military port it was often occupied by the emperors as their
+headquarters from which to watch and to oppose the advance of their
+enemies into Italy, and the possessor of it, for the reasons I have
+set forth, was always in a commanding position. Thus in A.D. 193 it
+was the surrender of Ravenna without resistance that gave the empire
+to Septimius Severus, when, scarcely allowing himself time for sleep
+or food, marching on foot and in complete armour, he crossed the Alps
+at the head of his columns to punish the wretched Didius Julianus and
+to avenge Pertinax. It was there in 238 that Pupienus was busy
+assembling his army to oppose Maximin when he received the news of the
+death of his enemy before Aquileia.
+
+And because it was impregnable and secluded it was often chosen too as
+a place of imprisonment for important prisoners.
+
+It is true that we know very little, in detail, of the life of any
+city other than Rome during those years of the great Peace in which we
+see the empire change from a Pagan to a Christian state. Those
+centuries which saw Christendom slowly emerge, in which Europe was
+founded, still lack a modern historian, and the magnitude and
+splendour of their achievement are too generally misconceived or
+ignored. We are largely unaware still of what they were in themselves
+and of what we owe to them. By reason of the miserable collapse of
+Europe, of Christendom, in the sixteenth century and its appalling
+results both in thought and in politics, we are led, too often by
+prejudices, to regard those mighty years rather as the prelude to the
+decline and fall of the empire than as the great and indestructible
+foundations of all that is still worth having in the world.
+
+For rightly understood those centuries gave us not only our culture,
+our civilisation, and our Faith, but ensured them to us that they
+should always endure. They established for ever the great lines upon
+which our art was to develop, to change, and yet not to suffer
+annihilation or barrenness. They established the supremacy of the
+idea, so that it might always renew our lives, our culture, and our
+polity, and that we might judge everything by it and fear neither
+revolution, defeat, nor decay. They, and they alone, established us in
+the secure possession of our own souls so that we alone in the world
+might develop from within, to change but never to die, and to be--yes,
+alone in the world--Christians.
+
+The almost incredible strength and well being of those years must be
+seized also. There was not a town in Italy and the West that did not
+expand and increase in a fashion almost miraculous during that period.
+It was then the rivers were embanked, the canals made, the great roads
+planned and constructed, and our communications established for ever.
+There was no industry that did not grow marvellously in strength,
+there is not a class that did not increase in wealth and well-being
+beyond our dreams of progress. There is scarcely anything that is
+really fundamental in our lives that was not then created that it
+might endure. It was then our religion, the soul of Europe, was born.
+
+Christianity, the Faith, which, little by little, absorbed the empire,
+till it became the energy and the cause of all that undying but
+changeful principle of life and freedom which rightly understood is
+Europe, is thought to have been brought first to Ravenna by S.
+Apollinaris, a disciple as we are told of S. Peter, who made him her
+first bishop. So at least his acts assert; and though little credence
+may, I fear, be placed in them, that he was the first bishop of
+Ravenna, and in the time of S. Peter, is not at variance with what we
+know of that age, is attested by the traditions of the city, and is
+supported by later authorities. S. Peter Chrysologus (_c_. 440), the
+most famous of his successors, for instance, assures us of it. This
+great churchman calls S. Apollinaris martyr, and in that there is
+nothing strange, but he asserts that though he often spilt his blood
+for the Faith, yet God preserved him a long time, not less than twenty
+years, to his church, and that his persecution did not take away his
+life.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: His relics lay for many years in the church dedicated in
+his honour at Classis; but in 549 they were removed from their great
+tomb and placed in a more secret spot in the same church. Cf.
+Agnellus. _Liber Pontificalis Ecclesiae Ravennatis_ (Ed. Holder--Egger
+in _Monumenta Germanicae Historica_) and S. Peter Chrysologus, Sermon
+128 in Migne.]
+
+The empire which it had taken more than a millenium to build, which
+was the most noble and perhaps the most beneficient experiment in
+government that has ever been made, was in obvious economic and
+administrative decay by the middle of the fourth century. Christianity
+perhaps was already undermining the servile state, which in its effort
+of self-preservation adopted an economic system hopelessly at variance
+with the facts of the situation; while the weakness of its frontiers
+offered a military problem which the empire was unable to face.
+Diocletian had attempted to solve it by dividing the empire, but the
+division he made was rather racial that strategic, for under it the
+two parts of the empire, East and West, met on the Danube. The eastern
+part, by force of geography, was inclined to an Asiatic point of view
+and to the neglect of the Danube; the western was by no means strong
+enough either financially or militarily to hold that tremendous line.
+
+We read, in the letters of S. Ambrose among others, of the decay of
+the great cities of Cisalpine Gaul,[1] of the failure of agriculture
+in that rich countryside, of the poverty and misery that were
+everywhere falling upon that great state. It is possible that in the
+general weakening of administrative power even the roads, the canals,
+the whole system of communications were allowed to become less perfect
+than they had been; everywhere there was a retreat. The frontiers were
+no longer inviolate, and it is probable that in the general decay the
+port of Classis, the city of Ravenna, suffered not less than their
+neighbours.
+
+[Footnote 1: See S. Ambrose, _Ep_. 39, written in 388, quoted by
+Muratori, _Dissertazioni_, vol. i. 21. "De Bonomensi veniens Urbe, a
+tergo Claternam, ipsam Bononiam, Mutinam, Regium derelinquebas; in
+dextera erat Brixillum; a fronte occurrebat Placentia.... Te igitur
+semirutarum Urbium cadavera, terrarumque sub eodem conspectu exposita
+funera non te admonent...."]
+
+Indeed already in 306 it is rather as a refuge than as a great and
+active naval base that Ravenna appears to us, when Severus, destitute
+of force, "retired or rather fled" thither from the pursuit of
+Maximian. He flung himself into Ravenna because it was impregnable and
+because he expected reinforcements from Illyricum and the East, but
+though he held the sea with a powerful fleet he made no use of it, and
+the emissaries of Maximian easily persuaded him to surrender. Already
+perhaps, a century later, when Honorius retired from Milan on the
+approach of Alaric and the first of those barbarian invasions which
+broke up the decaying western empire had penetrated into Cisalpine
+Gaul, the great works of Augustus and Trajan at Ravenna, the canals,
+the mighty Fossa, and the port itself had fallen into a sort of decay
+which the fifth century was to complete, till that marvellous city,
+once the base of the eastern fleet and one of the great naval ports of
+the world, became just a decaying citadel engulfed in the marshes,
+impregnable it is true, but for barbarian reasons, lost in the fogs
+and the miasma of her shallow and undredged lagoons.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE RETREAT UPON RAVENNA
+
+HONORIUS AND GALLA PLACIDIA
+
+
+When Honorius left Milan on the approach of Alaric he went to Ravenna.
+Why?
+
+Gibbon, whom every writer since has followed without question, tells
+us, in one of his most scornful passages, that "the emperor Honorius
+was distinguished, above his subjects, by the pre-eminence of fear, as
+well as of rank. The pride and luxury in which he was educated had not
+allowed him to suspect that there existed on the earth any power
+presumptuous enough to invade the repose of the successor of Augustus.
+The acts of flattery concealed the impending danger till Alaric
+approached the palace of Milan. But when the sound of war had awakened
+the young emperor, instead of flying to arms with the spirit, or even
+the rashness, of his age, he eagerly listened to those timid
+counsellors who proposed to convey his sacred person and his faithful
+attendants to some secure and distant station in the provinces of
+Gaul.... The recent danger to which the person of the emperor had been
+exposed in the defenceless palace of Milan urged him to seek a retreat
+in some inaccessible fortress of Italy, where he might securely remain
+while the open country was covered by a deluge of barbarians."
+
+No historian of Ravenna, and certainly no writer upon the fall of the
+empire, has cared to understand what Ravenna was. Gibbon complains
+that he lacks "a local antiquarian and a good topographical map;" yet
+it is not so much the lack of local knowledge that leads him
+unreservedly to censure Honorius for his retreat upon Ravenna, as the
+fact that he has not perhaps really grasped what Ravenna was, what was
+her relation to Italy and Cisalpine Gaul, and especially how she stood
+to the sea, and what part that sea played in the geography and
+strategy of the empire.
+
+For my part I shall maintain that, whatever may be the truth as to the
+private character of Honorius, which would indeed be difficult to
+defend, he was wisely advised by those counsellors who conceived his
+retreat from Milan to Ravenna; that this retreat was not a mere
+flight, but a consummate and well thought out strategical and
+political move, and that any other would have been for the worse and
+would probably have involved the West in an utter destruction.
+
+Cisalpine Gaul, at this crisis, as always both before and since, was
+the great and proper defence of Italy; not the Alps nor the Apennines
+but Cisalpine Gaul broke the barbarians, and, in so far as it could be
+materially saved, saved Italy and our civilisation, of which Rome was
+the soul. There Stilicho met Alaric and broke his first and worst
+enthusiasm; there Leo the Great turned back Attila; there the fiercest
+terror of the Lombard tide spent itself.
+
+Now, as we have seen, Cisalpine Gaul, in its relation to Italy, was
+best held and contained from Ravenna, which commanded, whenever it was
+in danger, the narrow pass between them. Therefore the retreat of
+Honorius upon Ravenna was a consummate strategical act, well advised
+and such as we might expect from "the successor of Augustus." Its
+results were momentous and entirely fortunate for Italy, and indeed,
+when the truth about Ravenna is once grasped, any other move would
+appear to have been craven and ridiculous.
+
+But there is something more that is of an even greater importance.
+
+The best hope of the West in its fight with the barbarian undoubtedly
+lay in its own virility and arms, but it had the right to expect that
+in such a fight it would not be unaided by the eastern empire and the
+great civilisation whose capital was that New Rome upon the Bosphorus.
+If it was to receive such assistance, it must receive it at Ravenna,
+which held Cisalpine Gaul and was the gate of the eastern sea.
+
+When Honorius then retreated upon Ravenna, he did so, not merely
+because Ravenna was impregnable, though that of course weighed too
+with his advisers, for the base of any virile and active defence must,
+or should, be itself secure; but also because it held the great pass
+and the great road into Italy, and as the eastern gate of the West
+would receive and thrust forward whatever help and reinforcement the
+empire in the East might care or be able to give.
+
+[Illustration: SARCOPHAGUS OF THE EMPEROR HONORIUS]
+
+That the defence which was made with Ravenna for its citadel was not
+wholly victorious, that the attack which the eastern empire planned
+and delivered from Ravenna, perhaps too late, was not completely
+successful, were the results of many and various causes, but not of
+any want of Judgment in the choice of Ravenna as their base. That base
+was rightly and consummately chosen without hesitation and from the
+first; and because it was chosen, the hope of the restoration never
+quite passed away and seemed to have been realised at last when
+Charlemagne, following Pepin into Italy, was crowned emperor in S.
+Peter's Church on Christmas Day in the year 800.
+
+It will readily be understood, then, that the most important and the
+most interesting part of the history of Ravenna begins when Honorius
+retreated upon her before the invasion of Alaric, and not only the
+West, but Italy and Rome, the heart and soul of it, seemed about to be
+in dispute.
+
+But first amid all the loose thought and confusion of the last three
+hundred years let us make sure of fundamentals.
+
+I shall take for granted in this book that Rome accepted the Faith not
+because the Roman mind was senile, but because it was mature; that the
+failure of the empire is to be regretted; that the barbarians were
+barbarians; that not from them but from the new and Christian
+civilisation of the empire itself came the strength of the
+restoration, the mighty achievements of the Middle Age, of the
+Renaissance, of the Modern world. The barbarian, as I understand it,
+did nothing. He came in naked and ashamed, without laws or
+institutions. To some extent, though even in this he was a failure, he
+destroyed; it was his one service. He came and he tried to learn; he
+learnt to be a Christian. When the empire re-arose it was Roman not
+barbarian, it was Christian not heathen, it was Catholic not
+heretical. It owed the barbarian nothing. That it re-arose, and that
+as a Roman and a Catholic state, is due largely to the fact that
+Honorius retreated upon Ravenna.
+
+If we could depend upon the dates in the Theodosian Code we should be
+able to say that Honorius finally retreated upon Ravenna before
+December 402;[1] unhappily the dates we find there must not be relied
+upon with absolute confidence. We may take it that Alaric entered
+Venetia in November 401, and that at the same time Radagaisus invaded
+Rhaetia. Stilicho, Honorius' great general and the hero of the whole
+defence, advanced against Radagaisus. Upon Easter Day in the following
+year, however, he met Alaric at Pollentia and defeated him, but the
+Gothic king was allowed to withdraw from that field with the greater
+part of his cavalry entire and unbroken. Stilicho hoping to annihilate
+him forced him to retreat, overtook him at Asta (Asti), but again
+allowed him to escape and this time to retreat into Istria.
+
+[Footnote 1: Cf. Hodgkin, _Italy and her Invaders_, vol. i. pt. 2, p.
+712.]
+
+In the summer of 403 Alaric again entered Italy and laid siege to
+Verona; Stilicho, however, met him and defeated him, but again allowed
+him to retreat. Well might Orosius, his contemporary, exclaim that
+this king with his Goths, though often hemmed in, often defeated, was
+always allowed to escape.
+
+The battle of Verona was followed by a peace of two years duration.
+But in 405 the other barbarian Radagaisus came down into Cisalpine
+Gaul as Alaric had done, and Stilicho, knowing that the pass through
+which the great road entered Italy was secured by Ravenna, assailed
+him at Ticinum (Pavia). Radagaisus, however, did a bold and perhaps an
+unexpected thing. He attempted to cross the Apennines themselves by
+the difficult and neglected route that ran over them and led to
+Fiesole.[2] But the Romans had been right in their judgment. That way
+was barred by nature. It needed no defence. Before the barbarian had
+quite pierced the mountains Stilicho caught him, slew him, and
+annihilated his already starving bands at Fiesole. Cisalpine Gaul and
+the fortress of Ravenna, its key, still held Italy secure.
+
+[Footnote 2: Livy asserts that C. Flamimus, the colleague of M.
+Aemilius Lepidus in B.C. 187, built a road direct from Arezzo to
+Bologna across the Tuscan Apennines. This road early fell into disuse
+and ruin. We hear nothing of it (but see Cicero, _Phil_. xii. 9) till
+this raid of Radagaisus. Later, Totila came this way to besiege Rome.
+Cf. Repetti, _Dizionavio della Toscana_, vol. v. 713-715.]
+
+Honorius and his great general and minister now essayed what perhaps
+should have been attempted earlier, namely, to employ Alaric in the
+service of Rome, as the East had known how to employ him, at a
+distance from the capital. He was first offered the province of
+Illyricum; but the senate refused to hear of any such treaty, and
+though at last it consented to pay the Goth 4000 pounds in gold "to
+secure the peace of Italy and conciliate the friendship of the Gothic
+king," Lampadius, one of the most illustrious members of that
+assembly, asserted that "this is not a treaty of peace but of
+servitude." Thus the senate was alienated from Stilicho, and not the
+senate only but the army also, which was exasperated by his affection
+for the barbarians. Nor was the great general more fortunate with the
+emperor, who had come of late under the influence of Olympius, a man
+who, Zosimus tells us, under an appearance of Christian piety,
+concealed a great deal of rascality. Stilicho had promoted him to a
+very honourable place in the household of the emperor; nevertheless he
+plotted against him. At his suggestion Honorius proposed to show
+himself to the army at Pavia, already at enmity with Stilicho. The
+result was disastrous. For the occasion was seized for a revolt in
+which the best officers of the empire perished. Stilicho, not daring
+to march his barbarians from Bologna upon the Roman army, and by this
+refusal incurring their enmity also, flung himself into Ravenna and
+took refuge in the great church there. On the following day, however,
+he was delivered up by the bishop to Count Heraclian and slain.
+
+Thus perished in the great fortress of the defence the great defender,
+leaving the whole of Italy in confusion. He was not long to go
+unavenged.
+
+[Illustration: Colour Plate S. AGATA]
+
+Stilicho was slain in Ravenna upon August 23rd, 408. In October of
+that year Alaric, who had watched the appalling revolution that
+followed his own defeat and the annihilation of Radagaisus, after
+fruitless negotiations with Honorius, descended into Italy, passed
+Aquileia, and coming into the Aemilian Way at Bologna found the pass
+open and without misadventure entered Italy at Rimini, and, without
+attacking Ravenna, marched on "to Rome, to make that city desolate."
+He besieged Rome three times and pillaged it, taking with him, when he
+left it, hostages. As we know he never returned, but died at Cosentia
+in southern Italy, and was buried in the bed of the Buxentius, which
+had been turned aside, for a moment, by a captive multitude, to give
+him sepulture.
+
+Among those hostages which Alaric had claimed from the City and taken
+with him southward was the sister of the two emperors, the daughter of
+the great Theodosius, Galla Placidia.
+
+This great lady had been born, as is thought, in Rome about 390; she
+had, however, spent the first seven years of her life in
+Constantinople, but had returned to Italy on the death of Theodosius
+with her brother Honorius, in the care of the beautiful Serena, the
+wife of Stilicho. She does not seem to have followed her brother
+either to Milan or to Ravenna, for indeed his residence in both these
+cities was part of the great defence. She remained in Rome, probably
+in the house of her kinswoman Laeta, the widow of Gratian. That she
+had a grudge against Serena seems certain, though the whole story of
+the plot to marry her to Eucherius, Serena's son, would appear
+doubtful. That she initiated her murder, as Zosimus[1] asserts, is
+extremely improbable and altogether unproven. However that may be,
+after one of his three sieges of Rome, Alaric carried Galla Placidia
+off as a hostage. He seems, according to Zosimus, to have treated her
+with courtesy and even with an exaggerated reverence, as the sister of
+the emperor and the daughter of Theodosius, but she was compelled to
+follow in his train and to see the ruin of Lucania and Calabria. For,
+as a matter of fact and reality, Galla Placidia was the one hope of
+the Goths and this became obvious after the death of Alaric.
+
+[Footnote 1: Zosimus, v. 38. Zosimus was a pagan. Placidia was a
+devout and enthusiastic Catholic.]
+
+The Gothic army was in a sort of trap; it could not return without the
+consent of Ravenna, and if it were compelled to remain in Italy it was
+only a question of time till it should be crushed or gradually wasted
+away. It is probable that Alaric was aware of this; it is certain that
+it was well appreciated by his successor Ataulfus. He saw that his one
+chance of coming to terms with the empire lay in his possession of
+Galla Placidia. Moreover, Italy and Rome had worked in the mind and
+the spirit of this man the extraordinary change that was to declare
+itself in the soul of almost every barbarian who came to ravage them.
+He began dimly to understand what the empire was. He felt ashamed of
+his own rudeness and of the barbarism of his people. Years afterwards
+he related to a citizen of Narbonne, who in his turn repeated the
+confession to S. Jerome in Palestine in the presence of the historian
+Orosius, the curious "conversion" that Italy had worked in his heart.
+"In the full confidence of valour and victory," said Ataulfus, "I once
+aspired to change the face of the universe; to obliterate the name of
+Rome; to erect on its ruins the dominion of the Goths; and to acquire,
+like Augustus, the immortal fame of the founder of a new empire. By
+repeated experiments I was gradually convinced that laws are
+essentially necessary to maintain and regulate a well constituted
+state, and that the fierce untractable humour of the Goths was
+incapable of bearing the salutary yoke of laws and civil government.
+From that moment I proposed to myself a different object of glory and
+ambition; and it is now my sincere wish that the gratitude of future
+ages should acknowledge the merit of a stranger who employed the sword
+of the Goths not to subvert but to restore and maintain the prosperity
+of the Roman Empire."[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Orosius, vii. c. 43. Gibbon, c. xxxi.]
+
+With this change in his heart and the necessity of securing a retreat
+upon the best terms he could arrange, Ataulfus looked on Placidia his
+captive and found her perhaps fair, certainly a prize almost beyond
+the dreams of a barbarian. He aspired to marry her, and she does not
+seem to have been unready to grant him her hand. Doubtless she had
+been treated by Alaric and his successor with an extraordinary respect
+not displeasing to so royal a lady, and Ataulfus, though not so tall
+as Alaric, was both shapely and noble.[1] There seems indeed to have
+been but one obstacle to this match. This was the ambition of
+Constantius, the new minister of Honorius, who wished to make his
+position secure by marrying Placidia himself.
+
+[Footnote 1: Jornandes, c. xxxi.]
+
+Italy, however, needed peace as badly as the Goths needed a secure
+retreat. And when negotiations were opened it was seen that their
+success depended entirely upon this question of Placidia. A treaty was
+drawn up of friendship and alliance between the Goths and the empire.
+The services of Ataulfus were accepted against the barbarians who were
+harrying the provinces beyond the Alps, and the king, with Galla
+Placidia a willing captive, began his retreat from Campania into Gaul.
+His troops occupied the cities of Narbonne, Toulouse, and Bordeaux,
+and in spite of the protests and resistance of the harassed
+provincials soon extended their quarters from the Mediterranean to the
+Atlantic.
+
+To hold the Goth to his friendship and to secure his absence from
+Italy nothing remained but to accord him the hand of Placidia; and in
+the year 414 at Narbonne their marriage was solemnised.[2]
+
+[Footnote 2: Olympiodorus and Idatius say the marriage took place at
+Narbonne, but Jornandes, _op cit_. c. 31, asserts that it took place
+at Forli before Ataulfus left Italy. Perhaps there were two
+ceremonies, or perhaps the ceremony at Narbonne was but the
+celebration of an anniversary.]
+
+With the retreat of the Goth and the treaty sealed by the marriage of
+Placidia, the sister of Honorius, and the Gothic king, Italy secured
+herself a peace and a repose which endured for some forty-two years,
+only broken by the raid of Heraclian from Africa in 413.
+
+But Ataulfus did not long survive his marriage. Having crossed the
+Pyrenees and surprised in the name of Honorius the city of Barcelona,
+he was assassinated in the palace there, and in the tumult which
+followed, Singeric, the brother of his enemy and a stranger to the
+royal race, was hailed as king. This revolution made Placidia once
+more a fugitive, and we see the daughter of Theodosius "confounded
+among a crowd of vulgar captives, compelled to march on foot above
+twelve miles before the horse of a barbarian, the assassin of a
+husband whom Placidia loved and lamented." On the seventh day of his
+reign, however, Singeric was himself assassinated and Wallia, who then
+became king of the Goths, after repeated representations backed at
+last by the despatch of an army surrendered the princess to her
+brother in exchange for 600,000 measures of wheat.
+
+That must have been a strange home-coming for Placidia. Bought and
+sold twice over, twice a fugitive, the companion of the rude Goth, she
+is the most pathetic figure in all that terrible fifth century, and
+never does she appear more pitiful than on her return from the camps
+and the triumphs of the barbarians to the decadent splendour and the
+corruption of the imperial court of Ravenna, and again as a captive, a
+prize, booty.
+
+For the man who had been at the head of that army whose approach, real
+or supposed, had decided the Goths to deliver up the sister of the
+emperor was Constantius, her old lover, he who had delayed her
+marriage with Ataulfus and who now determined to marry her himself.
+
+It was in 416 that Placidia returned to Ravenna. In the following year
+Honorius gave her to Constantius, then his colleague in the consular
+office for the second time. The marriage ceremony of very great
+splendour took place in Ravenna; and in the same year was born of that
+marriage Honoria, who was to offer herself to Attila, and in 419
+Valentinian, one day to be emperor.
+
+That marriage soon had the result Constantius had intended. In 421
+Honorius was compelled to associate him with himself on the imperial
+throne and to give to Placidia the title of Augusta. The new emperor,
+however, survived his elevation to the throne but seven months and
+once more Placidia was a widow. Her life, never a happy one, if we
+except the few years in which she was the wife of Ataulfus, whom she
+seems really to have loved, became unbearable after the death of
+Constantius. At the mercy of her brother who was fast sinking, at the
+age of thirty-nine, into a vicious and idiotic senility, she, always a
+sincere Catholic in spite of her romantic marriage with the Arian
+Ataulfus, seems to have been forced into a horrible intimacy with him;
+at least we know that he obliged her to receive his obscene kisses,
+even in public, to the scandal and perhaps the amusement of that
+corrupt society. And then suddenly her brother's dreadful love seems
+to have turned to hate and she is a fugitive again with her two
+children at the court of her nephew Theodosius II. at Constantinople.
+In the very year of her flight Honorius died and the throne of the
+West was vacant.
+
+It was filled by the obscure civil servant Joannes, the chief of the
+notaries, the creature of some palace intrigue. But such a choice
+could not be tolerated by Theodosius, who immediately confirmed
+Placidia in her title of Augusta, which had not before been recognised
+at Constantinople, and accepted Valentinian, whose title was
+Nobilissimus, as the heir to the western throne, giving him the title
+of Caesar. To suppress the usurper Joannes, Theodosius despatched an
+army to bring Placidia and her children to Ravenna. After a short
+campaign in northern Italy, by a miracle, according to the
+contemporary historian Socrates, the troops of Theodosius arrived
+before Ravenna. "The prayer of the pious emperor again prevailed. For
+an angel of God, under the semblance of a shepherd, undertook the
+guidance of Aspar and his troops, and led them through the lake near
+Ravenna. Now no one had ever been known to ford that lake before; but
+God then caused that to be possible which before had been impossible.
+But when they had crossed the lake, as if going over dry land, they
+found the gates of the city open and seized the tyrant Joannes."[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Socrates, vii. 23. Cf. Hodgkin, _op cit_. i. 847.]
+
+So the Augusta with the young Caesar and her daughter Honoria entered
+Ravenna, to reign there, first as regent and then as the no less
+powerful adviser of her son, for some twenty-five years.
+
+When Ravenna opened its gates some eighteen months had passed since
+the death of Honorius. But the appearance of that "angel of God under
+the semblance of a shepherd" had not been the only miracle that had
+occurred on the return of Placidia to the imperial city by the eastern
+sea. For it seems that on her voyage either from Constantinople to
+Aquileia, where she remained till Ravenna was taken, or from Aquileia
+to Ravenna, Placidia and her children were caught in a great storm at
+sea and came near to suffer shipwreck. Then Placidia prayed aloud,
+invoking the aid of S. John the Evangelist for deliverance from so
+great a peril, and vowing to build a church in his honour in Ravenna
+if he would bring them to land. And immediately the winds and the
+waves abated and the ship came safely to port.[2] It was in fulfilment
+of her vow that Placidia built in Ravenna the Basilica of S. John the
+Evangelist.
+
+[Footnote 2: The invocation of S. John is curious, and we have not the
+key to it. For though he was a fisherman, so was S. Peter for
+instance. It is interesting, though not perhaps really significant, to
+note that it is only S. John who notes in his Gospel (vi. 21) that,
+when the Apostles saw Our Lord walking on the water in the great
+storm, and had received Him into their ship, "immediately the ship was
+at the land."]
+
+The city of Ravenna at this time would seem to have been full of
+churches. Its first bishop, S. Apollinaris, had been the friend of S.
+Peter who, as it was believed, had appointed him to the see of
+Ravenna. That was in the earliest days of the Christian Church. But we
+find the tradition still living in the fourth century when Severus,
+bishop of Ravenna, miraculously chosen to fill the see, sat in the
+council of Sardica in 344 and refused to make any alteration in the
+Nicene Creed. About the end of the century Ursus had been bishop and
+had built the great cathedral church, the Basilica Ursiana, dedicated
+in honour of the Resurrection, with its five naves and fifty-six
+columns of marble, its _schola cantorum_ in the midst, and its
+mosaics, all of which were finally and utterly destroyed in 1733.
+There was too the baptistery which remains and the church of S. Agata
+and many others which have perished.
+
+With the church of S. Agata we connect one of the great bishops of the
+fifth century, Joannes Angeloptes, who was there served at Mass by an
+angel. While with the beautiful little chapel in the bishop's palace,
+which still, in some sort at least, remains to us, we connect perhaps
+the greatest bishop Ravenna can boast of, S. Peter Chrysologus, for he
+built it.
+
+Nor was Placidia herself slow to add to the ecclesiastical splendour
+of her city. We have already seen that she built S. Giovanni
+Evangelista, rebuilt in the thirteenth century, in fulfilment of her
+vow and in memory of her salvation from shipwreck. Close to her palace
+she built another church in honour of the Holy Cross, and attached to
+it she erected her mausoleum, which remains perhaps the most precious
+monument in the city. The church and the monastery which her niece
+Singleida built beside it have perished.
+
+But though during the lifetime of Placidia Italy was free from foreign
+invasion, the decay of the western empire, of what had been the
+western empire, was by no means arrested; on the contrary, Britain,
+Gaul, Spain, and Africa were finally lost. Two appalling catastrophes
+mark her reign, the Vandal invasion of the province of Africa and the
+ever growing cloud of Huns upon the north-eastern frontiers.
+
+[Illustration: THE APSE OF S. GIOVANNI EVANGELISTA]
+
+Placidia's two chief ministers were Boniface and Aetius, either of
+whom, according to Procopius, "had the other not been his
+contemporary, might truly have been called the last of the Romans."
+Their simultaneous appearance, however, finally destroyed all hope of
+an immediate resurrection of civilisation in the West. For Boniface,
+whose "one great object was the deliverance of Africa from all sorts
+of barbarians," betrayed Africa to the Vandals, and to this he was led
+by the rivalry and intrigue of Aetius who, on the other hand, must
+always be remembered for his heroic and glorious victory over Attila
+at Chalons which delivered Gaul from the worst deluge of all--that of
+the Huns.
+
+The truth would seem to be that while corruption of every sort, and
+especially political corruption, was destroying the empire, the
+importance of Christianity was vastly increasing. The great quarrel
+was really that between Catholicism and heresy. This was a living
+issue while the cause of the empire as a political entity was already
+dead. Placidia certainly eagerly considered all sorts of
+ecclesiastical problems and provided and legislated for their
+solution. We do not find her seeking the advice and offensive and
+defensive alliance of Constantinople for the restoration of her
+provinces. It might seem almost as though the mind of her time was
+unable to fix itself upon the vast political and economic problem that
+now for many generations had demanded a solution in vain. No one seems
+to have cared in any fundamental way, or even to have been aware, that
+the empire as a great state was gradually being ruined, was indeed
+already in full decadence--a thing to despair of. That is the curious
+thing--no one seems to have despaired. On the other hand, every one
+was keenly interested in the religious controversy of the time which,
+because we cannot fully understand that time, seems to us so futile.
+But it is only what is in the mind that is fundamentally important to
+man, and that will force him to action. The council of Ephesus which
+destroyed Nestorius in 431, the council of Chalcedon which condemned
+Dioscorus in 451, seemed to be the important things, and one day we
+may come to think again, that on those great decisions, and not on the
+material defence, both military and economic, of the West, depended
+the future of the world. If this be so, it would at least explain the
+hopeless variance of East and West, which, almost equally concerned in
+the material problem, were by no means at one in philosophy.
+
+[Illustration: THE MAUSOLEUM OF GALLA PLACIDIA]
+
+Nevertheless, although Theodosius II. had not trodden "the narrow path
+of orthodoxy with reputation unimpaired," as Placidia certainly had,
+the material alliance of East and West were seen to be so important
+that in 437 Valentinian III., the son of Placidia, and emperor in the
+West, was married to Eudoxia, the daughter of Theodosius II., in
+Constantinople.
+
+Neither the accession of her son nor his marriage seem to have made
+any real difference in the power of Placidia who, we may believe, not,
+as Procopius asserts, by a cunning system of training by which she had
+ruined his character, but rather by reason of her innate virility,
+retained the reins of government in her own hands. Certainly she
+ruled, the Augusta of the West, during the twelve years that remained
+to her after her son's marriage. And when at last she died in Rome in
+450, on the 27th November,[1] in the sixtieth year of her age, and a
+few months after her nephew Theodosius II., and was borne in a last
+triumph along the Via Flaminia, to be laid, seated in a chair of
+cedar, in a sarcophagus of alabaster in the gorgeous mausoleum she had
+prepared for herself beside the church of S. Croce in Ravenna, she
+left Italy at least in a profound peace, so secure, as it seemed, that
+the whole court had in that very year removed to Rome. It might appear
+as though the barbarian had but awaited her passing to descend once
+more upon the citadel of Europe.
+
+[Footnote 1: Agnellus asserts that on the Ides of March in the year
+following Placidia's death Ravenna suffered from a great fire, in
+which many buildings perished, but he does not tell us what they
+were.]
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE FALL OF THE EMPIRE IN THE WEST
+
+
+For more than ten years before the death of Placidia both East and
+West had been aware of a new cloud in the north-east. This darkness
+was the vast army of Huns, which, in the exodus from Asia proper,
+under Attila, threatened to overrun the empire and to lay it waste. In
+447, indeed, Attila fell upon the Adriatic and Aegean provinces of the
+eastern empire and ravaged them till he was bought off with a shameful
+tribute. His thoughts inevitably turned towards the capital, and it is
+said, I know not with how much truth, that in the very year of their
+death both Placidia and Theodosius received from this new barbarian an
+insolent message which said: "Attila, thy master and mine, bids thee
+prepare a palace for him."
+
+Theodosius II., however, was succeeded upon the Eastern throne by his
+sister Pulcheria who shared her government with the virile and bold
+soldier Marcian. But upon Placidia's death, on the other hand, the
+government of the West fell into the hands of her weak and sensual son
+Valentinian III.
+
+Placidia's greatest failure, indeed, was in the training and education
+of her children. Valentinian was incapable and vicious, while Honoria,
+who had inherited much of the romantic temperament of her mother, was
+both unscrupulous and irresponsible. Sent to Constantinople on account
+of an intrigue with her chamberlain, Honoria, bored by the ascetic
+life in which she found herself and furious at her virtual
+imprisonment, sent her ring to Attila and besought him to deliver her
+and make her his wife as Ataulfus had done Placidia her mother.
+Though, it seems, the Hun disdained her, he made this appeal his
+excuse. Within a year of the death of Theodosius and Placidia he
+decided that the way of least resistance lay westward. If he were
+successful he could make his own terms, and, among his spoil, if he
+cared, should be the sister of the emperor.
+
+At first it was Gaul that was to be plundered; but there, as we know,
+the wild beast was met by Aetius who defeated him at the battle of
+Chalons and thus saved the western provinces. But that victory was not
+followed up. Attila and his vast army were allowed to retreat; and
+though Gaul was saved, Italy lay at their mercy. That was in 451.
+Attila retreated into Pannonia, and prepared for a new raid in the
+following year.
+
+He came, as Alaric had done, through the Julian Alps; and before
+spring had gone Aquileia was not, Concordia was utterly destroyed,
+Altinum became nothing. Nor have these cities ever lived again; out of
+their ruin Venice sprang in the midst of the lagoons. All the
+Cisalpine plain north of the Po was in Attila's hands; Vicenza,
+Verona, Brescia, Bergamo, Pavia, even Milan opened their gates. No
+defence was offered, they saved themselves alive. And southward, over
+the Po, between the mountains and the sea, the gate which Ravenna held
+stood open wide. Italy without defence lay at the mercy of the Asiatic
+invader.
+
+Without defence! Valentinian and his court were in Rome; no one armed
+and ready waited in impregnable Ravenna to break the Hun as with a
+hammer when he should venture to take the road through the narrow pass
+between the mountains and the sea. The great defence was not to be
+held; the road, as once before, lay open and unguarded. In this
+moment, one of the greatest crises in the history of Europe, suddenly,
+and without warning, the reality of that age, which had changed so
+imperceptibly, was revealed. The material civilisation and defence of
+the empire were, at least as organised things, seen to be dead; its
+spiritual virility and splendour were about to be made manifest.
+
+For it was not any emperor or great soldier at the head of an army
+that faced Attila by the Mincio on the Cisalpine plain and saved
+Italy, but an old and unarmed man, alone and defenceless. Our saviour
+was pope Leo the Great; but above him, in the sky, the Hun perceived
+the mighty figures, overshadowing all that world, of S. Peter and S.
+Paul, and his eyes dazzled, he bowed his head. "What," he asked
+himself, "if I conquer like Alaric only to die as he did?" He yielded
+and consented to retreat, Italy was saved. The new emperor, the true
+head and champion of the new civilisation that was to arise out of all
+this confusion, had declared himself. It was the pope.
+
+There, it might seem, we have the truth at last, the explanation,
+perhaps, of all the extraordinary ennui and neglect that had made such
+an invasion as that of Alaric, as that of Radagaisus, as this of
+Attila, possible. For it is only what is in the mind that is of any
+importance. The empire rightly understood was not about to die, but to
+change into a new spiritual kingdom in the hearts of men; and there,
+in the place of the emperor, would sit God's Vicegerent, till in the
+fullness of time the material empire should be re-established and that
+Vicegerent should place the imperial crown once more upon a merely
+royal head. The force of the old empire had always lain in wholly
+material things and its excuse had been its material success; but it
+was a servile state, and after the advent of Christianity it was
+inevitable that it should change or perish. It changed. The force of
+the new empire was to be so completely spiritual that to-day we can
+scarcely understand it. Upon the banks of the Mincio it declared
+itself; and when, twenty-three years later, Odoacer the barbarian
+deposed Romulus Augustulus and made himself king of Italy, the true
+champion of all that Latin genius had established was already
+enthroned in Rome; but the throne was Peter's, and men called him not
+Emperor but Father.
+
+Those twenty-three years, so brief a period, are, as we might imagine,
+full of confusion and strange barbarian voices.
+
+After Leo had turned him back from Italy there by the Mincio, Attila
+retreated again into Pannonia, but he still insisted "on this point
+above all, that Honoria, the sister of the emperor and the daughter of
+the Augusta Placidia, should be sent to him with the portion of the
+royal wealth which was her due; and he threatened that unless this
+were done he would lay upon Italy a far heavier punishment than any
+which it had yet borne." But within a year Attila was dead in a
+barbaric marriage-bed by the Danube, and his empire destroyed. And as
+for Honoria we know no more of her, she disappears from history,
+though tradition has it that she spent the rest of her life in a
+convent in southern Italy.
+
+The two heroes of the Hunnish deluge in the West were Aetius, the
+great general who broke Attila upon the plain of Chalons, and Leo the
+pope surnamed the Great. Aetius had been unable to persuade his
+victorious troops to march to the defence of Italy, and in this again
+we see the growing failure of the imperial idea; but he was a great
+soldier, and certainly the greatest minister that Valentinian III.
+could boast. Nevertheless, after the death of Attila he seemed to the
+emperor both dangerous and useless; dangerous because, like Stilicho,
+he thought of the empire for his son, and useless because Valentinian
+had recently placed his confidence in another, the eunuch Heraclius.
+Just as Honorius contrived the murder of Stilicho, so did Valentinian
+contrive to rid himself of Aetius, and with his own hand, for
+Valentinian stabbed him himself in his palace on the Palatine Hill in
+Rome, towards the end of 454. Six months, however, had not gone by
+when Aetius was avenged and Valentinian lay dead in the Campus Martius
+stabbed by two soldiers of barbarian origin. Beside him, dead too, lay
+the eunuch Heraclius. This was the vengeance of the friends of Aetius,
+and of him who was to be emperor, Petronius Maximus, whose wife
+Valentinian had ravished.
+
+With Valentinian III., who had no children, the great line of
+Theodosius came to an end both in the East and in the West, for
+Pulcheria had died in 453. In Constantinople Marcian continued to rule
+till 457, when he was succeeded by Leo I. the Thracian. In Rome he who
+had so signally avenged himself, Petronius Maximus, a senator, sixty
+years of age, reigned during seventy days in which he was rather a
+prisoner than a monarch. During those seventy days, whether moved by
+lust or revenge we know not, he attempted to make the widow of
+Valentinian his wife. This brought all down, for Eudoxia, without a
+friend in the world, followed the fatal example of Honoria and called
+in the Vandal to her assistance. And when Genseric was on his way to
+answer her from Carthage, the terrified City, by the hands of the
+imperial servants and the soldiers, tore the emperor limb from limb
+and flung what remained into the Tiber so that even burial was denied
+him. But the Vandal came on, and in spite of Leo, as we know, sacked
+the City and departed--to lose the mighty booty in the midst of the
+sea.
+
+What are we to say of the years which follow, and what are we to say
+of those ghostly figures, which hover, always uncertainly and briefly,
+about the imperial throne after the assassination of Valentinian III.
+and the second sack of the City? There was Avitus the Gaul (455-456),
+Majorian (457-461), Libius Severus (461-465), Anthemius (467-472),
+Olybrius (472), Glycerius (473-474), Julius Nepos (474-475), and at
+last the pitiful boy Romulus Augustulus (475-476). Nothing can be said
+of them; they are less than shadows, and their empire, the material
+empire they represented, was no longer conscious of itself, was no
+longer a reality, but an hallucination, haunting the mind. It is true
+that the chief seat of their government, if government it can be
+called, was Ravenna, and that the city is concerned with most of the
+incidents of those vague and confused years; the proclamations of
+Majorian, of Severus, of Glycerius, and of Romulus Augustulus, the
+abdication of the last and the fight in the pinewood in which his
+uncle Paulus was broken and Odoacer made himself master. But they are,
+for the most part, the years of Ricimer the patrician, for they are
+full of his puppets.
+
+This man is another Stilicho, another Aetius, a great and heroic
+soldier, but of a sinister and subtle policy without loyalty or
+scruple. His is a figure that often appears about the death-bed of
+dying states, but his genius has not so often been matched. The son of
+a Suevic father, his mother the daughter of Wallia, the successor and
+avenger of Ataulfus the Visigoth, he was the champion of the empire
+against the Vandal, that is to say, against her most relentless foe.
+His success in this was the secret of his power. Pondering the fate of
+his predecessors he determined he would not end as they did. Therefore
+he determined to make whom he would emperor and to depose him when he
+had done with him; in a word, he meant to be the master as well as the
+saviour of Italy. In this he was successful. He deposed Avitus and
+caused him to be consecrated bishop of Placentia. In his place he set
+a man of his own choice, Majorian, whom he raised to the empire on
+April 1, 457, in the camp at Columellae, at the sixth milestone, it
+seems, from Ravenna; and upon August 2,461, he caused him to be put to
+death near Tortona.
+
+He chose Libius Severus to fill the place of Majorian and had him
+proclaimed in Ravenna upon November 19, 461; and upheld him for nearly
+four years till he died in Rome on August 15, 465, poisoned, men said,
+by Ricimer. Then the "king-maker" allied himself with Constantinople
+and placed Anthemius, son-in-law of Marcian, upon the throne of the
+West, in 467, kept him there till 472, and then proclaimed Olybrius,
+another Byzantine, emperor; laid siege to Anthemius in Rome, took the
+City, slew Anthemius, and forty days later himself died, leaving the
+command of his army to his nephew Gundobald, one of the princes of the
+Burgundians. Seven months later Olybrius died.
+
+The alliance Ricimer had made with Constantinople, though he repented
+it, was the one hope of the future, and as a fact the future belonged
+to it. For a moment Gundobald was able to place an obscure soldier
+Glycerius upon the throne, but he soon exchanged the purple for the
+bishopric of Salona, and the nominee of Constantinople, Julius Nepos,
+reigned in Ravenna in his stead. But though the future belonged to
+Constantinople, the present did not. The barbarian confederates,
+discontented and unwilling to give their allegiance to this Greek,
+rebelled and under Orestes their general marched upon Ravenna. Julius
+Nepos fled by ship to Dalmatia and Orestes in Ravenna proclaimed his
+young son Romulus Augustulus emperor. But those barbarian mercenaries
+were not to be so easily satisfied. Of the new emperor they demanded a
+third of the lands of all Italy, and when this was refused them they
+flocked to the standard of that barbarian general in the Roman service
+whom we know as Odoacer. "From all the camps and garrisons of Italy"
+the barbarian confederates flocked to the new standard and Orestes was
+compelled to shut himself up in Pavia while Paulus, his brother, held
+Ravenna for the boy emperor. Upon August 23, 476, Odoacer was raised
+like the barbarian he was, upon the shield, as Alaric had been, and
+his troops proclaimed him king. Five days later Orestes, who had
+escaped from Pavia, was taken and put to death at Placentia, and on
+September 4 Paulus his brother was taken in the Pineta outside Classis
+by Ravenna and was slain. The gates of Ravenna were open, Romulus
+Augustulus, the last emperor in the West, was forced to abdicate and
+was sent by Odoacer to the famous villa that Lucullus had built for
+himself long and long ago in Campania, and was granted a pension of
+six thousand _soldi_, and Odoacer reigned as the first king of Italy;
+the western empire, as such, was at an end.
+
+And the senate addressed, by unanimous decree, to the emperor Zeno in
+Constantinople an epistle, in which they disclaimed "the necessity, or
+even the wish, of continuing any longer the imperial succession in
+Italy, since, in their opinion, the majesty of a sole monarch is
+sufficient to pervade and protect at the same time both East and West.
+In their own name and in the name of the people they consent to the
+seat of universal empire being transferred from Rome to
+Constantinople, and they renounce the right of choosing their master.
+They further state that the republic (they repeat that name without a
+blush) might safely confide in the civil and military virtues of
+Odoacer; and they humbly request that the emperor would invest him
+with the title of patrician and the administration of the _diocese_ of
+Italy."
+
+And Odoacer sent the diadem and the purple robe, the imperial ensigns,
+the sacred ornaments of the throne and palace to Byzantium and
+received thence the title of patrician.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THEODORIC
+
+
+We may well ask what was the condition of Ravenna when the western
+empire fell and Odoacer made himself king of Italy. And by the
+greatest of good fortune we can answer that question. For we have a
+fairly vivid account of Ravenna from the hand of Sidonius Apollinaris
+who passed through the city on his way to Rome in 467.
+
+Ravenna had been the chief city of Italy during the seventy years of
+revolution and administrative disaster and decay which had followed
+the incursion of Alaric. For the greater part of that period she had
+been the seat of the emperors and of their government, and it is
+perhaps for reasons such as these that we find, after all, but little
+change in her condition. She does not seem to have suffered much decay
+since Honorius retreated upon her.
+
+"It is difficult," Sidonius tells us, "to say whether the old city of
+Ravenna is separated from the new port or joined to it by the Via
+Caesaris which lies between them. Above the town the Po is divided
+into two streams, of which one washes its walls and the other passes
+through its streets. The whole river has been diverted from its true
+channel by means of large mounds thrown across it at the public
+expense, and being thus drawn off into channels marked out for it, so
+divides its waters, that they offer protection to the walls which they
+encompass and bring commerce into the city which they penetrate. By
+this route, which is most convenient for the purpose, all kinds of
+mechandise arrive, and especially food. But against this must be set
+the fact that the supply of drinking water is wretched. On the one
+side you have the salt waves of the sea dashing against the gates, on
+the other the canals, filled with sewage of the consistency of gruel,
+are being constantly churned up by the passage of the barges; and the
+river itself, here gliding along with a very slow current, is made
+muddy by the poles of the bargemen which are being continually thrust
+into its clayey bed. The consequence was that we were thirsty in the
+midst of the waves, since no wholesome water was brought to us by the
+aqueducts, no cistern was flowing, no well was without its mud."[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Sidonius Apoll. _Ep_. 1 5. Cf. Hodgkin, _op. cit_. vol.
+1. p. 859.]
+
+In another letter we have a rather more fantastic picture. "A pretty
+place Cesena must be if Ravenna is better, for there your ears are
+pierced by the mosquito of the Po and a talkative mob of frogs is
+always croaking round you. Ravenna is a mere marsh where all the
+conditions of life are reversed, where walls fall and waters stand,
+towers flow down and ships squat, invalids walk about and their
+doctors take to bed, baths freeze and houses burn, the living perish
+with thirst and the dead swim about on the surface of the water,
+thieves watch and magistrates sleep, priests lend at usury and Syrians
+sing psalms, merchants shoulder arms and soldiers haggle like
+hucksters, greybeards play at ball and striplings at dice, and eunuchs
+study the art of war and the barbarian mercenaries study
+literature."[2]
+
+[Footnote 2: _Idem. Ep_. 1. 8. Cf. Hodgkin, _op cit_ vol. 1. p. 860.]
+
+Such was the Ravenna of the barbarian who called himself king of
+Italy.
+
+We have seen Ravenna since her incorporation into the Roman
+administrative system fulfilling the various reasons of her existence;
+as the fortress which held the gate into Italy from Cisalpine Gaul, as
+the second naval port of the West, and as the great impregnable
+fortress of Italy in the barbarian invasions. Odoacer, also, chose it
+as his chief seat of government for similar advantages. Ravenna
+strongly held gave him, as strongly held she had given every one of
+her masters, Italy and Cisalpine Gaul; while as the gate of the
+eastern sea, Ravenna was his proper means of communication with his
+over-lord and the eastern provinces of what was, rightly understood,
+the reunited empire.
+
+That, theoretically at least, is how Odoacer regarded the state in
+which, by the good pleasure of the emperor Zeno, he held the title of
+patrician. He was an unlettered man, an Arian, as were all the
+barbarians, and he held what he held by permission of Constantinople,
+though he had won it by his own strength in the weakness and misery of
+the time. He never aspired, it would seem, to make himself emperor.
+Certainly for the first four years of his rule in Ravenna that great
+office was filled by Julius Nepos in exile at Salona, whose deposition
+at the hands of Orestes had never been recognised by Constantinople.
+Thereafter, the western and the eastern empire were in theory
+reunited, with New Rome upon the Bosphorus for their true capital; and
+both before and after that event Odoacer ruled in Italy with the title
+of patrician conferred upon him by Constantinople. When that consent
+was withdrawn, as it was immediately Odoacer showed signs of ambition,
+he fell.
+
+Odoacer had ruled in Ravenna from 476 to 493, when he fell in that
+city after sustaining a siege of three years. He ruled well and
+strongly and by the laws of the empire. He was compelled by the
+barbaric confederates, who had placed him where he was, to grant them
+a third of the lands, certainly, of the great Italian landowners; but
+he created nothing new; like all the barbarians he was sterile, his
+only service was a service of destruction. With him even this service
+was small.
+
+His fall was curious and is exceedingly significant.
+
+In 481, after the murder of the emperor Julius Nepos in Salona,
+Odoacer led an expedition into Dalmatia to chastise the murderers and
+seized the opportunity to make himself master of Dalmatia. This action
+at once renewed the suspicion of Constantinople; but when in 484
+Odoacer entered into negotiations with Illus, the last of the
+insurgents who disturbed the reign of Zeno, Constantinople decided
+that he must be broken; therefore Feletheus, king of the Rugians upon
+the Danube, was stirred up against him, and when that failed, for
+Odoacer defeated him, Constantinople sent Theodoric and his
+Ostrogothic host into Italy to dispose of Odoacer the patrician[1].
+
+[Footnote 1: Cf. Anon. Valesii, "Missus ab imperatore Zenone de
+partibus orientis ad defendendam sibi Italiam...."]
+
+Theodoric, another unlettered barbarian and heretic, but a man of a
+great and noble character, set out for Italy from Nova on the southern
+bank of the Danube, where he had been a constant danger to the Eastern
+provinces, in the autumn of 488. His purpose, set forth in his own
+words to the Emperor Zeno, was as follows: "Although your servant is
+maintained in affluence by your liberality, graciously listen to the
+wishes of my heart. Italy, the inheritance of your predecessors, and
+Rome itself, the head and mistress of the world, now fluctuate under
+the violence and oppression of Odoacer the mercenary. Direct me with
+my national troops to march against this tyrant. If I fall, you will
+be delivered from an expensive and troublesome friend; if, with the
+Divine permission, I succeed, I shall govern, in your name and to your
+glory, the Roman senate and the part of the republic delivered from
+slavery by my victorious arms."
+
+That march was an exodus. Procopius tells us that, "with Theodoric
+went the people of the Goths, putting their wives and children and as
+much of their furniture as they could take with them into their
+waggons," and as Ennodius, bishop of Ticinum, asserts, it was "a world
+that migrated" with Theodoric into Italy, "a world of which every
+member is nevertheless your kinsman." "Waggons," says he, "are made to
+do duty as houses, and into these wandering habitations all things
+that can minister to the needs of the occupants are poured. Then were
+the tools of Ceres, and the stones with which the corn is ground,
+dragged along by the labouring oxen. Pregnant mothers, forgetful of
+their sex and of the burden which they bore, undertook the toil of
+providing food for the families of thy people. Followed the reign of
+winter in thy camp. Over the hair of thy men the long frost threw a
+veil of snowy white; the icicles hung in a tangle from their beards.
+So hard was the frost that the garment which the matron's persevering
+toil had woven had to be broken before a man might fit it to his body.
+Food for thy marching armies was forced from the grasp of the hostile
+nations around, or procured by the cunning of the hunter."[1] It has
+been supposed by Mr. Hodgkin that not less than 40,000 fighting men
+and some 200,000 souls in all thus entered Italy. To us it might seem
+that no such number of people could have lived without commissariat
+during that tremendous march of seven hundred miles through some of
+the poorest land of Europe in the depth of winter. However that may
+be, Theodoric after many an encounter with barbarians wilder than his
+own descended from the Julian Alps into Venetia in August 489, after a
+march of not less than ten months.
+
+[Footnote 1: Ennodius, _Panegyricus_, p. 173. Trs. by Hodgkin, _op.
+cit_. iii. 179-80.]
+
+Odoacer was waiting for him. He met him near the site of the old
+fortress of Aquileia, which Attila had annihilated, that once held the
+passage of the Sontius (Isonzo). He was defeated and all Venetia fell
+into the hands of the Ostrogoth. Odoacer retreated to Verona, that red
+fortress on the Adige; once more and more certainly he was beaten. He
+retreated to Ravenna,[2] while Theodoric advanced to Milan, to Milan
+which now led nowhere.
+
+[Footnote 2: "Et Ravennam cum exercitu fugiens pervenit." Anon.
+Valesii, 50.]
+
+After Verona, Theodoric had received the submission of a part of
+Odoacer's army under Tufa. When he had possessed himself of Milan, he
+sent these renegades and certain nobles with their men from his own
+army, apparently under the leadership of Tufa, to besiege Ravenna.
+They came down the Aemilian Way as far as Faventia (Faenza). There no
+doubt a road left the great highway for the impregnable city of the
+marshes. At Faventia, then, Theodoric expected to begin to blockade
+Ravenna. In this he was mistaken. Suddenly Tufa deserted his new
+master, was joined by Odoacer, who came to Faventia, and certain of
+the Ostrogothic nobles, if not all of them, were slaughtered. The
+expedition was lost and not the expedition alone: Milan was no longer
+safe. Therefore Theodoric evacuated that city, always almost
+indefensible, and occupied Ticinum (Pavia), which was naturally
+defended by the Ticino and the Po. There he established himself in
+winter quarters.
+
+A new diversion from the west, a frustrated attack of Gundobald and
+his Burgundians, kept Theodoric busy for a year. Meantime Odoacer
+appeared in the plain, retook and held all the country between
+Faventia and Cremona and even visited Milan, which he chastised. Then
+in August 490 Theodoric met him on the Adda, and again Odoacer was
+defeated, and again he fled back to Ravenna. All over Italy his cause
+tottered, was betrayed, or failed. A general massacre of the
+confederate troops throughout the peninsula seems to have occurred.
+And by the end of the year there remained to him but Ravenna, his
+fortress, and the two cities that it commanded, Cesena upon the
+Aemilian Way and Rimini in the midst of the narrow pass at the head of
+the Via Flaminia. Theodoric himself began the siege of Ravenna.
+
+This siege, the first that Ravenna had ever experienced, endured for
+near three years, from the autumn of 490 to the spring of 493. "_Et
+mox_" says a chronicle of the time, "_subsecutus est eum patricius
+Theodoricus veniens in Pineta, et fixit fossatum, obsidiens Odoacrem
+clausum per trienum in Ravenna et factus est usque ad sex solidos
+modicus tritici_...."[1] Theodoric established himself in a fortified
+camp in the Pineta with a view to preventing food or reinforcements
+arriving to his enemy from the sea. Ravenna was closed upon all sides
+and before the end of the siege corn rose in the beleaguered city to
+famine price, some seventy-two shillings of our money per peck, and
+the inhabitants were forced to eat the skins of animals and all sorts
+of offal, and many died of hunger.
+
+[Footnote 1: Anon. Valesii.]
+
+In 491, according to the same chronicler,[1] a sortie was made by
+Odoacer and his barbarians, but after a desperate fight in the Pineta
+this was repelled by Theodoric. In 492, another chronicle tells us,[2]
+Theodoric took Rimini and from thence brought a fleet of ships to the
+Porto Leone, some six miles from Ravenna, thus cutting off the city
+from the sea. Till at last in the beginning of 493 Odoacer was
+compelled to open negotiations for surrender. He gave his son Thelane
+as a hostage, and on the 26th February Theodoric entered Classis, and
+on the following day the treaty of peace was signed. Upon the 5th
+March 493, according to Agnellus, "that most blessed man, the
+archbishop John, opened the gates of the city which Odoacer had
+closed, and went forth with crosses and thuribles and the Holy Gospels
+seeking peace, with the priests and clergy singing psalms, and
+prostrating himself upon the ground obtained what he sought. He
+welcomed the new king coming from the East and peace was granted to
+him, not only with the citizens of Ravenna, but with the other Romans
+for whom the blessed John asked it."
+
+[Footnote 1: Anon. Valesii.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Agnellus, _Liber Pontificalis Rav_.]
+
+The terms of that treaty are extraordinarily significant of the
+importance of Ravenna in the defence of Italy. It would seem that
+Theodoric had possessed himself of everything but Ravenna easily
+enough, yet without Ravenna everything else was nothing. The city was,
+in spite of blockade and famine, impregnable, and it commanded so
+much, was still indeed, as always, the key to Italy and the plain and
+the very gate of the West, that not to possess it was to lose
+everything. Its surrender was necessary and Theodoric offered
+extraordinary terms to obtain it. Odoacer was not only to keep his
+life but his power. He was to rule as the equal of Theodoric. This
+mighty concession shows us at once what Ravenna really was, what part
+she played in the government of Italy, and how unique was her position
+in the military scheme of that country.
+
+Theodoric had certainly no intention of carrying out the terms of his
+treaty. In the very month in which he signed it, he invited Odoacer to
+a feast at the Palace "in Lauro" to the south-east of Ravenna. When
+the patrician arrived two petitioners knelt before him each clasping
+one of his hands, and two of Theodoric's men stepped from hiding to
+kill him. Perhaps they were not barbarians: at any rate, they lacked
+the courage and the contempt alike of law and of honour necessary to
+commit so cold a murder. It was Theodoric himself who lifted his sword
+and hewed his enemy in twain from the shoulder to the loins. "Where is
+God?" Odoacer, expecting the stroke, had demanded. And Theodoric
+answered, "Thus didst thou to my friends." And after he said, "I think
+the wretch had no bones in his body."
+
+The barbarian it might seem had certainly nothing to learn from the
+worst of the emperors in treachery and dishonour.
+
+Theodoric set up his seat in the city he had so perfidiously won, and
+for the next thirty years appears as the governour of Italy. He had
+set out, it will be remembered, as the soldier of Constantinople, had
+asked for leave to make his expedition, and had protested his
+willingness to govern in the name of the emperor and for his glory. It
+is not perhaps surprising that a barbarian, and especially Theodoric
+who knew so well how to win by treachery what he could not otherwise
+obtain, should after his victory forget the promise he had made to his
+master. After the battle of the Adda he had the audacity to send an
+embassy to the emperor to request that he might be allowed to clothe
+himself in the royal mantle. This was of course refused. Nevertheless
+the Goths "confirmed Theodoric to themselves as king without waiting
+for the order of the new emperor Anastasius."[1] This "confirmation,"
+whatever it may have meant to the Goths, meant nothing to the Romans
+or to the empire. For some years Constantinople refused all
+acknowledgment to Theodoric, till in 497 peace was made and Theodoric
+obtained recognition, much it may be thought as Odoacer had done, from
+Constantinople; but the ornaments of the palace at Ravenna, which
+Odoacer had sent to New Rome, were brought back, and therefore it
+would seem that the royalty of Theodoric was acknowledged by the
+empire; but we have no authority to see in this more than an
+acknowledgment of the king of the Goths, the vicegerent perhaps of the
+emperor in Italy. What Theodoric's title may have been we have no
+means of knowing: _de jure_ he was the representative of the emperor
+in Italy: _de facto_ he was the absolute ruler, the _tyrannus_, as
+Odoacer had been, of the country; but he never ventured to coin money
+bearing his effigy and superscription and he invariably sent the names
+of the consuls, whom he appointed, to Constantinople for confirmation.
+He ruled too, as Odoacer had done, by Roman law, and the Arian heresy,
+which he and his barbarians professed as their religion, was not till
+the very end of his reign permitted precedence over the Catholic
+Faith. For the most part too he governed by means of Roman officials,
+and to this must be ascribed the enormous success of his long
+government.
+
+[Footnote 1: Anon. Valesu, 57.]
+
+[Illustration: CAPITAL FROM THE COLONNADE IN PIAZZA MAGGIORE]
+
+For that he was successful, that he gave Italy peace during a whole
+generation, is undeniable. In all the chronicles there is little but
+praise of him. The chief of them[1] says of him: "He was an
+illustrious man and full of good-will towards all. He reigned
+thirty-three years[2] and during thirty of these years so great was
+the happiness of Italy that even the wayfarers were at peace. For he
+did nothing evil. He governed the two nations, the Goths and the
+Romans, as though they were one people. Belonging himself to the Arian
+sect, he yet ordained that the civil administration should remain for
+the Romans as it had been under the emperors. He gave presents and
+rations to the people, yet though he found the treasury ruined he
+brought it by hard work into a flourishing state. He attempted nothing
+against the Catholic Faith. He exhibited games in the circus and
+amphitheatre, and received from the Romans the names of Trajan and
+Valentinian, for the happy days of those most prosperous emperors he
+did in truth seek to restore, and at the same time the Goths rendered
+true obedience to their valiant king according to the edict which he
+had given them.
+
+[Footnote 1: Anon. Valesii. This was probably Bishop Maximian, a
+Catholic bishop of Ravenna. I follow, with a few changes, Mr.
+Hodgkin's translation.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Thirty-two years and a half from the death of Odoacer;
+thirty-seven from his descent into Italy.]
+
+"He gave one of his daughters in marriage to the king of the Visigoths
+in Gaul, another to the son of the Burgundian king; his sister to the
+king of the Vandals and his niece to the king of the Thuringians. Thus
+he pleased all the nations round him, for he was a lover of
+manufactures and a great restorer of cities. He restored the Aqueduct
+of Ravenna which Trajan had built, and again after a long interval
+brought water into the city. He completed but did not dedicate the
+Palace, and he finished the Porticoes about it. At Verona he erected
+Baths and a Palace, and constructed a Portico from the Gate to the
+Palace. The Aqueduct, which had been destroyed long since, he renewed,
+and brought in water through it. He also surrounded the city with new
+walls. At Ticinum (Pavia) too he built a Palace, Baths, and an
+Amphitheatre and erected walls round the city. On many other cities he
+bestowed similar benefits.
+
+"Thus he so delighted the nations near him that they entered into a
+league with him hoping that he would be their king. The merchants,
+too, from many provinces flocked to his dominions, for so great was
+the order which he maintained, that, if any one wished to keep gold
+and silver in the country it was as safe as in a walled city. A proof
+of this was that he never made gates for any city of Italy, and the
+gates that already existed were never closed. Any one who had business
+to do, might go about it as safely by night as by day."
+
+But if such praise sound fulsome, let us hear what the sceptical and
+censorious Procopius has to say:
+
+"Theodoric," he tells us, "was an extraordinary lover of justice and
+adhered vigorously to the laws. He guarded the country from barbarian
+invasions, and displayed the greatest intelligence and prudence. There
+was in his government scarcely a trace of injustice towards his
+subjects, nor would he permit any of those under him to attempt
+anything of the kind except that the Goths divided among themselves
+the same proportion of the land of Italy as Odoacer had given to his
+confederates. Thus then Theodoric was in name a tyrant, in fact a true
+king, not inferior to the best of his predecessors, and his popularity
+increased greatly both with the Goths and the Italians, and this was
+contrary to the ordinary course of human affairs. For generally as
+different classes in the state want different things, the government
+which pleases one party incurs the hatred of the other. After a reign
+of thirty-seven years he died having been a terror to all his enemies,
+but leaving a deep regret for his loss in the hearts of his subjects."
+
+In these panegyrics, which we cannot but accept as sincere, mention is
+made of one of the greatest virtues of Theodoric, his reparation of
+and care for the great monuments of the empire. In Ravenna we read he
+repaired the Aqueduct which Trajan had built and which had long been
+out of repair, so that Ravenna always deficient in water had for many
+years suffered on this account. In the _Variae_ of Cassiodorus, his
+minister and a Roman, we read as follows:--
+
+"_King Theodoric to all Cultivators_.
+
+"The Aqueducts are an object of our special care. We desire you at
+once to root up the shrubs growing in the Signine channel, which will
+before long become big trees scarcely to be hewn down with an axe and
+which interfere with the purity of the water in the Aqueduct of
+Ravenna. Vegetation is the peaceable overturner of buildings, the
+battering-ram which brings them to the ground, though the trumpets
+never sound for siege. Now we shall have Baths again that we may look
+upon with pleasure; water which will cleanse not stain[1]; water after
+using which we shall not require to wash ourselves again; drinking
+water too, such as the mere sight of it will not take away all
+appetite for food[2]."
+
+[Footnote 1: Cf. Sidonius Apollinaris above.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Cassiodorus, _Variae_, v. 38. Trs. Hodgkin, _The Letters
+of Cassiodorus_ (Oxford, 1886).]
+
+The general restoration of the great material works of the empire was
+characteristic of the reign of Theodoric and could only have been
+carried out by Roman officials and workmen. It is especially frequent
+in Ravenna and in Rome. Theodoric will, if he can help it, have
+nothing more destroyed. He is afraid of destruction, and that is a
+mark of the barbarian. He wishes, Cassiodorus tells us, "to build new
+edifices without despoiling the old. But we are informed that in your
+municipality (of Aestunae) there are blocks of masonry and columns,
+formerly belonging to some building, now lying absolutely useless and
+unhonoured. If this be so, send these slabs of marble and columns by
+all means to Ravenna that they may again be made beautiful and take
+their place in a building there."[1] And again: "We rely upon your
+zeal and prudence to see that the required blocks of marble are
+forwarded from Faenza to Ravenna without any extortion from private
+persons; so that, on the one hand, our desire for the adornment of
+that city may be gratified, and, on the other, there may be no cause
+for complaint on the part of our subjects.[2]
+
+His care and adornment of Ravenna are remarkable. It was his capital
+and he built there with a truly Roman splendour.  We hear vaguely of a
+Basilica of Hercules which was to be adorned with a mosaic, though
+what this may have been we do not know; but we still have the
+magnificent Arian church of S. Apollinare, which he called S. Martin
+_de Coelo Aureo_ because of its beautiful gilded roof; and less
+perfectly there remains to us the Arian church he built, called then
+S. Theodore and now S. Spirito, and the Arian baptistery beside it;
+the ruin, known as his palace, and his mighty tomb.
+
+The government of Theodoric was great and generous, Roman in its
+completeness and in its largeness; but he did not succeed in
+establishing a new kingdom, a nation of Goths and Romans in Italy.
+Why?
+
+The answer to that question must be given and it is this: Theodoric
+and his Goths were Arians. Much more than race or nationality religion
+forms and inspires a people, welds them into one or divides them
+asunder. Even though there had been no visible difference in culture
+and civilisation between the Goths, when for a generation they had
+been settled south of the Alps, and the Romans of the plain and of
+Italy, nevertheless they would have remained barbarians, for Arianism
+at this time was the certain mark of barbarism.[3] Had the barbarians
+not fallen into this strange heresy, had the Goths, above all, been
+Catholics, who knows what new nation might have arisen upon the ruin
+of the Western empire to create, more than five hundred years before,
+as things were, it was to blossom, the rose of the Middle Age?
+
+[Footnote 1: Cassiodorus, op cit. iii. 9. Trs. Hodgkin, op. cit.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Cassiodorus, op. cit. v. 8.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Heathenism even more so of course. It cannot be
+altogether a cooincidence that those barbarians which first became
+Catholic, though they had been ruder and rougher than the rest, were
+destined to re-establish the empire in the West--the Franks.]
+
+[Illustration: S. APOLLINARE IN CLASSE]
+
+[Illustration: Colour Plate THE MAUSOLEUM OF THEODORIC]
+
+But this was not to be. The work of Theodoric, a useful work as we
+shall see, was serving quite another purpose than that of establishing
+a new Gothic kingdom. As for him and his government, they were utterly
+to pass away and by reason of the religion they professed.
+
+The first blow at the endurance and security of the Ostrogothic
+hegemony was the conversion of Clovis to Catholicism in 496. This
+changed the political relations, not only of every state in Gaul, but
+of every state in Europe, and enormously to the disadvantage of the
+Arians. The second was the reconciliation, in 519, of the pope and the
+emperor, which rightly understood was the death warrant of the Gothic
+kingdom. Had the Goths been Catholic, either that reconciliation would
+not have taken place, or it would have been without ill results for
+them. As it was it was fatal, though not all at once.
+
+The Arian heresy, if we are to understand it aright, must be
+recognised as an orientalism having much in common with Judaism and
+the later Mahometanism. It denied several of the statements of the
+Nicene Creed, those monoliths upon which the new Europe was to be
+founded. It maintained that the Father and the Son are distinct
+Beings; that the Son though divine is not equal to the Father; that
+the Son had a state of existence previous to His appearance upon
+earth, but is not from Eternity; that Christ Jesus was not really man
+but a divine being in a case of flesh. Already against it the future
+frowned dark and enormous as the Alps.
+
+Such was the heresy at the root of the Ostrogothic kingdom, and it is
+significant that the cause of the first open alienation between
+Theodoric and the Catholics of Italy was concerned with the Jews. It
+seems that the Jews, whom Theodoric had always protected, had, during
+his absence from Ravenna, mocked the Christian rite of baptism and
+made sport of it by throwing one another into one of the two muddy
+rivers of that city, and also by some blasphemous foolishness aimed at
+the Mass. The Catholic population had naturally retaliated by burning
+all the Jewish synagogues to the ground. Theodoric, like all the
+Gothic Arians, sided with the Jews and fined the Catholic citizens of
+Ravenna, publicly flogging those who could not pay, in order that the
+synagogues might be rebuilt. Such was the first open breach between
+the king and the Romans, who now began to remind themselves that there
+was an Augustus at Constantinople. This memory, which had slumbered
+while pope and emperor were in conflict--such is the creative and
+formative power of religion--was stirred and strengthened by the
+reconciliation between the emperor Justin and the Holy See. It is
+curious that the man who was to lead the Catholic party and to suffer
+in the national cause had translated thirty books of Aristotle into
+Latin; his name was Boethius and he was master of the offices.
+
+This great and pathetic figure had been till the year 523 continually
+in the favour of Theodoric. In that year suddenly an accusation was
+brought against the patrician Albinus of "sending letters to the
+emperor Justin hostile to the royal rule of Theodoric." In the debate
+which followed, Boethius claimed to speak and declared that the
+accusation was false, "but whatever Albinus did, I and the whole
+senate of Rome with one purpose did the same." We may well ask for a
+clear statement of what they had done; we shall get no answer.
+Boethius himself speaks of "the accusation against me of having hoped
+for Roman freedom," and adds: "As for Roman freedom, what hope is left
+to us of that? Would that there were any such hope." To the charge of
+"hoping for Roman freedom" was added an accusation of sorcery.
+
+Boethius was tried in the senate house in Rome while he was lying in
+prison in Pavia. Without being permitted to answer his accusers or to
+be heard by his judges he was sentenced to death by the intimidated
+senate whose freedom he was accused of seeking to establish. From
+Pavia, where in prison awaiting death he had written his _De
+Consolatione Philosophiae_ which was so largely to inform the new
+Europe, he was carried to "the _ager Calventianus_" a few miles from
+Milan; where he was tortured, a cord was twisted round his forehead
+till his eyes burst from their sockets, and then he was clubbed to
+death. This occurred in 524, and in that same year throughout the
+empire we find the great movement against Arianism take on new life.
+
+[Illustration: CAPITAL FROM S. VITALE]
+
+This irresistible attack began in the East and Theodoric seems at once
+to have seen in it the culmination of all those dangers he had to
+fear. He recognised, too, at last, that it was Catholicism he had to
+face. Therefore he sent for pope John I. When the pope, old and
+infirm, appeared in Ravenna, Theodoric made the greatest diplomatic
+mistake of his life. He bade the pope go to Constantinople to the
+emperor and tell him that "he must not in any way attempt to win over
+those whom he calls heretics to the Catholic religion."
+
+Apart from the impertinence of this command to the emperor from the
+king of the Goths, it was foolish in the extreme. His object should
+have been, above all else, to keep the emperor and the pope apart, but
+by this act he forced them together; only anger can have suggested
+such an impolitic move. "The king," says the chronicler[1], "returning
+in great anger [from the murder of Boethius] and unmindful of the
+blessings of God, considered that he might frighten Justin by an
+embassy. Therefore he sent for John the chief of the Apostolic See to
+Ravenna and said to him, 'Go to Justin the emperor and tell him that
+among other things he must restore the converted heretics to the
+(Arian) faith.' And the pope answered, 'What thou doest do quickly.
+Behold here I stand in thy sight. I will not promise to do this thing
+for thee nor to say this to the emperor. But in other matters, with
+God's help, I may succeed.' Then the king being angered ordered a ship
+to be prepared and placed the pope aboard together with other bishops,
+namely, Ecclesius of Ravenna, Eusebius of Fano, Sabinus of Campania,
+and two others with the following senators, Theodorus, Importunus,
+Agapitus, and another Agapitus. But God, who does not forsake those
+who are faithful, brought them prosperously to their journey's end.
+Then the emperor Justin met the pope on his arrival as though he were
+St. Peter himself[2], and when he heard his message promised that he
+would comply with all his requests, but _the converts who had given
+themselves to the Catholic Faith he could by no means restore to the
+Arians_."
+
+[Footnote 1: Anon. Valesii, _ut supra_.]
+
+[Footnote 2: "Prone on the ground the emperor, whom all other men
+adored, adored the weary pontiff.... When Easter-day came, the pope,
+taking the place of honour at the right hand of the patriarch of
+Constantinople, celebrated Mass according to the Latin use in the
+great cathedral."--Marcellinus Comes, quoted by Hodgkin, _op. cit_.
+iii. p. 463.]
+
+That was a great day not only for the papacy but for Italy. The pope
+can never have hoped that Theodoric would open to him so great an
+opportunity for confirming the reconciliation between the emperor and
+the papacy which was the great need of the Latin cause. There can be
+little doubt that pope John used his advantage to the utmost. Early in
+526 he returned to Ravenna to find Theodoric beside himself with
+anger. The barbarian who had perfidiously murdered Odoacer his rival,
+and most foully tortured the old philosopher Boethius to death, was
+not likely to shrink from any outrage that he thought might serve him,
+even though his victim were the pope. Symmachus, the father-in-law of
+Boethius, a venerable and a saintly man, was barbarously done to death
+and Pope John and his colleagues were thrown into prison in Ravenna,
+where the pope died on May 18 of that same year, and one hundred and
+four days later was followed to the grave by the unhappy Gothic king.
+
+[Illustration: CAPITAL FROM SANTO SPIRITO]
+
+Theodoric had utterly failed in everything he had attempted. His
+Romano-Gothic kingdom proved to be a hopeless chimaera, and this
+because he had not been able to understand the forces with which he
+had to deal. Nor was he capable of learning from experience. Even
+after the death of Pope John he countersigned the death warrant of his
+kingdom by an edict, issued with the signature of a Jewish treasury
+clerk, that all the Catholic churches of Italy should be handed over
+to the Arians. He had scarcely published this amazing document,
+however, when he died after three days of pain on August 30, 526, the
+very day the revolution was to have taken place.
+
+The Gothic king was buried outside Ravenna upon the north-east and in
+the mighty tomb--a truly Roman work--that the Romans, at his orders,
+had prepared for him: a marvellous mausoleum of squared stones in two
+stories, the lower a decagon, the upper an octagon covered by a vast
+dome hewn out of a single block of Istrian marble. There in a porphyry
+vase reposed all that was mortal of the great barbarian who failed to
+understand what the Roman empire was, but who almost without knowing
+it rendered it, as we shall see, so great a service. But the body of
+Theodoric did not long remain in the enormous silence of that
+sepulchre. Even in the time of Agnellus (ninth century) the body was
+no longer in the mausoleum and what had become of it will always
+remain a mystery. A weird and awful legend, in keeping with the
+tremendous tragedy that was played out in his time and in which he had
+filled the main role, relates how a holy hermit upon the island of
+Lipari on the day and in the hour of the great king's death saw him,
+his hands and feet bound, his garments all disarrayed, dragged up the
+mountain of Stromboli by his two victims, pope John and Symmachus, the
+father-in-law of Boethius, and hurled by them into the fiery crater of
+the volcano.
+
+Agnellus, of Ravenna, who records that the body of Theodoric was no
+longer in the great mausoleum, tells us that as it seems to him it was
+cast forth out of that sepulchre. A later suggestion would lead us to
+suppose that this was done by the monks of a neighbouring monastery,
+who are said to have cast the body in its golden armour into the
+Canale Corsini close by[1]. A few pieces of a golden cuirass
+discovered there and now in the museum of Ravenna, seem to confirm
+this story, which certainly is not unreasonable though of course it is
+the merest conjecture. It is possible that the body of Theodoric did
+not rest longer in its tomb than the Gothic power remained in Italy.
+For already within a year of the death of Theodoric the new saviour
+had appeared. Once more a great man sat upon the throne of the empire,
+in whose mind and in whose will was set the dream of the reconquest,
+of the re-establishment of the empire through the West, of the
+promulgation of the great code by which the new Europe was to realise
+itself. Justinian reigned in the New Rome upon the Bosphorus.
+
+[Footnote 1: There is apparently no foundation for the assertion of
+Fra Salimbene, the thirteenth-century chronicler of Parma (_Cronica_,
+ed Holder-Egger, pp 209-210), that it was S. Gregory the Great himself
+who ordered the body of Theodoric to be cast forth from its tomb. Cf.
+E.G. Gardner _The Dialogues of S. Gregory_ (1911), p 273]
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+THE RECONQUEST
+
+VITIGES, BELISARIUS, TOTILA, NARSES
+
+The failure of Theodoric, the failure of barbarism, of Arianism that
+is, for barbarism and civilisation were now for all intents and
+purposes mere synonyms for heresy and Catholicism, was probably fully
+appreciated by the Gothic king, who was, nevertheless, incapable of
+mastering his fate. The great lady who succeeded to his power in Italy
+as the guardian of her son, his heir, Athalaric, was certainly as
+fully aware as Theodoric may have been of the cause of that failure,
+and she made the attempt, which he had not wished or dared to make, to
+save the kingdom. The value of her heroic effort, which, for all its
+courage, utterly failed, lies for us in the confirmation it gives to
+our analysis of the causes of the Gothic failure to establish an
+enduring government in the West.
+
+That Amalasuntha wished to become a Catholic is probably true enough;
+it is certain that she understood from the first that, in such an act,
+she would not be able to carry her people with her. Therefore, she did
+what she could short of this the only real remedy. She attempted to
+educate her little son as a Roman, and hoped thus to insure his power
+with the Latin population, trusting that the fact of his birth would
+perhaps ensure the loyalty of the Gothic nation. In this she was
+wholly to fail, because, as her attempt shows, she had not
+fundamentally understood, any more than her father had been able to
+do, the realities of the situation in which she found herself.
+
+For all her genuine love for Roman things, her contempt of Gothic
+rudeness and barbarism, she failed to see that the one living thing
+that impressed the Roman mind, and really differentiated the Latin
+from the Goth, was religion, was Catholicism. She remained, possibly
+from necessity, but she remained, an Arian, and though she brought
+Athalaric up "in all respects after the manner of the Romans," she did
+not make him a Catholic, nor did she attempt the certainly hopeless
+task of leading the Gothic nation towards the only means of
+reconciliation that might have been successful.
+
+The compromise she adopted was useless and futile, and only succeeded
+in alienating the Goths, without winning her a single ally among the
+Romans. Her own people utterly disapproved of her method of education
+for her son, their king, "because they wished him to be trained in
+more barbaric style so that they might the more readily oppress their
+subjects." Presently they remonstrated with her: "O Lady, you are not
+dealing justly with us, nor doing what is best for the nation when you
+thus educate your son. Letters and book-learning are different from
+courage and fortitude, and to permit a boy to be trained by old men is
+the way to make him a coward and a fool. He who is to dare and to win
+glory, and fame, must not be subjected to the fear of a pedagogue, but
+must spend his time in martial exercise. Your father, Theodoric, would
+never suffer his Goths to send their sons to the grammarians, for he
+used to say: 'If they fear the teacher's strap they will never look on
+sword or javelin without a shudder.' He himself, who won the lordship
+of such wide lands and died king of so fair a kingdom, which he had
+not inherited from his fathers, knew nothing, even by hearsay, of book
+learning. Therefore, lady, you must say 'good-bye' to these
+pedagogues, and give Athalaric companions of his own age, who may grow
+up with him to manhood, and make him a valiant king after the manner
+of the barbarians."[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Hodgkin, _Theodoric_ (Putnam, 1900), pp. 307-308.]
+
+Amalasuntha was forced to bow to this, the public opinion of her own
+people. The result was disastrous; for the young Athalaric, like a
+true barbarian, was soon led away into a bestial sensuality which
+presently destroyed his health and sent him to an early grave. Seeing
+his instability both of body and mind, Amalasuntha entered into secret
+communication with Constantinople, where Justinian was now emperor,
+and even prepared for a possible flight to that city. Thus in 534,
+when she received an ambassador in Ravenna from Justinian who demanded
+of her the surrender of Lilybaeum, a barren rock in Sicily which
+Theodoric had assigned to Thrasamund on his marriage with his sister
+Amalafrida, in public she protested vigorously against the attempt of
+the emperor to pick a quarrel with "an orphaned king" too young to
+defend himself; but in private she assured the imperial ambassador of
+her readiness "to transfer to the emperor the whole of Italy."
+
+Italy was in this unstable state when, on the 2nd October 534,
+Athalaric died in his eighteenth year. This apparently upset
+Amalasuntha's plans. At any rate, we see her suddenly face quite about
+and sending for Theodahad, the son of Amalafrida, upon whom she had
+but lately pronounced a humiliating sentence, she offered to make him
+her official colleague upon the Gothic throne. This man was an
+ambitious villain. Of course he accepted Amalasuntha's foolish offer
+and swore to observe the agreement made between them. But before many
+weeks had passed he had made her a prisoner and had her securely
+hidden upon an island in the Lake of Bolsena in Umbria. But Theodahad
+appears to have been a fool as well as a villain. Having disposed of
+Amalasuntha, he sent an embassy to Constantinople to explain his
+conduct and to attempt to come to terms with Caesar. For his
+ambassadors he chose not Gothic nobles, who might have found his
+actions to their advantage, but Roman senators all but one of whom
+told a plain tale. Justinian immediately despatched his ambassador
+Peter to reassure Amalasuntha of his protection and to threaten
+Theodahad that if she were hurt it would be at the price of his own
+head. Peter however, had scarcely landed in Italy when he had news of
+Amalasuntha's murder in her island prison. He continued at once on his
+way to Ravenna, and there in the court before all the Gothic nobles
+not only denounced the murderer, but declared "truceless war" upon the
+Goths.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Cf. Procopius, _De Bello Gotico_, 25. The murder of
+Amalasuntha served the interests of the imperialists so well that
+public opinion at Constantinople attributed it to Peter the ambassador
+and to Theodora, the wife of Justinian. It remains, however, extremely
+doubtful whether there is any truth in this accusation, although it is
+certain that Theodora was in communication with Theodahad.]
+
+The truth was that Justinian was ready, the hour had struck, and with
+the hour had appeared the man who with his great master was ready to
+attempt the reconquest of the West for civilisation.
+
+We shall see the true state of affairs from the point of view of
+Constantinople if we retrace our steps a little.
+
+Justinian had succeeded Justin upon the imperial throne in 527. This
+great man had early set before himself the real recovery of the West
+for the empire. Circumstances, which he was not slow to use, caused
+him to attempt first the reconquest of Africa from the Vandals, and
+the true state of affairs is disclosed by the causes which brought
+about this great campaign.
+
+Hilderic, who had succeeded Thrasamund on the Vandal throne in Africa,
+had put Amalafrida, the queen dowager, the sister of Theodoric, to
+death. In June 531, he was deposed. Now Hilderic favoured the
+Catholics, was the ally of the empire, and was descended on his
+mother's side from the great Theodosius. Justinian determined to
+avenge him, and in avenging him to reconquer Africa for the empire.
+The hour had struck as I say, and the man had appeared with the hour.
+That man was the great soldier Belisarius, the instrument of Justinian
+in all his heroic design.
+
+Belisarius was entirely successful in his African campaign. On 15th
+September 533, he entered Carthage, and "was received by the majority
+of the citizens who spoke the Latin tongue and professed the Catholic
+Faith with unconcealed rejoicing." And as it happened he entered
+Carthage only to hear of Hilderic's murder. Before the end of the year
+the reconquest was complete. Africa was once more and in reality a
+province of the empire, and offered an excellent base of operations
+for the conquest of Italy, now to be undertaken.
+
+In the summer of 535, eighteen months later, Justinian began the great
+war against the Goths, the opportunity for which was offered him by
+the murder of Amalasuntha, and the result of which was to be the
+re-establishment of the empire in Italy. Rightly understood the true
+service of Theodoric--and it was a real and a precious service--was
+that the thirty years of settled government and peace which he had
+given Italy had prepared the way for the reconquest.
+
+That reconquest occupied five years. It was begun with an attack upon
+Sicily and proceeded northward by way of Naples and Rome to Ravenna,
+with the fall of which it was achieved. From a purely strategical
+point of view Belisarius was wrong to attack Sicily first and to carry
+the campaign from south to north; he should have attacked Ravenna
+first, and from the sea, and thus possessed himself of the key of
+Italy, and this especially as his base was Constantinople. But
+politically he was absolutely right. Sicily was almost empty of Gothic
+troops and the provincials were eagerly Catholic and only too willing
+to make a real part of the Roman empire. Thus the campaign opened with
+surrender after surrender, was indeed almost a procession; only
+Palermo offered resistance, and this because it was held by a garrison
+of Goths; but before the end of 535 the whole island was once more
+subject to the empire.
+
+Early in 536 a rebellion in Africa, which proved to be little more
+than a mutiny in Carthage, took Belisarius away; but he was back in
+Sicily before the end of the spring, and in the early summer was
+marching through southern Italy almost unresisted, welcomed everywhere
+with joy and thanksgiving till he came to the fortress of Naples,
+which was held by a Gothic garrison. Here the people wished to welcome
+him and surrender the city, but were prevented by the garrison, which,
+however, was soon cleverly outwitted and taken prisoner, and by the
+end of November all southern Italy was in Belisarius' hands.
+
+The fall of Naples brought Theodahad to the ground. The Goths deposed
+him and raised upon their shields Vitiges the soldier. As for
+Theodahad he was overtaken on the road to Ravenna, whither he was
+flying, and his throat was cut as he lay on the pavement of the way,
+"as a priest cuts the throat of his victim."
+
+If Theodahad was a villain as well as a fool, perhaps Vitiges was only
+the latter. At any rate, he is generally considered to have acted with
+criminal folly, when, as the first act of his reign, he abandoned Rome
+and fell back upon Ravenna, determined to make his great defence in
+northern Italy. But I think, if we consider the position more closely,
+we shall see that Vitiges was not such a fool as he looks. He had seen
+the two great fortresses of Palermo and Naples fall, and mainly for
+the same reason, the fact that the whole of their populations except
+the Gothic garrisons were eagerly on the side of the enemy. The
+situation of Rome, its great size, made it difficult to defend except
+with a very great army, and this would become a hundred times more
+difficult, if not impossible, if the population were to side with the
+attack. Yet not only was that already certain, but the sympathies of
+the citizens there might be expected to be even more passionately
+Roman than others had been elsewhere; for Rome was the capital of
+Catholicism, the throne of the Church, the seat of Peter. The Goth had
+to face the fact that, while he was perhaps hardly holding his own in
+Rome, Belisarius might stealthily pass on to overthrow the Gothic
+citadel at Ravenna. He had to ask himself whether he could expect to
+defend both Rome and Ravenna, for if Ravenna were to fall the whole
+kingdom was lost, since now, not less but rather more than before,
+Ravenna was the key to Italy.
+
+There is this also; Justinian had in the summer of 535 despatched two
+armies from Constantinople. One of these was that which Belisarius had
+disembarked in Sicily, and which till now had been so uniformly and so
+easily victorious. The other under Mundus had entered Dalmatia which
+it had completely wrested from the Goths by the middle of 536. It is
+probable that Vitiges expected to be attacked in the rear and from the
+north by this victorious army. If that should fall upon Ravenna while
+the Gothic strength was engaged in the defence of Rome, what would be
+the fate of that principal city, and with that lost, what would become
+of him in the Catholic capital?
+
+Of course Vitiges ought to have met the imperial army in the field and
+given battle. That was the true solution. But no Gothic army ever
+dared to face Belisarius in the open, for though the Goths enormously
+outnumbered his small force of some 8000 men, they feared him as the
+possessor of a superior arm in the _Hippotoxotai_, mounted troops
+armed with the bow, and above all they feared his genius.
+
+But Vitiges was no fool; his cause was hopeless from the first. He
+abandoned Rome and fell back upon Ravenna, because that was the best
+thing to be done in the circumstances in which he found himself. Among
+these must be reckoned the newness of his authority and the necessity
+of consolidating it by a marriage with a princess of the blood of
+Theodoric. As it happened, this retreat enabled him to prolong a war
+that at first looked like coming to an end in a few months for four
+more years.
+
+Vitiges then abandoned Rome, but it seems not altogether. What he may
+be supposed to have imagined Belisarius doing to his disadvantage,
+that he himself did. He left in Rome a garrison of four thousand men
+under a veteran general Leudaris, while he himself with the Gothic
+army fell back upon Ravenna. No sooner was he gone than the surrender
+of the City was offered to Belisarius by pope Silverius who spoke for
+the citizens and the Roman people. This was the reality of the
+situation. Then indeed an almost incredible blunder was committed, but
+not by Vitiges. The four thousand Goths whom he had left to hold the
+City, and at least to delay and waste the imperialists, marched out of
+Rome along the Flaminian Way as Belisarius entered from the south by
+the Via Latina. Leudaris alone refused to quit this post. He was taken
+prisoner, and sent with the keys of the Eternal City to Justinian.
+
+Belisarius established himself upon the Pincian Hill, and his first
+act after his occupation of the City is significant both of his
+profound knowledge of the barbarians and of the immutable
+characteristics of a Latin people.
+
+It is possible that the Romans, seeing the fall of Palermo and Naples
+and the occupation of Rome itself obtained so easily, believed that
+the Goths were finally disposed of. But Belisarius' vast experience of
+the character of the barbarians taught him otherwise. He immediately
+began to provision Rome from Sicily as fast as he could, and he at
+once undertook the fortification of the City, the repair of the
+Aurelian Wall. In these acts of Belisarius two things become evident.
+We see that he expected the return of the Goths, and we are made aware
+of the fact that they had neglected to fortify the City.
+
+It must be well seized by the reader, that the Gothic armies very
+greatly outnumbered the imperial troops, who were but a small
+expedition of not more than eight thousand men face to face with an
+immense horde of barbarians. The great advantage of the imperialists
+was that they were fighting in a friendly country, and they had too
+certain superiorities of armament which civilisation may always depend
+upon having at its command as against barbarians. Nevertheless,
+Belisarius knew that his end would be more securely won if he could
+wear down the barbarians, always impatient of so slow a business as a
+siege, from behind fortifications. He expected the barbarians,
+unstable in judgment and impatient of any but the simplest strategy
+and tactics, to swarm again and again about the City, and he was
+right: what he expected came to pass.
+
+On the other hand, we see in the neglect on the part of the Goths of
+all fortification of the City a neglect instantly repaired by
+Belisarius, a characteristic persistent and perhaps ineradicable in
+the Teutonic mind from the days of Tacitus to our own time. The Romans
+had always asserted, and those nations to-day who are of their
+tradition still assert, that the spade is the indispensable weapon of
+the soldier. But the barbarians and those nations to-day who are of
+their tradition, while they have not been so foolish as to refuse the
+spade altogether, have always fortified reluctantly. You see these two
+characteristics at work to-day in the opposite methods of the French
+and the Germans, just as you see them at work in the sixth century
+when Belisarius rebuilt the fortifications of the City which the Goths
+had neglected.
+
+And if we have praised Vitiges for his retreat upon Ravenna, how much
+more must we praise Belisarius for the fortification of Rome. For if
+the one had for its result the prolongation of the war for some four
+years, the other determined what the end of that war should be.
+
+Let us once more consider the military situation. It is evident that
+Vitiges evacuated Rome because he was afraid of losing Ravenna, his
+base, by an outflanking movement on the part of Belisarius and perhaps
+by a new attack from Dalmatia.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: My theory of the strategy of Vitiges and of his purpose
+is perhaps unorthodox; the orthodox theory being that he was a fool
+and the abandonment of Rome a mere blunder. But my theory would seem
+to be accurate enough, for Vitiges's first act from Ravenna was to
+despatch an army into Dalmatia.]
+
+In leaving a garrison within the City of some four thousand men--say
+half as many as the whole imperialist army--he at least hoped to delay
+the enemy till he had secured himself in the north and to waste him. I
+do not think he expected to hold the city for any length of time, for
+the whole country was spiritually with the enemy.
+
+What he hoped to gain by his retreat was, however, not merely the
+security of the north. He hoped also to lure Belisarius thither after
+him where, in a country less wholly Latin and imperialist, he would
+have a better chance of annihilating him by mere numbers once and for
+all. To this supreme hope and expectation of the Goth's, the
+refortification of Rome by Belisarius finally put an end. It was a
+countermove worthy of such a master and entirely in keeping with the
+Roman tradition.
+
+At first it must have appeared to Vitiges that the course he had
+expected Belisarius to pursue was actually being followed; for
+presently the imperialists began to move up the Flaminian Way. But it
+was soon evident that this was no advance in force, but rather a part
+of the fortification of the City. All the places occupied were
+fortresses and all were with one exception upon the Via Flaminia which
+they commanded. The first of these strong places was Narni, which held
+the great bridge over the Nera at the southern exit of the passes
+between the valley of Spoleto and the lower Tiber valley, where the
+two roads over the mountains, one by Todi, the other by Spoleto, met.
+The second place occupied was Spoleto at the head, and the third was
+Perugia at the foot, of the great valley of Spoleto, from which the
+Via Flaminia rose to cross the central Apennines. The three places
+were occupied without much trouble, and it was thus attempted to make
+the great road from the north impassable.
+
+If Vitiges, as I believe, thought the imperialists would immediately
+follow him northward he was no more deceived than the Romans
+themselves. They had surrendered the City to Belisarius to save it
+from attack and the last thing they desired was to suffer a siege. A
+feeling of resentment, the old jealousy of Constantinople, seems to
+have appeared, and in this Vitiges thought he saw his opportunity.
+With 150,000 men, according to Procopius, he issued from Ravenna and
+marched upon Rome, avoiding apparently the three forts held by the
+imperialists, for he came, again according to Procopius, through
+Sabine territory and therefore his advance was upon the eastern bank
+of the Tiber. However that may be, he got without being attacked as
+far as the bridge over the Anio on the Via Salaria, or as the Milvian
+Bridge over the Tiber where the Via Cassia and the Via Flaminia meet
+to enter the City.[1] This bridge, whichever it was, Belisarius had
+determined to hold, but without his knowledge it was deserted. The
+Goths were crossing unopposed when the general himself appeared with
+1000 horse. A tremendous fight followed in which, such was his rage
+and astonishment, Belisarius bore himself rather like a brave soldier
+than a wise general. Unhurt in spite of the _melee_ he fell back
+either upon the Porta Salaria[2] or upon the Porta Flaminia (del
+Popolo), which he found closed against him, for the City believed him
+dead. Almost in despair he rallied his men and made a desperate
+charge, which, such was the number of the Goths in the road and the
+confusion of their advance, was successful. The barbarians fled and
+Belisarius and his gallant troopers entered the City at nightfall.
+
+[Footnote 1: Procopius tells us both that Vitiges advanced through the
+Sabine country and that he crossed the Tiber--an impossible thing.
+Gibbon and Hodgkin refuse the former, Gregorovius the latter
+statement. I agree with Gregorovius, for Procopius confuses the Tiber
+and Anio elsewhere, notably iii. 10.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Possibly the Porta Pinciana.]
+
+[Illustration: Sketch Map of VITIGES, MARCH]
+
+All through that night the walls of Rome were aflame with watchfires
+and disastrous tidings, happily false; and when the dawn rose out of
+the Campagna, Rome was still inviolate.
+
+Thus began the first siege of Rome in the early days of March 537. It
+lasted for three hundred and seventy-four days and ended in the sullen
+retreat of the barbarians to save Ravenna, which as Vitiges had at
+first foreseen would happen was threatened with attack. But as so
+often in later times, those three hundred and seventy-four days had
+dealt incomparably more hardly with the besiegers than with the
+besieged. The Campagna had done its work, and it has been calculated
+that of the 150,000 men that are said to have marched with Vitiges to
+attack the city, not more than 10,000 returned to Ravenna.
+
+Meanwhile during the great siege Belisarius, by means of his
+subordinate general, John, had carried on a campaign in Picenum and
+had been able to send assistance to the people of Milan, eagerly Roman
+as they were.
+
+In Picenum, John had perhaps rashly pushed forward from Ancona to
+Rimini; which he held precariously and to the danger of Ancona. The
+first act of Belisarius after the raising of the siege of the City was
+to despatch troops post haste to Rimini. He sent Ildiger and Martin
+with a thousand horse to fight their way if necessary to Rimini to
+withdraw John and his two thousand horse. He purposed to hold Rimini
+only with the tips of his fingers, for his determination was to secure
+all he held before he entered upon a final and a real advance
+northward.
+
+The position of Belisarius seemed more insecure than in fact it was.
+If we consider the great artery of his advance northward, the Via
+Flaminia, we shall find that he held everything to the east of the
+road between Rome and Ancona save one fortress, Osimo above Ancona,
+which was held by four thousand of the enemy. But all was or seemed to
+be insecure because he held nothing to the west of the great road save
+Perugia: Orvieto, Todi, Chiusi, Urbino were all in Gothic hands, while
+the Furlo Pass over the Apennines was also held by the enemy.
+
+Well might Belisarius desire the cavalry of John, useless in Rimini,
+for the direct road to that city was still in the hands of the enemy.
+But when John got his orders he refused to obey them and Ildiger and
+Martin returned without him. What excuse is possible for this refusal
+of obedience on the part of a subordinate which might well have
+imperilled the whole campaign? This only: that he had orders from one
+superior even to Belisarius. It is probable that John in Rimini and
+Ancona was aware that he might expect reinforcement from
+Constantinople and that Belisarius knew nothing of them. These
+reinforcements arrived under Narses, the great and famous chamberlain
+of Justinian, not long after Rimini had begun to suffer the memorable
+siege that followed the departure of Ildiger and Martin, and Ancona
+had only just been saved. The presence of Narses in Italy changed the
+whole aspect of the campaign, and whatever motives Justinian may have
+had for sending him thither, the effect of his landing at Ancona with
+great reinforcements can have had only a good effect upon the war.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch Map CITIES UNDERLINED WERE IN IMPERIAL HANDS]
+
+Belisarius had now secured himself to this extent that Todi and Chiusi
+were in his hands, and he hastened to meet Narses at Fermo forty miles
+south of Ancona. There a council of war was held in which Belisarius
+maintained his plan, namely, that Rimini should be abandoned because
+Osimo, very strongly held over Ancona, was in the hands of the Goths.
+Narses, on the contrary, looked only to the spiritual side of war. He
+maintained that if a city once recovered for the empire was abandoned
+the moral result would be disastrous. At any cost he was for the
+relief of Rimini. Somewhat reluctantly, realising the danger,
+Belisarius consented to try. A screen of a thousand men was placed
+before Osimo, an army was embarked for Rimini and another was sent out
+by the coast road, while Belisarius himself and Narses with a column
+of cavalry set out from Fermo westward, crossed the Apennines above
+Spoleto, struck into the Flaminian Way, recrossed the Apennines by the
+Furlo, and had come within a day's journey of Rimini when they came
+upon a party of Goths, who fled and gave the alarm to Vitiges. But
+before the Goth could decide what to do, Ildiger was upon him from the
+sea, Martin was upon him with a great army from the south, and
+Belisarius and Narses came down from the mountains in time to rejoice
+at the delivery of the city.
+
+That deliverance but disclosed the two parties that divided the
+imperial army. When John refused obedience to Belisarius we may be
+sure he was not acting wholly without encouragement, and this at once
+became obvious after the deliverance of Rimini which Belisarius had
+carried out but which had been conceived by Narses. It will be
+remembered that Milan was by the act of Belisarius in the hands of the
+Romans; it was, however, now besieged even as Rimini had been by a
+very redoubtable Gothic leader, Uraius. Orvieto and Osimo also were
+still in barbarian hands. Belisarius now proposed to employ the army
+in the relief of the one and the capture of the others. Narses, on the
+other hand, proposed to take his part of the army and with it to
+reoccupy the province of Aemilia between the Apennines and the Po.
+These rivalries and differences were to cost the life of a great city,
+Milan. For since Narses would not consent to the plan of Belisarius,
+only what seemed most urgent was done; Orvieto was taken, Urbino too,
+and the energy of the imperial army and its purpose, also, was
+expended upon many unimportant things, an attempt upon Cesena, the
+reduction of Imola, which involved a hopeless dispersal of forces upon
+no great end. Belisarius, warned of the danger, ordered John to the
+relief of Milan; again that creature of Narses refused. And down came
+Milan before Uraius the Goth, who fell upon the helpless citizens and
+massacred three hundred thousand of them, being all the men of the
+city; and the women he gave as payment to his Burgundian ally; and of
+Milan he left not one stone upon another. But when Justinian read the
+despatch of Belisarius, he recalled Narses, for if the fall of Rimini
+would have injured so sorely the imperial cause, what of the fall of
+Milan, the massacre of its inhabitants, the utter destruction of the
+city? So great was its effect that we read even Justinian thought of
+treating with the Goths; for he was haunted by the weakness of his
+Persian frontier, and he had soon to look to the western Alps.
+
+Not so Belisarius. He went on his way and first he reduced two
+fortresses that had long threatened him, Osimo and Fiesole, and then
+and at long last he began the great advance upon Ravenna.
+
+In this he was attempting with a small and weary force what had never
+before been accomplished. Theodoric, it is true, had entered Ravenna
+as a conqueror, but only by stratagem and deceptive promises after a
+siege of three years. Belisarius, none knew it better than he, had
+neither the time nor the forces that were at the disposal of the great
+Gothic king. He must act quickly if at all, and nowhere and on no
+occasion does this great and resourceful man appear to better
+advantage than in his achievement at Ravenna, which should have been
+the last military action of the reconquest.
+
+Procopius, who was perhaps an eye-witness of the whole business of the
+siege and certainly entered Ravenna in triumph with Belisarius, tells
+us that, after the fall of Osimo, Belisarius made haste to Ravenna
+with his whole army. He sent one of his generals, Magnus, before him
+with a sufficient force, to march along the Po and to prevent
+provisions being taken into the impregnable city from the Aemilian
+Way; while another general, Vitalius, he called out of Dalmatia with
+his forces to hold the northern bank of the river. When this was done
+a most extraordinary accident occurred which it seems impossible to
+explain. "An accident then befell," says Procopius, "which clearly
+shows that Fortuna determines even yet every struggle. For the Goths
+had brought down the Po many barges from Liguria[1] laden with corn,
+bound for Ravenna; but the water suddenly grew so low in the river
+that they could not row on; and the Romans coming upon them took them
+and all their lading. Soon after the river had again its wonted stream
+and was navigable as before. This scarcity of water had never till
+then occurred so far as we could hear."
+
+[Footnote 1: Cf. Cassiodorus, _Variae_, II. 20, where we read of
+Theodoric in a time of scarcity supplying Liguria with food from
+Ravenna. "Let any provision ships which may be now lying at Ravenna be
+ordered round to Liguna, which in ordinary times supplies the needs of
+Ravenna herself."]
+
+Owing to this accident and the closeness of the investment the Goths
+began to be short of provisions, for they could import nothing from
+the sea, since the Romans were masters there. In their need, however,
+the King of the Franks, knowing how things were, sent ambassadors to
+Vitiges in Ravenna, and so did Belisarius. The Franks offered to lead
+an army of five hundred thousand men over the Alps and to bury the
+Romans in utter ruin if the Goths would consent to share Italy with
+them. But the Goths feared the Franks, and the ambassadors of
+Belisarius were able to persuade them to reject their offers. From
+this time forward negotiations went on without ceasing between
+Belisarius and the Goths, for the one was short of time, the other of
+food. Nevertheless, the Romans did not relax their investment of the
+city in any way. Indeed, Belisarius chose this moment for his
+shrewdest and cruellest blow. "For hearing how there was much corn in
+the public magazines of Ravenna, he won a citizen with money to set
+them afire; which loss, some say, happened by Matasuntha's advice, the
+wife of Vitiges. It was so suddenly done that some thought it was by
+lightning, as others by design, and Vitiges and the Goths, taking it
+in either kind, fell into more irresolution, mistrusting one another,
+and thinking that God himself made war against them."
+
+At this misfortune Uraius, the destroyer of Milan, proposed to attempt
+to relieve Ravenna, but Belisarius easily outwitted him and his
+intervention came to nothing.
+
+Nevertheless time, so scarce with the Romans, was running short.
+Justinian was impatient to have done with the Italian war, for the
+general situation was extremely grave; upon the Danube an invasion of
+Slavs was gathering; in Asia, Persia threatened the empire. It is not
+altogether surprising then that Justinian now made an attempt to come
+to terms with Vitiges behind the back of Belisarius. He sent two
+ambassadors to offer peace upon the following really amazing terms,
+namely, that the Goths were to have half the royal treasure and the
+dominion of the country beyond the Po, that is to say, to the north of
+the Po; the other half of the revenues and the rest of Italy with
+Sicily were to be the emperor's. The ambassadors showed their
+instructions to Belisarius, who had them conducted into Ravenna, where
+Vitiges and the Goths gladly consented to make peace and to accept
+these conditions. But both sides had reckoned without Belisarius, who
+doubtless saw that such a peace could not endure and that all his
+labour, if such terms were to be made, had gone for nothing. Nothing
+would satisfy his ideas of security save the absolute defeat of the
+Goths with its natural sequel, the bringing of Vitiges to
+Constantinople as a prisoner. He, therefore, refused to sign the
+treaty, leaving it to be established by the ambassadors alone. But
+when the Goths saw this they thought that the Romans cozened them, and
+refused to conclude anything without the signature and oath of
+Belisarius.
+
+That Belisarius was right we cannot doubt; but his action naturally
+laid him open to be accused of a design, against the emperor's
+intentions, to prolong the war for his own glory. Nor were certain of
+his generals slow to make such an accusation. When he heard of it, he
+(who had suffered more than enough from the disloyalty of
+subordinates) called them all together, and in the presence of the
+ambassadors confessed that Fortune was the great decider of war, and
+that a good opportunity for peace should ever be seized. Then he bade
+them speak their minds in the present case. They declared then, one
+and all, that it were best to follow the instructions of the emperor.
+When Belisarius heard them speak thus he was glad and bade them put
+their opinions in writing, that neither he nor they might afterwards
+deny their confession that they were not able to subdue the enemy by
+war.
+
+But Belisarius was sure of his ground. The Goths pressed by famine
+could hold out no longer, and weary of Vitiges, who had given them no
+success, yet afraid of yielding to the emperor lest he should remove
+them out of Italy to Constantinople and thereabout, they resolved, of
+all things, to declare Belisarius emperor in the West. Secretly they
+sent to entreat him to accept the empire, professing to be most
+willing to obey him. Such an astonishing proposal must have filled
+Belisarius with delight. He, indeed, had no intention of receiving
+from such hands a gift so fantastic, for he hated the name of usurper;
+but he saw at once how this proposal might help his ends. He
+immediately called his generals and the ambassadors together and asked
+them if they did not think it a matter of importance to make all the
+Goths and Vitiges the emperor's captives, to capture their wealth, and
+to recover all Italy to the Romans. They answered it would be an
+extreme high fortune and bade him effect it if he could. Then
+Belisarius sent to the Goths and bade them perform what they had
+offered. And they, for the famine was too hard to bear, agreed and
+sent ambassadors to take the oath of the great Roman for their
+indemnity and that he would be King of Italy, and when they had it, to
+return into Ravenna with the Roman army. Now as to their indemnity
+Belisarius bound himself, but touching the kingdom he said he would
+swear it to Vitiges himself and the Gothic commanders. And the
+ambassadors, not thinking he would forego the kingdom, but that he
+desired it above all things, prayed him forthwith to march into
+Ravenna. And he himself with his army and the Gothic ambassadors
+entered Ravenna; and he commanded also ships to be laden with corn and
+to come into Classis.
+
+"When I saw," says Procopius, whose account of the siege and fall of
+Ravenna I have followed so far, "when I saw the entrance of their army
+into Ravenna, I considered how actions are not concluded by valour,
+multitudes, or human virtue, but by some Divinity that steers the acts
+and judgements of men. The Goths had much the advantage in numbers and
+power, and since they came to Ravenna no defeat there had overthrown
+them, yet they became prisoners and thought it no shame to be slaves
+to fewer in number. The women (who had heard from their husbands that
+the enemy were tall and gallant men and not to be numbered) looked
+with contempt upon the Roman soldiers when they saw them in the city,
+and spat in the faces of their husbands, reviling them with cowardice,
+pointing at their conquerors."
+
+Thus Ravenna, the impregnable city, was taken by stratagem and
+willingly; never again to pass out of Roman hands till Aistulf the
+Lombard in 752 seized it for a few years and thus caused Pepin to
+cross the Alps to vindicate the Roman name.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The first Gothic war, against Vitiges, (536-540) had thus for its
+crown and end, the capture of Ravenna; the second, against Totila
+(541-553), proceeded from Ravenna for the reconquest, yet once again,
+of Italy.
+
+In 540, after Ravenna had been occupied, Belisarius recalled, and
+Vitiges taken as a captive to Constantinople, the Romans held all
+Italy except the city of Pavia. In 544, when Belisarius returned, they
+held only Ravenna, Rome, Spoleto, and a few other strongholds such as
+Perugia and Piacenza. Nor was this all. In this second war all Italy
+was laid waste and ruined, Rome was twice besieged and occupied by the
+Goths, and in 546, when Totila had done with her, during a space of
+forty days the City remained utterly desolate, without a single
+inhabitant. How had such a miserable and unexpected catastrophe
+befallen the Catholic cause?
+
+In the first place it must be admitted that the capture of Ravenna by
+stratagem was not the final catastrophe it appeared for the Goths. It
+is true that that triumph seemed to give, and indeed did give, all
+Italy into the hands of the Romans, but that gift was never secured.
+Belisarius, partly from necessity, partly on account of the suspicious
+jealousy of the emperor, was withdrawn from Italy too soon. He was
+victorious, but he was not given time to secure his victories. The
+extraordinary incompetence and rivalries of the committee of generals
+which succeeded him let the opportunity for securing and establishing
+an enduring peace slip through its fingers; the inevitable reaction
+that followed the departure of Belisarius was not met at all, the
+whole situation that then developed was misunderstood, with the result
+that the Goths were soon able to find a leader, perhaps the most
+formidable, and certainly the most destructive, that they had ever
+produced.
+
+The cause of the imperial incompetence and failure would appear to
+have been financial. The empire had been perhaps always, certainly for
+two hundred years, bankrupt. Its administration and above all its
+defence were beyond its means. The Gothic war had been a tremendous
+strain upon the imperial finances already incredibly involved in the
+defence of the East. It was necessary to find in Italy the money for
+that war and for the future defence of that country; but Italy had
+been ruined by the Gothic war and above all things needed capital and
+a period of reproductive repose. These Justinian was unable to give
+her. His necessities forced him to cover the peninsula with tax
+gatherers, to bleed an already ruined country of the little that
+remained to her. If the result was a reaction, in the north actively
+Gothic, in the centre and south certainly indifferent to the imperial
+cause, we cannot wonder at it. The spiritual situation and the
+economic or material would not chime. The result was the appalling
+confusion we know as the second Gothic war.
+
+[Illustration: Colour Plate S. VITALE: THE GALLERY]
+
+I say it was a confusion. No clear issue seems to present itself from
+beginning to end; the old democratic cause, the Catholicism of the
+people rising in rage and fury against the Arianism of the courts,
+burnt low for a moment, and was indeed in part extinguished by the
+appalling misery of the material situation of Italy. Upon this
+materialism, the material benefits that Theodoric had undoubtedly
+conferred upon the Italian people, Totila, that formidable chieftain
+who now came to the front as the Gothic leader, based his appeal and
+his hope of victory. "Surely," he says to the Roman senate, "you must
+remember sometimes in these evil days the benefits which you received
+not so very long ago at the hands of Theodoric and Amalasuntha." And
+again: "What harm did the Goths ever do you? And tell me then what
+good you received from Justinian the emperor?... Has he not compelled
+you to give an account of every _solidus_ which you received from the
+public funds even under the Gothic kings? All harassed and
+impoverished as you are by the war, has he not compelled you to pay to
+the Greeks the full taxes which could be levied in a time of
+profoundest peace?" Totila based his appeal upon the material
+well-being of the people. It was a formidable appeal; it nearly
+succeeded. That it did not succeed, though it had so much in its
+favour, is the best testimony we could have to the real nature of the
+war, which was not a struggle between two races or even primarily, at
+any rate, between barbarism and civilisation, but something greater
+and more fundamental, a fight to the death between two religions
+Arianism and Catholicism, upon the result of which the whole future of
+Europe depended.
+
+The confusion of the second Gothic war, in which the future of the
+world and the major interests of man were in jeopardy, may be divided
+into three parts. The first of these is that in which the whole
+administration precariously established by Belisarius fell to pieces
+before the earthquake that was Totila, who, never systematically met
+and opposed, by the year 544 held all Italy with the exception, as I
+have said, of Ravenna, Rome, Spoleto, Perugia, Piacenza, and a few
+other strongholds. The second is that in which Belisarius again
+appears, and from the citadel of Ravenna, without ceasing or rest, but
+without much success, opposes him everywhere. In this period Rome was
+occupied and reoccupied no less than four times, and, as I have said,
+in 546 was left utterly desolate. Nevertheless, when for the second
+time Belisarius was recalled, in 548, he left things much as he had
+found them. He had at least--and with what scarcity of men and money
+we may see in his letters to the emperor--opposed and perhaps stemmed
+the overwhelming Gothic advance. At his departure the imperialists
+held Ravenna, Rome (but after the sack of 546), Rimini, Spoleto,
+Ancona, and Perugia. But before he arrived in Constantinople, Perugia
+had fallen; in the same year, 549, a mutiny in Rome gave the City to
+the Goths and Rimini was betrayed. In the year 551, the year of
+Narses' appointment as general-in-chief in Italy and the opening of
+the third period, only Ravenna and Ancona, with Hydruntum (Otranto)
+and Crotona in southern Italy, remained to the empire.
+
+In that year, 551, however, everywhere the Gothic cause began to fail.
+In a sea-fight off Sinigaglia the imperial forces disposed of the
+Gothic sea power and relieved Ancona, which was in grave danger. About
+the same time Sicily was delivered from the Gothic yoke, and in the
+spring of 552 Crotona was relieved. Meanwhile, in Illyricum, Narses
+gathered his army, in which Ardoin, King of the Lombards, rode at the
+head of two thousand of his people, and prepared for the great march
+into Italy.
+
+He came through Venetia round the head of the Adriatic, close to the
+sea (for a formidable Frankish host held the great roads), crossing
+with what anxiety we may guess, the mouths of the Piave, the Brenta,
+the Adige, and the Po by means of his ships, and having thus turned
+the flank of the Frankish armies he triumphantly marched into Ravenna.
+There he remained for nine days, as it were another Caesar about to
+cross the Rubicon.
+
+While he waited in Ravenna an insulting challenge reached him from the
+barbarian Usdrilas who held Rimini. "After your boasted preparations,
+which have kept all Italy in a ferment, and after striking terror into
+our hearts by knitting your brows and looking more awful than mortal
+men, you have crept into Ravenna and are skulking there afraid of the
+very name of the Goths. Come out with all that mongrel host of
+barbarians to whom you want to deliver Italy and let us behold you,
+for the eyes of the Goths hunger for the sight of you."[1] And Narses
+laughed at the insolence of the barbarian, and presently he set
+forward with the army he had made, upon the great road through Classis
+for Rimini, till he came to the bridge over the Marecchia, there which
+Augustus had built and which was held by the enemy. There in the fight
+which followed--little more than a skirmish--the barbarian Usdrilas
+came by his end, and Narses ignoring Rimini marched on, his great
+object before him, Totila and his army, which he meant, before all
+things else, to seek out and to destroy. So he went down the Flaminian
+Way to Fano and there presently left it for a by-way upon the left,
+rejoining the great highway some miles beyond the fortress of Petra
+Pertusa, which he disregarded as he had done that of Rimini. He
+marched on till he came to the very crest of the Apennines, over which
+he passed and camped upon the west under the great heights, at a place
+then called Ad Ensem and to-day Scheggia.
+
+[Footnote 1: Hodgkin's free translation of Procopius, _op. cit_. iv.
+28.]
+
+[Illustration: Sketch Map NARSES' MARCH FROM RAVENNA _To Meet_ TOTILA]
+
+Meanwhile Totila had come to meet him from Rome, and had managed to
+reach Tadinum, the modern Gualdo Tadino, when he found Narses,
+unexpectedly, for he must have thought the way over the mountains
+securely barred by the fortress of Petra Pertusa, upon the great road
+before him.
+
+Narses sent an embassy to Totila to offer, "not peace, but pardon;"
+this the barbarian refused. Asked when he would fight Totila answered,
+"In eight days from this day." But Narses, knowing what manner of man
+his enemy was, made all ready for the morrow, and at once occupied the
+great hill upon his left which overlooked both camps. In this he was
+right, for no sooner had he seized this advantage than Totila
+attempted to do the same, but without any success.
+
+Then on the morrow Totila, having meanwhile been reinforced with two
+thousand men, rode forth before the two armies and "exhibited in a
+narrow space the strength and agility of a warrior. His armour was
+enchased with gold; his purple banner floated with the wind; he cast
+his lance into the air; caught himself backwards; recovered his seat
+and managed a fiery steed in all the paces and evolutions of the
+equestrian school."[1] No doubt Narses the eunuch smiled. The
+barbarians were all the same, and they remain unaltered. Totila's
+theatrical antics are but the prototype to those amazing cavalry
+charges, excellently stage-managed, that may be seen almost any autumn
+during the German manoeuvres, a new Totila at their head.
+
+[Footnote 1: Gibbon's free translation of Procopius, iv. 31.]
+
+When Totila had finished his display the two armies faced one another,
+the imperialists with Narses and John upon the left, the Lombards in
+the centre, and Valerian upon the right with John the Glutton; the
+Goths in what order of battle we do not know. At length at noon the
+battle was joined. The Gothic charge failed, Narses drew his straight
+line of troops into a crescent, and the short battle ended in the
+utter rout of the Goths, Totila flying from the field. In that flight
+one Asbad a Gepid struck at him and fatally wounded him. He was borne
+by his companions to the village of Caprae, more than twelve miles
+away, and there he died.
+
+Thus ended Totila the Goth and with him the Gothic cause in Italy. A
+remnant of his army made its way to Pavia, where it was contained by
+Valerian; and all over Italy the Gothic fortresses hastened to
+surrender, Perugia, Spoleto, Narni, all opened their gates, and Narses
+marched on to occupy Rome which he did without much difficulty. All
+Italy lay open to the imperialists, and when Totila's successor Teias
+was slain all hope of recovery was gone. The Goths offered to leave
+Italy, and their offer was accepted. For a year longer a desultory
+war, the reduction of Cumae and Lucca, occupied Narses; but by 554
+this too was brought to an end, and unhappy Italy was once more
+gathered into the government of the empire.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+MODICA QUIES
+
+THE PRAGMATIC SANCTION AND THE SETTLEMENT OF ITALY
+
+
+Such was the inevitable end of the Gothic war in Italy. The issue thus
+decided was, as I have tried to show, something much more tremendous
+than the mere supremacy of a race. Nothing less than the future of the
+world was assured upon those stricken fields and about those ruined
+fortresses, the supremacy of the Catholic religion in which was
+involved the whole destiny of Europe, the continuance of our
+civilisation and culture. For let it be said again: these wars of the
+sixth century were not a struggle to the death between two races, but
+between two religions; the opponents were not really Roman and Goth,
+but Catholic and Arian, and in the victory of the former was involved
+the major interest of mankind. The whole energy of that age was
+devoted to the final establishment of what for a thousand years was to
+be the universal religion of Europe, the source of all her greatness
+and the reason of her being. What was saved in those unhappy campaigns
+was not Italy, but the soul of Europe.
+
+Certainly it was not Italy. Materially the result of those eighteen
+years of war, which began with the invasion of Italy by Belisarius in
+536, reached their crisis in 540 with the capture of Ravenna, and were
+finally decided by Narses in 552-554, was the ruin of Italy.
+Exhausted, devastated, and unfilled, the prey, for half a generation,
+of a fundamental war, Italy was materially ruined by Justinian's
+Gothic campaigns, and so hopelessly that, when in 568 the Lombards
+fell upon her, she was almost unable to defend herself, to offer any
+resistance to what proved--and in part for this reason--the only
+barbaric invasion which had upon her any enduring consequences.
+Visigoths, Huns, Vandals, Ostrogoths, all poured over her, and
+presently, like winter floods, retreated and subsided, leaving nothing
+to remind us of their fear and devastation; the Lombards remained.
+
+I say this was largely due to the appalling exhaustion and ruin of
+Italy in the Gothic war; but there was something else which we must
+not forget. The Gothic war was a religious war. The Arianism of the
+Goths had really threatened our civilisation. But the Lombards were
+largely mere heathens. Their heathenism was not at all dangerous to us
+as a heresy must always be.[1] Therefore Italy never roused herself
+from her exhaustion, one might almost say her indifference. It was
+only her material well-being that was at stake, her future was safe.
+Her great attempt against the Lombards was a spiritual effort, was an
+effort for their conversion, and their final discomfiture, wrought not
+from within the peninsula, but from over the Alps, did not involve
+their expulsion from Italy, but was seized upon as the opportunity for
+the re-establishment in name and in fact of the Western Empire, and
+for the great crowning of Charlemagne by the pope in S. Peter's
+church.
+
+[Footnote 1: It was not the paganism of the Italian Renaissance but
+the heresy of the Teutons which destroyed the unity of Europe in the
+sixteenth century.]
+
+Italy, and with Italy Europe, were, then, saved from nothing less than
+death when Narses finally disposed of Totila in the Apennines in 552;
+but that war which had a result so very glorious had materially ruined
+the country.
+
+From this general bankruptcy one city certainly escaped; that city was
+Ravenna, which since the year 540, when she had opened her gates to
+Belisarius, had been free from attack, and had more than ever been
+established as the capital of the West. That position was secured to
+her, as I have already said, by her geographical position, which now
+that Constantinople had reasserted the claim of the empire to Italy
+established her more than at any time in her history as the necessary
+seat of military and administrative power; and from Ravenna as from
+the citadel the whole of the second part of the Gothic war was waged
+by the imperialists. As we might expect the true nature of that war is
+immediately manifested in her history at this time.
+
+It would seem that very shortly after the occupation of Ravenna by the
+imperialists in 540, the re-edification of the city and its splendid
+embellishment was begun. The church of S. Vitalis begun by S.
+Ecclesius (_c_. 521-532) was finished and gloriously adorned with
+mosaics by S. Maximianus (_c_ 546-556), and not long after S.
+Apollonaris in Classe begun by S. Ursicinus (532-536) was completed
+and adorned by the same great bishop.
+
+But this eagerness to mark and to express in such glorious monuments
+as these the great victory for Catholicism and civilisation that was
+then in the winning becomes even more manifest after the death of
+Totila and the end of the war. To the S. Agnellus and to the Church of
+Ravenna Justinian "_rectae fidei Augustus_" gave all the substance of
+the Goths, according to the _Liber Pontificalis_,[1] "not only in
+Ravenna itself, but in the suburban towns and in the villages, both
+sanctuaries and altars, slaves and maidens, whatever was theirs. _S.
+Mater Ecclesia Ravennas, vera mater, vera orthodoxa nam ceterae multae
+Ecclesiae falsam propter metum et terrores Principum superinduxere
+doctrinam; haec vero et veram et unicam Sanctam Catholicam tenuit
+Fidem, nunquam mutavit fluctuationem sustinuit, a tempestate quassata
+immobilis permansit_. Therefore S. Agnellus the archbishop reconciled
+all the churches of the Goths, which in their time or in that of King
+Theodoric had been built or had been occupied by the false doctrines
+of the Arians.... He thus reconciled the church of S. Eusebius which
+Unimundus the (Arian) bishop had built in the twenty-third year of
+King Theodoric. In the same year he reconciled the church of S.
+Georgius (S. Giorgio ad Tabulam fuori delle Mura) ... the church of S.
+Sergius which is in Classis and of S. Zenone which is in Caesarea." In
+Ravenna itself he reconciled the churches of S. Theodorus (S.
+Spirito), S. Maria in Cosmedin (the Arian Baptistery), the church of
+S. Martin (S. Apollinare Nuovo) which Theodoric had built, which was
+called _Caelum Aureum_ and which Agnellus re-decorated with the
+mosaics of the Martyrs and Virgins we see and the effigies of
+Justinian and himself.
+
+[Footnote 1: Agnellus, _Liber Pontificalis_ (ed. Holder-Egger. P. 334)
+_ad vitam Sancti Agnelli_.]
+
+Such was the work achieved in the fortunate capital. But ruined Italy
+awaited a more necessary, if less splendid, labour. This can have been
+nothing less than the resurrection of the country, which, in those
+eighteen years of war, can have become little less than a desert; and,
+as we might expect, all Italy desolate and depopulated looked to
+Justinian to succour her in her misery if she was not to perish under
+her ruins and her debts. The first step in that work was undertaken in
+the very year of the peace, in the August of the year 554, and it took
+the form of a solemn "Pragmatic Sanction" addressed to Narses and to
+Antiochus, the Prefect of Italy,[1] in Ravenna. It had for its object
+the social peace of Italy, the re-establishment of order out of the
+chaos of the Ostrogothic war; and it is significant of the true
+position of affairs that this decree asserts that it is issued by the
+emperor in reply to the petition of the pope.
+
+[Footnote 1: The fact that it was addressed to both surely seems to
+show that Narses at this time only held a military power in Italy.
+This is interesting as touching the discussion later on of the genesis
+of the exarchate.]
+
+It consists of twenty-seven articles, and first establishes what is to
+be considered as still having authority in that tempestuous past; what
+part of it is to remain and to be confirmed and what is to be utterly
+swept away. Thus the emperor confirms all dispositions made by
+Amalasuntha, Athalaric, and Theodahad, as well as all his own
+acts--and these would include Theodoric's--and those of Theodora. But
+everything done by "the most wicked tyrant Totila" is null and void,
+"for we will not allow these law-abiding days of ours to take any
+account of what was done by him in the time of his tyranny."[1] Totila
+had indeed most cruelly attacked the great landed proprietors whom he
+suspected of too great an attachment for Constantinople; he had
+attacked them in their persons and in their wealth. With a single
+stroke of the pen Justinian, as it were, effaced all the ordinances of
+the tyrant and rendered again to their legitimate masters, as far as
+it could be done, their lands, their flocks, their peasants, and their
+slaves which had been taken from them, or which fear had caused them
+to alienate.
+
+[Footnote 1: Cf. Hodgkin, _op. cit_. vi. pp. 519-520.]
+
+Such were the political achievements of the decree. Nor were its
+financial provisions less far-reaching. Something had to be done to
+meet the crisis resulting from the enormous quantity of debt.
+Everywhere Justinian undertook great public works, and tried to repair
+the destruction caused by the war; but it is probable that in reality
+he achieved very little. He had enriched the Church; he had
+re-established the great proprietors in their lands and their rights,
+but the industry and commerce of Italy, save perhaps at Ravenna and at
+Naples, he could not restore. And we seem to understand that the mere
+lack of men left whole districts of Italy uncultivated and desert.
+
+As for the administrative and legal clauses of the decree, they gave
+the Italian--the Roman as he is called--the right to have his suit
+heard by a civil judge instead of a military official. This
+established the security of the Italian against the barbaric hosts the
+imperial armies had brought into the country. But perhaps more
+important, and certainly more significant, is the twelfth clause of
+the decree which relates to the way in which the _Judices
+Provinciarum_ are to be appointed. "We order," says Justinian, "that
+only fit and proper persons able to administer the local government
+shall be chosen, and this by the bishops and chief persons of each
+province from the inhabitants of that province." This clause was soon
+proved to contain so much wisdom that in 569 by Justinian's successor
+it was extended to the provinces of the Eastern empire.
+
+In all this we recognise the work of the great reformer who had
+already produced the _Corpus Juris Civilis_, consisting of the
+Institutes, Digest, Code, and Novellae, which more than anything else
+he did--and he did everything--determined that Europe, which he had
+secured for ever, should be a Roman thing established upon Roman Law.
+But are we also to see in this great man the creator of the exarchate,
+that citadel of the empire in Italy which was to endure, though almost
+all else perished, till Charlemagne appeared and the empire itself
+suddenly re-arose, armed at all points and ready for battle? It might
+seem that we are not to attribute that great scheme to Justinian, but
+rather to a later recognition of the force and reality of the
+disasters that so few years after his death descended once more upon
+Italy.
+
+When Narses at the head of the armies of Justinian had in 554
+conquered the Goths and possessed Italy, the administrative divisions
+of the peninsula would seem to have remained almost the same as they
+had been in the time of Honorius. Indeed the re-entry of Italy within
+the empire was accompanied by no important change in the provincial
+divisions of the peninsular because there was no necessity for it.
+Narses, who ruled just eleven years in Ravenna, was never known by the
+title of exarch. On the contrary, Procopius and Agathias call him
+simply the general-in-chief of the Roman army [Greek: o Romaion
+strataegos], and pope Pelagius calls him _Patricius et Dux in Italia_,
+and others, among them Gregory the Great and Agnellus, simply
+_Patricius_. But it is obvious that there was something new in the
+official situation and that certain extraordinary powers were
+conferred upon Narses. And it is the same with his successor Longinus.
+All the texts that mention him, including the _Liber Pontificalis_,
+call him _Praefectus_. But the transformation from which the exarchate
+arose was more obscure and far more slow than any official reform of
+Justinian's could have been. It is in part the result of the new
+condition of the country, which Justinian had had to take into
+account, but it is much more the result of the progress of the Lombard
+conquest and the new necessities of defence, which not one of the
+three great men who had restored Italy to the empire lived to see.
+
+For Belisarius and Justinian both died in 565, and Narses, who was
+recalled in that year by the foolish and insolent Sophia, the wife of
+the new emperor Justin II., seems to have died about 572.
+
+It is difficult to determine to which of these three great and heroic
+figures Italy, and through Italy, Europe, owes most, but since it was
+Justinian who chose and employed them we must, I think, accord him,
+here too, the first place in our remembrance.
+
+Belisarius, who had fought the first great war so gloriously against
+Vitiges, and for so long and with so little encouragement had opposed
+Totila in the second, is of course one of the great soldiers of the
+world and perhaps the greatest the empire ever employed. His capture
+of Ravenna, by stratagem it is true, but against time and, as it were,
+in spite of the emperor, brought the first Gothic war to an end, and
+would, had he been left in Italy a few months longer, have prevented
+all the long drawn out agony of the second. As it was his achievement,
+and his achievement alone, made that second war something better than
+the hopeless affair it seemed for so long, and though he himself to
+all appearances made little headway against Totila, it was his series
+of heroic campaigns, in which he refused despair, that made the ever
+glorious march of Narses possible, and the final crushing of the
+barbarian in the Apennines after all but the crown of his endeavour.
+
+Of his master, the great emperor, it is not for me to speak since to
+this day his works speak for him. The thirty-eight years of his reign
+are the most brilliant period of the later Roman empire, and if the
+military triumphs he conceived were the work of Belisarius and Narses
+we must attribute to him alone the magnificent conception, the
+tireless energy, and the heroic purpose which established the great
+pillars of the _Corpus Juris Civilis_ which is the legal foundation of
+mediaeval and of modern Europe, the basis of all Canon Law and of all
+Civil Law in every civilised country. Of his great ecclesiastical
+polity perhaps we must speak with less enthusiasm, though not with
+less wonder; while his glorious buildings remain only less enduring
+than his codification of the laws. If in Ravenna we are most nearly
+and splendidly reminded of him in S. Vitale, we do not forget that he
+was the creator of perhaps the greatest ecclesiastical building left
+to us, the mighty church--lost to us now for near five hundred
+years--of S. Sophia in Constantinople. On the whole we see in
+Justinian the greatest of all the emperors save Augustus, and perhaps
+Constantine. Nor can any later state show us so great a ruler.
+
+Justinian in his Italian designs had been very well served by
+Belisarius, nor were his ideas less splendidly carried out by Narses.
+Indeed, in many ways the eunuch was the better instrument and
+especially in administration. He ruled in peace in Ravenna as I have
+said for eleven years, devoting himself to the resurrection of unhappy
+Italy. In this we may think he was as successful as the shortness of
+the time of his rule would allow. The catastrophe that put an end
+alike to his work and to the regeneration of Italy was the death of
+Justinian. In that very year, 565, the great eunuch was deposed, an
+insulting recall reached him from the empress Sophia, and he retired
+to Rome, where he passed the few years that remained to him in
+retirement, and died there, it is thought, in 572.
+
+A curious and certainly an unproved accusation hangs over his name. It
+seems that his government of Italy was not wholly grateful to the
+Italians, who it must be remembered were ruined and whom many years of
+eager self-denial would hardly render solvent again. Now the business
+of Narses was to achieve this solvency and to pay out of Italy some
+sort of interest upon the enormous sums Justinian had disbursed for
+the great war. If he incurred the hatred of the Italians it would not
+be surprising, nor would it lead us to accuse him of tyranny. "Where
+Narses the eunuch rules," they said, "he makes us slaves." This cry
+came to the ears of the emperor for whom it was meant. No doubt, being
+a fool, he was anxious to be rid of Justinian's pro-consul. However
+that may be, Narses was recalled, the empress, it is said, sending him
+a message to the effect that as he was a eunuch she would appoint him
+to apportion the spinning to the women of her household. To this
+Narses is reported to have replied, doubtless with much the same smile
+as that with which he had greeted the equestrian display of Totila,
+that he would spin her a thread of which neither she nor the emperor
+Justin would be able to find the end. In the course of time this
+mysterious threat, which was probably never uttered, was said to refer
+to the enormous catastrophe which within three years of Narses' recall
+fell upon Italy--the Lombard invasion. And Narses, who had employed
+the Lombards in the last campaign against Totila, was said to have
+revenged himself by inviting them into Italy to possess it.
+
+The accusation rests upon no good authority, and is altogether
+unlikely when we remember how great a part of his life had been
+devoted to the incorportion of Italy within the empire. But there is
+this much truth in it we may perhaps think; that had the great eunuch
+been left in command, Alboin would not have dared to come on, and if
+he had dared, would have found an army and an Italy ready to fling him
+back into his darkness.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+THE CITADEL OF THE EMPIRE IN ITALY
+
+THE LOMBARD INVASION
+
+
+It was upon the second day of April 568, upon the Monday within the
+octave of Easter, that Alboin set out to cross the Julian Alps, to
+descend upon an Italy which even the great Narses had not been able,
+in the short sixteen years of peace he had secured her, to recover
+from the utter exhaustion of a generation of war. No army awaited him,
+no attempt was made to crush his rude and barbarous army in the
+marches, he was unopposed, save that the bishop of Treviso begged him
+to spare the property of his church, and presently the whole province
+of Venetia, with the exception of Padua, Mantua, and Monselice, was in
+his hands. Those who could, doubtless fled away, for the most part to
+that new settlement in the Venetian lagoons which was presently to
+give birth to Venice and which had been founded by those who had fled
+from Attila; but there were many who could not flee. These came under
+the cruel yoke of the invader. Perhaps Alboin spent the winter in
+Verona, perhaps in Friuli; wherever it was, he but prepared his
+advance and still no one appeared to say him nay. By the end of 569
+all Cisalpine Gaul with Liguria and Milan, except Pavia, the coast,
+Cremona, Piacenza, and a few smaller places, were in his hands.
+Indeed, in all that terrible flood of disasters we hear of but one
+great city which offered even for a time a successful resistance. This
+was Pavia, naturally so strongly defended by the Po and the Ticino.
+Alboin established an army about it, and swore to massacre all its
+inhabitants since it alone had dared to resist him. Pavia fell to the
+Lombard, after a three years' siege, in 572; but Alboin was prevented
+from carrying out his vow, and not long after Pavia became the capital
+of the Lombard power in Italy.
+
+Meantime, those three years, during which Pavia held her own, had not
+been wasted by the barbarian. He crossed the Apennines, we may believe
+as Totila had done, by the old deserted way to Fiesole, brought all
+Tuscany under his yoke and a great part both of central and of
+southern Italy, establishing there two "duchies" as the centres of his
+power at Spoleto and Benevento. Then he returned to take Pavia, all
+this time besieged, and in the same year, 572, it is probable that
+Piacenza fell also, and Mantua. All Italy was in confusion, the system
+of government re-established by Narses broken; the work of Justinian's
+reconquest seemed all undone. That it was not wholly undone, that it
+lived on and was at last re-established, we owe to two great facts:
+the conversion of the Lombards to Catholicism by Gregory the Great and
+the establishment of the exarchate, the entrenchment of Roman power
+and civilisation in Ravenna. Let us consider these things.
+
+The Lombards were barbarians and therefore pagans or Arians, but their
+Arianism was of a different kind from that of the Huns, different even
+from that of the Ostrogoths. Indeed, though the Lombards may be called
+Arian, for indeed such Christianity as they possessed was wholly
+Arian, they were but little removed from mere heathenism. It is true
+that they sacked churches, slaughtered priests, and carried off the
+holy vessels everywhere as they came into Italy; but they did this, it
+would seem, not from a sectarian hatred of the Catholic Faith, but
+from mere heathenism. As pagans, heathen or semi-heathen, they might
+be converted, and thus their advent was ultimately less dangerous to
+our civilisation than the conquest of the Ostrogoths threatened to be.
+I do not mean to suggest that that advent was without danger. It was
+of course full of dreadful peril, but that peril was chiefly material
+and not spiritual; it could destroy, but not create; moreover, since
+in the main it was pagan, it could only destroy material things.
+
+It is unthinkable that the Italy of the sixth century was for a moment
+in danger of losing its Faith, of being dechristianised. That, all
+things considered, in the third fourth and fifth centuries there had
+more than once been a real danger of the victory of some heresy, and
+especially of that subtle Arianism, the forerunner of Mahometanism,
+which all the invaders professed, and most of them so bitterly, we
+know; as we know that with the hard won victory of the Catholic Faith
+the whole of the future was safe; but that in the Italy of the sixth
+century the Faith was in danger from a horde of semi-pagan barbarians
+is not to be thought of. To this extent, and it is three parts at
+least of the whole, the Lombard invasion was less perilous than those
+which had come and passed away before it. Once more, the Catholic
+church was to be victorious, but in a different fashion. It cast out
+the Visigoths, the Huns, the Vandals, and the Ostrogoths from Italy,
+for it could not convert them; the Lombards it converted and they
+remained. It converted them because they were rather heathen than
+Arian, and the victory was won by that great Gregory who, seeing our
+forefathers in the Forum of Rome, and loving them for their bright
+hair and open faces--_non Angli sed Angeli si Christiani_--sent S.
+Austin to turn them too from their pagan rites and gather them into
+the fold of Christ.
+
+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 passing evil like all
+the other barbarian incursions. No one believed Italy to be
+irrevocably lost; on the contrary, everyone was assured that the lost
+provinces could soon be delivered again.
+
+This may explain, though perhaps it cannot excuse, the passive
+attitude of Longinus, the successor of Narses, 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 Classis, and took it and spoiled it.
+
+This, however, was but an isolated effort, and though the Lombards
+held Classis, 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, Classis 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
+Narses 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-assembling 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 circumstances 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 title
+"Exarch," _see_ Diehl, _op. cit_. pp. 15-16.]
+
+The earliest document 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 title. This
+it would seem was a much nobler 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 title 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 principal 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 exactitude; 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, Fossombrone,
+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.
+
+[Illustration: SKETCH MAP]
+
+In the year after the recapture of Classis 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 Romanus 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 Romanus'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 circumstance, 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 passionately 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 Romanus,
+perhaps seeing further, was not to be moved to the assistance 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 Romanus
+quickly south with an army to re-occupy Perugia, Orte, Todi, Ameria,
+and various other cities of Umbria. But Romanus 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 God, 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 Romanus Patricius et Exarchus Ravennae
+Romam properavit. Qui dum Ravennam revertitur retenuit civitates, quae
+a Langobardis tenebantur, quarum ista sunt nomma: Sutrium, Polimartium
+Hortas, Tuder, Ameria, Perusia, Luceolis et alias quasdam civitates.
+Quod factum cum regi Agilulfo nunciatum esset statim Ticino egressus
+cum 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
+"assessor" 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 Romanus died.
+
+Romanus 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
+circumstances 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, passing 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 assassinated 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 assassinated 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 assassinated 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 assumed 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
+Narses 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 ambassador 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 nobles, 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.]
+
+[Illustration: THE SARCOPHAGUS OF EXARCH ISAAC]
+
+Nor was this all. It is in Isaac's time that the growing jealousy of
+the empire in regard to the papacy for the first time breaks into
+flame. Isaac, who as exarch had the right to "approve" the election of
+the pope, on the accession of Severinus (638) sent Maurice his
+_chartularius_ to Rome as his ambassador. This Maurice it seems was
+eager against the papal power, and finding an opportunity in Rome
+suddenly seized the Lateran and its wealth at the head of "the Roman
+army," and wrote to Isaac that he might come and enjoy the spoil. The
+exarch presently arrived in Rome, resided in the Lateran during eight
+days, banished the cardinals, and proceeded to steal everything he
+could lay his hands on in the name of the emperor, to whom he sent a
+part of the booty. A little later Maurice attempted to repeat his
+rape, but doubtless hoping to enrich himself he began by repudiating
+Isaac, who then dealt with him, had him brought northward, and
+beheaded at a place called Ficulae, twelve miles from Ravenna; but
+before he could decide what punishment to mete out to Maurice's
+accomplices the exarch himself died, "smitten," as it was said, "by
+God," and the exarchate was filled apparently by Theodore Calliopas
+(644-646).
+
+Theodore Calliopas was twice exarch. Of his first administration we
+know nothing at all; but in 646 he was succeeded by Plato (646-649),
+whose name we learn from a letter of the emperor Constans II. to his
+successor Olympius (649-652), who had been imperial chamberlain in
+Constantinople. Theodore Calliopas was then again appointed and ruled
+in Ravenna for eleven years (653-664).
+
+We have seen the empire and the papacy politically at enmity and
+certainly bent on attaining different political ends in Italy and the
+West, and this is emphasised by the economic condition of Italy which
+the empire taxed heavily. Philosophically Constantinople had never
+perhaps been very eagerly Catholic--or must one say papal? But now at
+this dangerous moment a doctrine definitely heretical was to be
+officially adopted there and supported by emperor and patriarch with
+insistance and perhaps enthusiasm. Heraclius, the grandfather of
+Constans II., had asserted the Monothelete heresy which maintained
+that although Christ had two distinct natures yet He had but one
+_Will_--his human will being merged in the divine. The patriarch of
+Constantinople, always jealous of the popes, eagerly upheld this
+doctrine which the papacy continually and consistently denounced. Now
+Constans II. cared for none of these things. He refused to allow that
+either pope or patriarch was right, but as though he had been living
+in the sixteenth instead of the seventh century gravely announced that
+"the sacred Scriptures, the works of the Fathers, the Decrees of the
+five General Councils are enough for us;" and asked: "Why should men
+seek to go beyond these?" Roundly he refused to allow the question to
+be either supported or attacked.
+
+Now the whole of the West was very heartily with the pope in
+sentiment; but save for the bishops of Italy he stood alone against
+the great patriarchates of the East. Nevertheless, he refused to be
+silent and to obey the emperor. Therefore Olympius, Constans'
+chamberlain in 649, came to Italy as exarch with orders to arrest the
+pope and bring him to Constantinople: this it seemed to him a prudent
+thing to do; he was to judge for himself. Olympius decided it was not
+a prudent thing to do. He found the Italian bishops and the people
+eagerly Catholic. There is a story that he attempted instead to take
+the pope's life as he said Mass, but this is probably untrue, for we
+find pope and exarch presently excellent friends. He went on into
+Sicily to meet the first invasion of the Saracens in that island, and
+died there of the pestilence.
+
+Theodore Calliopas was appointed exarch for the second time as his
+successor in 652. He had either less sagacity or less scruple than his
+predecessor, for in the following year he appeared with an army in
+Rome. He found the pope ill and in bed before the high altar of S.
+John Lateran. He surrounded the church and entered it with his men,
+who were guilty of violence and desecration. But the pope, to save
+bloodshed, surrendered himself to the exarch, shouting as he emerged
+from the church, "Anathema to all who say that Martin has changed a
+jot or tittle of the Faith Anathema to all who do not remain in his
+orthodox Faith even to the death." Through the tumultuous and weeping
+city the pope passed to the palace of the exarch upon the Palatine
+Hill. He entered it a prisoner and was presently smuggled away on
+board ship to Constantinople, where he was examined and condemned to
+death, insulted in the Hippodrome, and his sentence commuted to
+imprisonment and exile to Cherson, where he died in 655.
+
+The controversy slumbered. Before long, surely to the amazement of the
+West, the emperor landed in Italy at Tarentum with the object of
+finally dealing with the Lombards, for Rothari was dead. It is said he
+asked some hermit there in the south: "Shall I vanquish and hold down
+the nation of the Lombards which now dwelleth in Italy?" The answer
+was as follows, and, rightly understood, contained at least the
+fundamental part of the truth: "The nation of the Lombards," said the
+hermit after a night of prayer, "cannot be overcome because a pious
+queen coming from a foreign land has built a church in honour of S.
+John Baptist who therefore pleads without ceasing for that people. But
+a time will come when that sanctuary will be held in contempt, and
+then the nation shall perish."[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Diaconus. v. 6; cf. Hodgkin, _op. cit_. vi. 272. Paulus
+adds that the prophecy was fulfilled when adulterous and vile priests
+were ordained in the church at Monza and the Lombards fell before
+Pepin.]
+
+That prophecy contained the fundamental truth that since the Lombards
+were Catholic it was not possible to turn them out of Italy. But
+Constans heeded it not. He marched on, besieged Beneventum, was not
+successful, and went on to Rome, and himself spoiled the City. From
+Rome he returned southward to Naples and Sicily, where in 668 he died.
+
+All that time Gregory was exarch. He had succeeded Theodore Calliopas
+in 664, and he ruled till 677. We know little of him save that he
+appears to have attempted to confirm Maurus, archbishop of Ravenna, in
+his "independence" of the Papal See.[1] This Maurus was undoubtedly a
+schismatic and Agnellus tells us that he had many troubles with the
+Holy See and many altercations. Indeed the position of the archbishop
+of Ravenna can never have been a very enviable one and especially at
+this time when the breach between pope and emperor, papacy and empire,
+was continually widening. Always the archbishop of Ravenna, as the
+bishop of the imperial citadel in Italy, must have been tempted to
+follow the emperor rather than the pope, and more especially since,
+personally, he might expect to gain both in power and wealth that way.
+
+[Footnote 1: That was the "Privilegium," whatever it was worth and
+whatever exactly it meant, conferred by Constans II. Constantine
+Pogonatus, the successor of Constans, is still to be seen in S.
+Apollinare in Classe the "Privilegium" in his hands in mosaic. See
+_infra_, p. 208.]
+
+The exarch Gregory was succeeded apparently by a certain Theodore
+whose contemporary archbishop in Ravenna was also a Theodore. He ruled
+it seems for ten years, 677-687, and built near his palace an oratory,
+or a monastery, not far from the church of S. Martin (S. Apollinare
+Nuovo), and was, according to Agnellus, a pious man, presenting three
+golden chalices to the church in Ravenna and composing the differences
+of his namesake the archbishop and his clergy.
+
+Theodore in his turn was succeeded by Joannes Platyn (687-701). Two
+years before his appointment in 685 Justinian II. (685-695) had
+succeeded to the imperial throne, and in that same year pope Benedict
+II. died. John V. succeeded him and reigned for a few months, when
+there followed two disputed elections, those of Conon and of Sergius.
+In the latter Joannes Platyn the exarch played a miserable and
+disastrous part. For he suddenly appeared in Rome as the partisan of
+Paschal, the rival of Sergius, who had obtained his support by a
+promise of one hundred pounds of gold if he would help him to the
+papal throne. On his advent in Rome, however, the exarch found that he
+must abandon Paschal and consent to the election of Sergius, in which
+all concurred. He refused, however, to abandon his bribe which he now
+demanded of the new pope. Sergius replied that he had never promised
+anything to the exarch and that he could not pay the sum demanded. And
+he brought forth in the sight of the people the holy vessels of S.
+Peter, saying these were all he had. As the pope doubtless intended,
+the Romans were enraged against the exarch, the money was scraped
+together, and the holy vessels rescued.
+
+In all this we see the growing distrust and hatred of Constantinople,
+which the taxation had first aroused on the part of the Italian people
+and their champion the papacy. These feelings were to be crystallised
+by the extraordinary and tactless council that the emperor convened in
+691, in which the empire attempted to avenge the defeat it had
+sustained at the hands of the papacy in regard to the Monothelete
+heresy. The council, which was mainly concerned with discipline,
+altogether disregarded Western custom and the See of Rome, and
+especially asserted that "the patriarchal throne of Constantinople
+should enjoy the same privileges as that of Old Rome, and in all
+ecclesiastical matters should be entitled to the same pre-eminence and
+should count as second after it." The pope promptly forbade the
+publication of the decrees of this council which he had refused to
+sign. Then the emperor sent a truculent soldier, one Zacharias, to
+Rome with orders to seize Sergius and bring him to Constantinople as
+Martin had been arrested and dragged away. It only needed this to make
+the whole situation clear once and for all.
+
+For it was not only the people of Rome who rose to prevent this
+outrageous act. When Zacharias landed in Ravenna, the citadel of the
+empire in Italy, the "army of Ravenna," no longer perhaps Byzantine
+mercenaries, but Italians, mutinied and determined to march to Rome to
+defend the pope. As they marched down the Flaminian Way, the soldiers
+of the Pentapolis joined them, a Holy War, a revolution, declared
+itself, and for this end: "We will not suffer the Pontiff of the
+Apostolic See to be carried to Constantinople." This curious mob of
+soldiers, gathering force and recruits as it marched with songs and
+shouting down the Way, hurled itself against the walls of the Eternal
+City, battered down the gate of S. Peter which Zacharias, afraid and
+in tears, had ordered to be closed, and demanded to see the pope who
+was believed to have been spirited away in the night on board a
+Byzantine ship like his predecessor Martin. Zacharias took refuge
+under the pope's bed, and Sergius showed himself upon the balcony of
+the Lateran and was received with the wildest enthusiasm.
+
+In that revolution was destroyed all hope of the Byzantine empire in
+Italy. A new vision had suddenly appeared to those whom we may call,
+and rightly now, the Italian people. The long resurrection of the
+West, the greatest miracle of the papacy, was upon that day secured
+for the future. And henceforth the mere appearance of the exarch in
+Rome was regarded as an insult and a declaration of war.
+
+In the year 695 Justinian II. was deposed and mutilated by Leontius,
+but he was to appear again as emperor ten years later when Sergius was
+dead and John VII. sat on the throne of Peter. Pope John reigned but
+for three years, in which he was successfully bullied by Justinian. He
+was then succeeded by Sisinnius, who reigned for a few months, and
+then by Constantine who ruled for seven years (708-715). The
+archbishops of Ravenna had certainly not dared openly to side with the
+imperial party and the exarch during the revolution, but, with the
+restoration of Justinian, archbishop Felix (708-724) felt himself
+strong enough to oppose the pope when he categorically required of him
+an oath "to do nothing contrary to the unity of the Church and the
+safety of the empire." He had, however, chosen a bad time to set
+himself against his superior, who in the minds of all was the champion
+of Italy.
+
+Justinian II. had by no means forgotten the injuries he had received
+at the hands of the Ravennati: "_ad Ravennam_," says Agnellus, "_corda
+revolvens retorsit, et per noctem plurima volvens, infra se taliter
+agens; heu quid agam et contra Ravennam quae exordia sumam_?" "What
+can I do against Ravenna?" What he did was this. Theodore the
+patrician, one of his generals, was despatched with a fleet to Ravenna
+by way of Sicily. He proceeded up the Adriatic and when far off he saw
+the great imperial city, he first, according to Agnellus, lamented its
+fate, "for she shall be levelled with the ground which lifted her head
+to the clouds;" and then having landed and been greeted with due
+ceremony, set his camp on the banks of the Po a few hundred yards
+outside the city walls. There he invited all the chief men of the
+Ravennati to a banquet in the open air. As two by two they entered his
+tent to be presented to their host they were bound and gagged and put
+aboard ship. Thus all the nobles and Felix the archbishop were taken
+and the soldiers of Theodore entered Ravenna and burned their houses
+to the ground.
+
+Theodore took his captives to Constantinople where they were all slain
+save Felix, who, however, was blinded. Later he returned to Ravenna,
+was reconciled with the Holy See, and died archbishop in 725.
+
+It would appear that all this happened when Theophylact (702-709) was
+exarch, though Theodore the patrician may have superseded him for a
+moment on his arrival. The exarch in 710 was Joannes Rizocopus, and in
+that year pope Constantine visited Constantinople with the future pope
+Gregory II. in his train. They met in Rome, the pope about to set
+sail, the exarch on his way to Ravenna, where he was apparently
+assassinated in a popular tumult, "the just reward of his wickedness."
+The people of Ravenna then elected a certain Giorgius as their
+captain, and all the neighbouring cities, Cervia, Forli, Forlimpopoli,
+and others, placed themselves under his government and turned upon the
+imperial troops. We know very little of this revolution, what directly
+was the cause of it, or how it was suppressed; but it is clear that
+the exarchate, if it did not actually perish, was from this time forth
+for all intents and purposes dead. Three more exarchs were to reign in
+Ravenna, but not to govern. In 713, Scholasticus was appointed and
+remained till 726. He was followed by Paulus (726-727) who attempted
+to arrest Leo III., was prevented by the joint action of the Romans
+and the Lombards, and met his death at the hands of the people of
+Ravenna; and by Eutychius (727-752) who it seems saw the fall of
+Ravenna before the assault of the Lombard Aistulf. He was the last
+representative of the Byzantine empire to govern in Ravenna or in
+Italy.
+
+But the fall of the imperial power in Italy was not the work of the
+Romans or of the Lombards. It fell because it had ceased to be
+Catholic.
+
+We have seen the invasions of the Visigoths and the Huns fade away
+into nothing; we have seen the greater attempt of the Ostrogoths to
+found a kingdom in Italy brought to nought. One and all they failed
+for this fundamental reason, that they were not Catholic. The future
+belonged to Catholicism, and since it is only what is in the mind and
+the soul that is of any profound and lasting effect, to be Arian, to
+be heretic, was to fail. The great attempt, the noble attempt of
+Justinian to refound the empire in the West, to gather Italy
+especially once more into a universal government, succeeded, in so far
+as it did succeed, because the circumstances of the time in Italy
+forced it to be a pre-eminently Catholic movement. When that movement
+ceased to be Catholic it failed.
+
+Let us be sure of this, for our whole understanding of the Dark Age
+depends upon it. Justinian's success in Italy was a Catholic success.
+What had always differentiated the imperialists from the barbarians
+since the fall of the old empire was their Catholicism. Justinian, a
+great Catholic emperor, perhaps the greatest, faced and outfaced the
+Arian Goths. He succeeded because his cause was the Catholic cause.
+But when his successors had to meet the Lombards they soon found that,
+for all they could do, they had no success. The Lombards, never very
+eagerly Arian, were open to conversion, slowly they became Catholic,
+and from the day they became Catholic there was no longer any hope of
+turning them out of Italy. It is only what is in the mind that is of
+any fundamental account. Face to face with such a thing as religion,
+race is as a tale that is told. But though all hope of turning the
+Lombards out of Italy ceased with their conversion, and the plan of
+Justinian, with nothing as it were to kick against, was thus rendered
+a thousand times more difficult, it did not become utterly hopeless
+and impossible till the empire, the East, that is, Constantinople,
+fell into heresy and ceased itself to be Catholic. It was the gradual
+failure of Constantinople in Catholicism that disclosed the pope to
+the Italians as their champion. It was this failure that raised up
+even in the imperial citadel, even in Ravenna, men and armies
+passionately antagonistic to the emperor, passionately papal too.
+During a hundred years this movement grew till, in the eight century,
+the _coup de grace_, as we might say, was given to the Justinian plan
+by the Iconoclastic heresy.
+
+The Iconoclastic decrees of the emperor Leo are said to have appeared
+in Italy in the year 726. Leo was an adventurer from the mountains of
+Isauria. He was, so Gibbon tells us, "ignorant of sacred and profane
+letters; but his education, his reason, perhaps his intercourse with
+the Jews and the Arabs, had inspired the martial peasant with an
+hatred of images." It was his design to pronounce the condemnation of
+images as an article of faith by the authority of a general council.
+This, however, he was not able to do, for he was at once met and his
+iconoclasm pronounced heretical by the greatest of all opponents, the
+pope--Gregory II.
+
+Gregory had been elected to the papacy in 715 upon the death of
+Constantine. He was a man of great strength of purpose and nobility of
+character. Upon the Lombard throne sat Liutprand whose boast it was
+that "his nation was Catholic and beloved of God," and who
+acknowledged the pope as "the head of all the churches and priests of
+God through the world." These three men were the great protagonists
+who decided the fate of the empire in Italy.
+
+The Lombards though they were thus Catholic had certainly not ceased
+to make war upon the empire. In this ceaseless quarrel, for instance,
+they had, perhaps about 720, possessed themselves of Classis, the
+seaport of Ravenna, and not long after of the fortress of Narni upon
+the Flaminian Way, and a little later, about 752, Liutprand himself
+laid siege to Ravenna, apparently without much result, though Classis
+seems to have suffered pillage. But if Ravenna did not then fall it
+was because the emperor's Iconoclastic decrees had not then reached
+Italy. They appear to have arrived in the following year and
+immediately the whole peninsula was aflame. "No image of any saint,
+martyr, or angel shall be retained in the churches," said Leo, "for
+all such things are accursed." The pope was told to acquiesce or to
+prepare to endure degradation and exile. Then, says Gibbon, surely
+here an unbiassed authority, "without depending on prayers or
+miracles, Gregory II. boldly armed against the public enemy and his
+pastoral letters admonished the Italians of their danger and their
+duty. At this signal Ravenna, Venice, and the cities of the Exarchate
+and Pentapolis adhered to the cause of religion; their military force
+by sea and land consisted for the most part of the natives; and the
+spirit of patriotism and zeal was transfused into the mercenary
+strangers. The Italians swore to live and die in the defence of the
+pope and the holy images; the Roman people were devoted to their
+Father and even the Lombards were ambitious to share the merit and
+advantage of this holy war. The most treasonable act, but the most
+obvious revenge, was the destruction of the statues of Leo himself;
+the most effectual and most pleasing measure of rebellion was the
+withholding of the tribute of Italy and depriving him of a power which
+he had recently abused by the imposition of a new duty."
+
+The life of the pope was attempted by the imperial officials and the
+exarch appears to have been privy to the plot. The Romans rose and
+prevented the murder by slaying two of the conspirators, and when the
+exarch attempted to arrest the pope the very Lombards "flocked from
+all quarters" to defend him. In Ravenna itself there was revolution;
+Paulus the exarch was slain it seems in 727, and Ravenna apparently
+swore allegiance to the Holy See. Leo sent a fleet and an army to
+chastise her; "after suffering," says Gibbon, "from the wind and wave
+much loss and delay, the Greeks made their descent in the
+neighbourhood of Ravenna; they threatened to depopulate the guilty
+capital and to imitate, perhaps to surpass, the example of Justinian
+II. who had chastised a former rebellion by the choice and execution
+of fifty of the principal inhabitants. The women and clergy in
+sackcloth and ashes lay prostrate in prayer; the men were in arms for
+the defence of their country; the common danger had united the
+factions, and the event of a battle was preferred to the slow miseries
+of a siege. In a hard-fought day, as the two armies alternately
+yielded and advanced, a phantom was seen, a voice was heard, and
+Ravenna was victorious by the assurance of victory. The strangers
+retreated to their ships, but the populous sea-coast poured forth a
+multitude of boats; the waters of the Po were so deeply infected with
+blood that during six years the public prejudice abstained from the
+fish of the river; and the institution of an annual feast perpetuated
+the worship of images and the abhorrence of the Greek tyrant."
+
+So Gibbon, following Agnellus whose account is obscure and perhaps
+altogether untrustworthy. What is certain is that Liutprand was
+advancing against the empire in war; that he took Bologna and without
+difficulty made himself master of the whole of the Pentapolis.
+
+Yet the emperor took no heed. The eunuch Eutychius was appointed as
+exarch. He appeared in Naples and sent orders to Rome to have the pope
+murdered; but again the Roman people saved their champion and swore to
+him a new allegiance. Then Eutychius turned to the Lombards.
+
+He attempted to bribe both Liutprand and the dukes. At first he was
+unsuccessful, but presently they began to listen to him. Liutprand
+certainly hoped to make himself king of Italy, and it may be that it
+was this which Eutychius offered him under the emperor. Moreover, he
+was jealous, and not without cause, of the dukes of Spoleto and
+Benevento, who had rallied to the pope, and was anxious to have them
+under his feet. This, too, he may have hoped to attain as King of
+Italy and the emperor's representative in Italy.
+
+When the pope saw Liutprand march southward with the exarch he must
+have known that the whole of the future depended upon the outcome of
+this act. Liutprand presently encamped with his army in the plain of
+Nero between the Vatican and Monte Mario. There the pope met him and,
+even as Leo the Great had done upon the banks of the Mincio, and as
+Gregory the Great had done upon the steps of S. Peter's, overawed the
+barbarian. Liutprand laid his crown and his sword at the pope's feet
+and begged, not only for his own forgiveness, but for that of the
+exarch his ally. The moment of enormous danger passed, the pope
+received both his enemies; but from that moment it was evident that
+the Lombards were not to be trusted and must one day feel the weight
+of the papal arm.
+
+Gregory died in February 731, and was succeeded by Gregory III. who
+continued his predecessor's Italian policy. The great and terrible
+danger which had suddenly threatened the whole of papal policy when
+Liutprand and the exarch approached one another seems to have haunted
+the third Gregory. His obvious defence was to support the dukes
+against Liutprand, and this he did. Liutprand marched down against him
+and seized several towns in the duchy of Rome. It is now that the
+future begins to declare itself. The pope in his peril, a peril that
+would presently increase, made an appeal to the great Christian
+champion, Charles Martel; he appealed to the Franks; in the event, as
+we know, it was the Franks who saved the situation. In 740, however,
+Charles Martel refused to interfere; he was the kinsman of Liutprand
+and his son was a guest at the court of Pavia; that son was to be king
+Pepin the Deliverer--the father of Charlemagne, the first emperor of
+the restored West.
+
+That appeal for help was in all probability not made only on account
+of the threat of Liutprand against Rome. It was obvious and more and
+more obvious that the imperial power in Italy was about to dissolve.
+What was to take its place? The papacy? Yes, but the state of Italy,
+the hostility of Liutprand, the whole attitude and condition of the
+Lombards, forced upon the papacy the necessity of finding a champion,
+a soldier and an army. That champion Gregory hoped to find in Charles
+Martel; his successors found him in Charles's son Pepin and in
+Charlemagne.
+
+I say the appeal of the pope for help was not made only on account of
+the Lombard threat against Rome. It was the sudden dissolution of the
+imperial power that called it forth. In or about 737, the city of
+Ravenna, as we may believe, was besieged and taken by Liutprand and
+for some three years remained in his hands, till at the united prayers
+of exarch and pope the Venetians fitted out a fleet and recaptured it
+for the empire as we may think in 740.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: I follow Hodgkin, vi. p. 482 _et seq_., and Appendix F.
+Cf. also for discussion as to the date, Pinton in _Archivio Veneto_
+(1889), pp. 368-384, and Monticolo in _Archivio della R. S. Romana di
+St. Pat_. (1892), pp. 321-365.]
+
+We know nothing of that siege and capture and practically nothing of
+the splendid victory of the Venetians. But the tremendous significance
+of the fall of Ravenna, which had been the impregnable seat of the
+empire in Italy since Belisarius entered it in 540, must not escape
+us. Rightly understood it made necessary all that followed.
+
+At this dramatic moment the Emperor Leo died, to be followed in 741 by
+Pope Gregory and Charles Martel. Gregory was succeeded by Pope
+Zacharias, who in the year of his election met Liutprand at Narni and
+obtained from him the restoration of the four frontier towns he had
+taken two years before. But though Rome was thus secured Ravenna was
+in worse danger than ever, for Liutprand now renewed his attack upon
+it and it was only the intervention of the pope in person at Pavia
+that saved the city. Zacharias set forth along the Flaminian Way; at
+Aquila perhaps near Rimini the exarch met him, and he entered Ravenna
+in triumph, the whole city coming out to meet him. In spite of the
+opposition of Liutprand he made his way to Pavia, and was successful
+in persuading him to give up his attempt to take the once impregnable
+city and to restore much he had captured. Liutprand was an old man;
+perhaps he was not hard to persuade, for he was on the eve of his
+death, which came to him in 744. His successor Hildeprand reigned for
+six months and was deposed. Ratchis became king, a pious man who made
+truce with the pope, and in 749 abdicated and entered a monastery.
+Aistulf was chosen king, and at once turned his thoughts to Ravenna.
+The crisis so long foreseen, so often prevented by the papacy, came at
+last with great suddenness. In 751 Ravenna fell and the Byzantine
+empire in Italy thereby came to an end.
+
+We know nothing of this tremendous affair; we do not know whether the
+great imperial city, full of all the strange wonder of Byzantium, and
+heavy with the destiny of Europe, was taken suddenly by assault or
+after a long siege. We know only that it fell, and that Aistulf was
+master there in the year of our Lord 751.
+
+A sort of silence followed that fall. In 752 Pope Zacharias died. His
+successor was never consecrated, but died within three days of his
+election and made way for Pope Stephen. In the confusion of all things
+it is said that a party in Rome urged Aistulf to usurp the empire.
+This was enough; it might have been, and perhaps was, expected. The
+pope had his answer ready. The heir of the empire in Italy was not the
+Lombard but the Holy See. Aistulf threatened to invade Roman
+territory, and, indeed, occupied Ceccano in the duchy of Rome. Again
+the pope had his answer. That answer was the appeal to Pepin and his
+Franks. The papacy had found a champion.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+THE PAPAL STATE
+
+PEPIN AND CHARLEMANGE
+
+
+The appeal of Stephen, which was to have for its result the
+resurrection of the empire in the West and the establishment of the
+papacy as a temporal power and sovereignty, was made in a letter now
+lost to us, which a pilgrim on his way back to France from Rome
+carried to Pepin the king of the Franks. In reply to it, the abbot of
+Jumieges appeared in Rome as Pepin's ambassador to invite the pope
+himself to cross the Alps.
+
+Meantime two events occurred, which cannot but have hardened the
+resolve of the pope to find a champion. These events were the
+occupation of Ceccano in the duchy of Rome by Aistulf and the appeal
+of the emperor to the pope that he should go to Pavia and attempt to
+persuade the Lombard king to give up Ravenna and the cities he had
+lately taken. The appeal of the emperor must have assured the pope, if
+indeed he had any doubt about it, that the emperor, so far as Italy
+was concerned, was helpless; while the occupation of Ceccano made it
+doubly obvious that the Lombard intended, now that the empire was
+helpless, to be absolute master throughout the peninsula.
+
+[Illustration: Colour Plate S. GlOVANNI EVANGELISTA]
+
+Stephen considered what course he should pursue, received two other
+Prankish envoys in Rome, consented to go to Pavia on behalf of the
+emperor, and determined at the same time to visit Pepin in the north.
+He set out for Pavia upon October 13, 753, leaving Rome with a vast
+concourse of people, which accompanied him some distance along the
+Way, out of the Flaminian Gate. His mission on behalf of the empire
+was naturally entirely fruitless, and early in November the pope left
+Pavia with the hardly won consent of Aistulf to cross the Alps by the
+Great S. Bernard--a difficult and dangerous business at that time of
+year--and to meet the Frankish king at S. Maurice in the valley of the
+Rhone. In the latter he was disappointed. Pepin had been called away
+to deal with an incursion of the Saxons, and now awaited his amazing
+visitor at Ponthion in Champagne, but he sent his son Charles,
+destined to be the first emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, a hundred
+miles down the long roads to meet the pope, and it was in the company
+of this youthful hero that upon the Feast of the Epiphany 754 Stephen
+entered Ponthion at last, and was greeted by Pepin, who cast himself
+upon the ground before him and walked as his lackey beside him as he
+rode.
+
+The result of their interview is given in the _Liber Pontificalis_:
+"The most blessed pope tearfully besought the said most Christian king
+that by means of a treaty of peace (? with him the pope) he would
+dispose of the cause of the blessed Peter and the republic of the
+Romans, who by an oath there and then (de praesenti) satisfied the
+most blessed pope that he would obey all his commands and admonitions
+with all his strength and that it pleased him to restore by every
+means the exarchate of Ravenna and the rights and territories of the
+republic."[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: As this is very important I give the original Latin
+"Ibidem beatissmus Papa praefatum Christianissimum regem
+lacrimabiliter deprecatus est ut per pacis foedera causam beati Petri
+et reipublicarae Romanorum disponeret. Qui de praesenti jurejurando
+eundem beatissimum Papam satisfecit omnibus ejus mandatis et
+ammonitionibus sese totis nisibus obedire, et ut illi placitum fuerit
+Exarchatum Ravennae et reipublicae jura seu loca reddere modis
+omnibus."]
+
+That winter the pope spent at S. Denis, where he solemnly crowned
+Pepin and his queen, and Charles and Carloman their children,
+pronouncing an anathema upon all or any who should ever attempt to
+elect a king not of their house. Upon Pepin too he conferred the title
+of patrician. Can it be that by this he intended the king of the
+Franks to be his executor in the exarchate as the exarch had been the
+executor of the emperor?[1] We do not know; but a little later a
+document was drawn up in which Pepin declared and enumerated the
+territories he was ready to secure for the pope. This document, the
+Donation of Pepin, would seem to have confirmed in detail and in
+writing the oath he had sworn to the pope at Ponthion. Unhappily the
+document has disappeared, and we can only judge of its contents by
+what actually happened.
+
+[Footnote 1: The title patrician was not exclusively borne by the
+exarch, the Dux Romae, for instance, bore that title in 743.]
+
+The adventure into Italy to which the pope had persuaded Pepin was not
+universally popular with the Frankish nobles. We find Pepin attempting
+to gain his end by negotiation with Aistulf, but all to no purpose,
+and probably in March 755 the Franks set out with the pope at their
+head to march into Italy to curb and chastise the Lombard.
+
+The great army of Pepin crossed the Alps by the Mont Cenis, and in
+what was little more than a skirmish upon the northern side of the
+pass defeated the Lombard army and proceeded to invest Pavia and
+ravish the country round about. Aistulf, who was rather an impetuous
+than a great soldier, had soon had enough and was ready to entertain
+proposals for peace. A treaty was made in which he agreed "to restore"
+Ravenna and divers other cities, and to attempt nothing in the future
+against Rome and the Holy See. This having been decided, the pope took
+leave of Pepin, who returned to France, and went on his way to Rome.
+
+The pope had won and had really established the Holy See as the heir
+of the empire; but Aistulf was by no means done with. He forgot alike
+his treaty and his promises. "Ever since the day when we parted," the
+pope writes to Pepin and the young kings, his sons Charles and
+Carloman, "he has striven to put upon us such afflictions and on the
+Holy Church of God such insults as the tongue of man cannot
+declare.... You have made peace too easily, you have taken no
+sufficient security for the fulfilment of the promises you have made
+to S. Peter, which you yourselves guaranteed by writing under your
+hand and seal...."
+
+But the Franks were deaf. An expedition to crush the Lombards was a
+laborious and an expensive business, and Pepin had much to occupy him
+at home.
+
+In January 756, however, Aistulf, mad from the start, laid siege to
+Rome, and for three months laid waste the farms of the Campagna, S.
+Peter's patrimony. Narni was taken and indeed all seemed as hopeless
+as ever. Then the pope took up his pen and as the successor of the
+Prince of the Apostles wrote a letter as from S. Peter himself and
+sent it to the three kings, Pepin, Charles, and Carloman, to the
+bishops, abbots, priests and monks, the dukes, counts, armies, and
+people of Francia. Gibbon thus summarises this extraordinary and
+dramatic epistle: "The apostle assures his adoptive sons the king, the
+clergy, and the nobles of France that dead in the flesh, he is still
+alive in the spirit; that they now hear and must obey the voice of the
+founder and guardian of the Roman Church; that the Virgin, the angels,
+the saints, and the martyrs, and all the host of heaven unanimously
+urge the request, and will confess the obligation; that riches,
+victory, and paradise will crown their pious enterprise; and that
+eternal damnation will be the penalty of their neglect, if they suffer
+his tomb, his temple, and his people to fall into the hands of the
+perfidious Lombards."
+
+Pepin could not be deaf to such an appeal. He again crossed the Mont
+Cenis, and again the Lombards were as chaff before him. On his march
+to Pavia he was met by two envoys from Constantinople who had
+ill-treated, detained, and outstripped the papal ambassador. They
+besought Pepin to restore Ravenna and the exarchate to the empire, but
+he denied them and declared roundly that "on no account whatsoever
+should those cities be alienated from the power of the blessed Peter
+and the jurisdiction of the Roman Church and the Apostolic See,
+affirming too with an oath that for no man's favour had he given
+himself once again to this conflict, but only for love of S. Peter and
+for the pardon of his sins; asserting, also, that no abundance of
+treasure would bribe him to take away what he had once offered for S.
+Peter's acceptance."[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Cf. Hodgkin, _op, cit_. vii. p. 217.]
+
+Pepin marched on; Pavia was besieged, Aistulf was beaten to the dust.
+A treaty was drawn up in which the Lombard gave to "S. Peter, the Holy
+Roman Church, and all the popes of the Apostolic See forever" the
+Exarchate, the Pentapolis, and Comacchio. An officer was commissioned
+to receive the submission of every city, and their keys and the deed
+of Pepin's donation were placed upon the tomb of S. Peter in Rome. The
+papal state was founded; where the empire had ruled so long there
+appeared the heir of the empire, the papacy "sitting crowned upon the
+grave thereof."
+
+The cities that with their _contadi_ and dependencies thus formed the
+temporal dominion of the pope were, according to the papal biographer,
+twenty-three in number; Ravenna first and foremost, then Rimini,
+Pesaro, Fano, Sinigaglia (but not Ancona) that had formed the old
+Pentapolis. To them was added La Cattolica. The whole of the inland
+Pentapolis--though Fossombrone is not mentioned--Urbino, Jesi, Cagli,
+Gubbio--passed to the pope as well as the following places: Cesena and
+the Mons Lucatium, Forlimpopoli, Forli, Castro, Caro, S. Leo, Arcevia,
+Serra dei Conti, the Republic of S. Marino, Sarsina, and Cantiano
+together with Comacchio and Narni. A few months after all this was
+accomplished, in December 756, Aistulf, "that follower of the devil,"
+as the pope called him, died.
+
+Every state that is nearing dissolution is the prey of civil discord.
+So it was with the Lombards. Ratchis, who had more than seven years
+before become a monk, claimed the throne; so did Desiderius, "mildest
+of men." Pope Stephen supported the latter on condition that Ancona,
+that last city of the Pentapolis, Osimo which dominated it, and Umana,
+together with Faenza, Imola, and Ferrara, were "restored" to the
+papacy. Desiderius agreed and became king, but failed, as the Lombards
+always failed, to keep his promise, for though he handed over Faenza,
+Bagnacavallo, and Gavello, he withheld Imola, Bologna, Ancona, Osimo,
+and Umana; this was in 757, the year of Stephen's death.
+
+In the same year Pope Paul I. seems to have visited the chief city of
+his new state, Ravenna, mainly perhaps on ecclesiastical business, for
+the archbishop Sergius was by no means a loyal subject and had only
+been brought to heel when nothing but submission was left open to him.
+He had then, according to Agnellus, promised to deliver to the pope
+all the "gold, silver, vessels of price, hoards of money," and so
+forth stored up in Ravenna. Agnellus tells a long and incoherent tale
+of the way the pope obtained this treasure and of certain plots to
+murder him therefor. All that seems fairly certain is that in the
+first year of his reign pope Paul I. visited Ravenna. Indeed the chief
+difficulty of the papacy at this time must have been the occupation of
+the state it had won so consummately. How were the popes to make good
+their somewhat shadowy hold upon Ravenna, and the Pentapolis, and
+those other strongholds in central Italy and Aemilia?
+
+That they were not to hold them easily was soon evident. The empire
+was plotting to win Pepin to its side, and when that failed again,
+rumours of an imperial invasion reached Rome. Politically all
+relations ceased between Constantinople and Rome about this time; for
+though the pope in reality had long ceased to be a subject of the
+emperor, when he had possessed himself of the exarchate even theory
+had to give way to fact. Nor was the papacy more fortunate in its
+relations with Desiderius. The pope's object was doubtless to keep the
+Lombard kingdom weak, if not to destroy it. The first step to that end
+was obviously to encourage the achievement of a real independence by
+the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento, which, again, bordering as they
+did upon the duchy of Rome, would be easier to deal with if they stood
+alone. There can be little doubt that the pope fostered the sleepless
+disaffection of the dukes, but when their revolt matured Desiderius
+was able to crush it, laying waste the Pentapolis on his way. He was
+then wise enough to visit Rome and to arrange a peace which was only
+once broken during pope Paul's pontificate: in 761 when Desiderius
+attacked Sinigaglia.
+
+It was easier, however, for the pope to arrange successfully a foreign
+policy than to administer his new state. No machinery existed for the
+secular government by the Holy See of a country so considerable; nor
+was this easy to invent. The pope was forced to fall back upon his
+representative in Ravenna, namely, the archbishop. Now the archbishops
+of Ravenna had always been lacking in loyalty. Ravenna and the
+exarchate were governed in the name of the pope by the archbishop,
+assisted by three tribunes who were elected by the people. This
+government was never very successful, for at every opportunity, and
+especially after the resurrection of the empire in the West, the
+archbishops were eager to consider themselves as feudatories of the
+empire. This was natural and it may be worth while briefly to inquire
+why.
+
+Because Ravenna had for so long, ever since the year 404, been the
+seat of the empire in Italy, the bishops of that city had acquired
+extraordinary privileges and even a unique position among the bishops
+of the West. As early as the time of Galla Placidia, the bishop of
+Ravenna had obtained from the Augusta the title and rights of
+metropolitan of the fourteen cities of Aemilia and Flaminia. It is
+true that the bishop continued to be confirmed and consecrated by the
+pope--S. Peter Chrysologus was so confirmed and consecrated--but the
+presence of the imperial court and later of the exarch encouraged in
+the minds of the bishops a sense of their unique importance and a
+certain spirit of independence in regard to Rome. Of course the Holy
+See was not prepared to cede any of its rights; but the spirit of
+disloyalty remained, and presently the bishop of Ravenna at the time
+of his consecration was forced to sign a declaration of loyalty, in
+which was set forth his chief duties and a definition of his rights.
+
+After the Byzantine conquest the church of Ravenna, which the empire
+regarded as a bulwark against the papal claims, received important
+privileges and its importance in the ecclesiastical hierarchy was
+greatly increased. Like the bishop of Rome, the bishop of Ravenna had
+a special envoy at Constantinople and was represented, again like
+Rome, in a special manner in the councils of the Orient. In religions
+ceremonies the bishops of Ravenna took a place immediately behind the
+pope, and in ecclesiastical assemblies they sat at the right hand of
+the pontiff. There can be little doubt indeed of the Erastianism of
+Justinian nor of his encouragement of the bishop of Ravenna.
+
+The declaration that the bishops were forced to sign upon their
+consecration by the pope by no means settled matters. In 648 this
+declaration itself was in dispute as to its interpretation, for
+Constans II. had conferred upon the See of Ravenna the privilege of
+autonomy, and at this time the bishop did not go to Rome for
+consecration. The Iconoclastic heresy of Constantinople, however,
+indirectly brought about peace between the pope and his suffragan, for
+Ravenna was in this whole heartedly Roman.
+
+It was then, by means of an instrument still very uncertain, that the
+papacy was forced to govern its new state, and in these circumstances,
+friendly relationship with Constantinople daily becoming more
+impossible, it is not surprising that we see the pope making an
+attempt to come to some sort of permanent reconciliation with
+Desiderius; and indeed when pope Paul died in 767 undoubtedly a peace
+had been arranged.
+
+All might have been well if pope Paul's successor had been regularly
+chosen; but a layman Constantine was elected by a rabble at the
+instigation of his brother Toto of Nepi. Christopher and his son
+Sergius, who held two of the greatest offices in the papal chancery,
+decided to call in the aid of the duke of Spoleto to attack
+Constantine, Rome was entered, and in the appalling confusion the
+Lombards elected a certain priest named Philip to be pope. Christopher
+appeared, Philip was turned out, and Stephen III., a Sicilian, was
+regularly chosen. That was in 768, and in the same year king Pepin
+died and was succeeded by his two sons, Charles to whom apparently
+fell Austrasia and Neustria, and Carloman who took Burgundy, Provence,
+and Swabia.
+
+The death of Pepin left the papacy without a champion. Nor was this
+all, as soon appeared. Charles and Carloman began to quarrel and to
+effect their reconciliation, or to avert its consequences, Bertrada,
+their mother, counselled and succeeded in forcing upon them a
+friendship and an alliance with the Lombards which meant the complete
+abandonment of Italy upon the part of the Franks. This alliance was to
+be secured by a double marriage. Charles was to marry Desiderata, the
+daughter of the Lombard king, while Gisila, Bertrada's daughter, was
+to marry Desiderius' heir. It is obvious that S. Peter was in peril,
+nor was pope Stephen slow to denounce the whole arrangement. His
+remonstrance, however, was ineffectual and there remained to him but
+one thing to do: to arrange himself with the now uncurbed Lombard
+king. This was exceedingly difficult, because his own election had
+been achieved only by the humiliation of the Lombards. However, he
+managed it at the price of civil war. Desiderius and his army entered
+Rome at the behest of the pope, who celebrated Mass before the king in
+S. Peter's. The Franks were checkmated.
+
+It was not long before Charles saw that he had been outwitted. An
+immediate change of his policy was necessary. In 771 it came with the
+repudiation of Desiderata, who was sent back to her father's court at
+Pavia. Henceforth Charles and Desiderius were implacable enemies. And
+now everything went in favour of the papal policy, just as before
+everything had seemed to cross it. Carloman, who had not quarrelled
+with Desiderius, and might have opposed Charles and changed all the
+future, suddenly died in December of the year of the quarrel. Charles
+became thus sole king of the Frankish nation. When pope Stephen came
+to die in February 772 he must have laid him down with a quiet mind.
+
+In Stephen's stead there was elected as pope a pure Roman, born in the
+Via Lata of the nobility of the City; he took the famous name of
+Hadrian I. Desiderius, who had watched with a growing anxiety the
+amazing policy of Stephen, now turned to his successor, and both
+demanded and begged a renewal of friendship. Hadrian answered his
+ambassador at last with the mere truth. "How can I trust your king
+when I recall what my predecessor Lord Stephen of pious memory told me
+in confidence of his perfidy? He told me that he had lied to him in
+everything as to the rights of Holy Church, though he swore upon the
+body of the Blessed Peter.... Look you, such is the honour of king
+Desiderius and the measure of the confidence I may repose in him."
+
+Desiderius' answer was not to the point. He seized the cities of
+Faenza, Ferrara, and Comacchio and ravaged the territory about
+Ravenna, burned the farms and carried off the cattle. Then he fell
+upon the Pentapolis, seized Sinigaglia, Jesi, Urbino, Gubbio, S. Leo,
+and other "Roman" cities, and indeed possessed himself of everything
+save only Ravenna and Rimini, and proceeded upon a raid into the duchy
+of Rome.
+
+The answer of the pope was mild but firm: mild, for the hour was not
+yet come; firm, for it would strike ere long. "Tell your king," said
+he, "that I swear in the presence of God that if he choose to restore
+those cities which in my time he has taken from S. Peter, I will
+hasten into his presence wherever he may appoint a meeting place, at
+Pavia, Ravenna, Perugia, or here in Rome, that we may confer
+together.... But if he does not restore what he has taken away he
+shall never see my face."
+
+The hour was not come. Charles was busy with the Saxon hordes upon the
+north and east of his kingdom. It was not till the beginning of
+January 773 that the pope sent his messenger Peter to summon him to
+his aid. Meanwhile, Desiderius marched on Rome. But even without
+Charles the pope was not defenceless. The Vicegerent of God who had
+without a soldier turned back Attila on the Mincio and had thrust back
+Liutprand from Rome was not to be at the mercy of such a king as
+Desiderius. At Viterbo his messengers, the three bishops of Albano,
+Palestrina, and Tivoli, met the Lombard king and gave him the pope's
+last word: "Anathema." Desiderius shrank back. In that moment as it
+seems the ambassadors of Charles arrived in Rome, satisfied themselves
+of the justice of the papal summons, and carried back to the great
+Frank the prayer of the pope that he would "redeem the Church of God."
+In the late summer of that year the Frankish host was assembled at
+Geneva and was already beginning to cross the mountains in two mighty
+commands by the Great S. Bernard and the Mont Cenis; in October the
+siege of Pavia was begun.
+
+That siege endured for more than eight months. Meanwhile Charles had
+made himself master of Verona and of many of the cities of the plain.
+The men of Spoleto hastened to "commend" themselves to the pope and
+the citizens of Fermo, Osimo, and Ancona, and of Citta di Castello, we
+read, followed their example, and for the feast of Easter 774, Charles
+appeared in Rome, and was greeted and embraced by the pope at S.
+Peter's. On Easter Day Charles heard Mass in S. Maria Maggiore, on
+Easter Monday in S. Peter's, on Easter Tuesday in S. Paul's. On the
+Wednesday in that Easter week, according to Hadrian's biographer, he
+made that great Donation to the papacy which confirmed and extended
+and secured the gift of Pepin his father. The duchies of Spoleto and
+Benevento, and much else, were added to the exarchate "as it was of
+old" and given to the pope. Then in June Pavia, the Lombard capital,
+fell and Desiderius and his wife were sent by Charles as prisoners to
+a convent in Picardy where it is said they ended their lives.
+
+[Illustration: GUARDHOUSE OF THE PALACE OF THEODORIC]
+
+The Donation of Pepin, confirmed, renewed, and enlarged by Charles,
+may, of course, be understood in various ways; at any rate it has been
+so understood; but it is certain that the pope saw in it both the
+fulfilment of his hopes and the final establishment of the papal
+monarchy. Yet while he utterly refused, and rightly, to admit the
+claim of Charles--not yet emperor--to interfere in the election of the
+archbishop of Ravenna, the head of his new dominion, he graciously
+permitted the king to take away certain mosaics from the old imperial
+city to adorn his palace at Aix; and that in the following letter,
+which Dr. Hodgkin translates: "We have received your bright and
+honeysweet letters brought us by Duke Arwin. In these you expressed
+your desire that we should grant you the mosaics and marbles of the
+palace in the city of Ravenna, as well as other specimens to be found
+both in the pavement and on the walls. We willingly grant your request
+because by your royal struggles the Church of your patron S. Peter
+daily enjoys many benefits, for which great will be your reward in
+heaven...." On no theory yet put forward can the pope be considered as
+the subject of the king of the Franks. That he had been and was to be
+the subject of the emperor can be defended, but when has S. Peter been
+the creature of a king?
+
+It was not Hadrian as we know but Leo who was destined to crown what
+pope Stephen had begun, and to re-establish the empire in the West,
+and as he thought to create for S. Peter not an occasional but a
+permanent champion.
+
+Twenty-five years after that great Easter in Rome, pope Leo, who
+succeeded Hadrian, whose long pontificate lasted for twenty-three
+years, was attacked in the streets of Rome and thrown to the ground in
+the Corso by two nephews of Hadrian's. Exactly what was the nature of
+their quarrel with Leo we do not know, but they managed to imprison
+the pope, who presently escaped and, assisted by Winichis, duke of
+Spoleto, made his way to the court of Charles. During the summer of
+799 the pope remained in France, and probably in October returned to
+Rome with a Frankish guard of honour. In the following autumn Charles
+set out on his fourth journey to Rome. It was now that he visited
+Ravenna, as he had already done in 787, and remained for seven days.
+On the 24th November he arrived in Rome. A month later upon Christmas
+Day the great king, attended by his nobles, amid a vast multitude,
+went to S. Peter's to hear Mass. It was there in the midst of that
+great basilica, before the tomb of the Prince of the Apostles, that
+upon the birthday of Christ the empire re-arose; the pope placed upon
+the head of Charlemagne the golden diadem and the Roman people cried
+aloud, "_Carolo Piissimo Augusta Deo, Coronato Magno a Pacifico
+Imperatori Vita et Victoria_," Three times that great acclamation
+echoed over the tomb of the Fisherman. Once more there was an emperor
+in the West, a champion of the Faith and defender of the Holy See.
+
+It has been asserted, and is still I believe maintained, that that
+coronation was a surprise to Charles. But such things do not come
+unforeseen, nor was Charlemagne the man to permit or to tolerate so
+amazing an astonishment. All Rome knew what was about to be
+accomplished and had gathered in the ancient basilica to await it and
+complete it.
+
+Such a question, however, concerns us but little. For us it remains to
+note that with the re-creation of the empire, and the appearance of
+the Holy See as a great temporal sovereignty in Italy, the historical
+importance of Ravenna comes to an end. We have seen that in the autumn
+of the most famous year save that of the birth of Our Lord,
+Charlemagne had visited Ravenna and had spent seven days in the city.
+Once more he was to visit it, and that upon his return journey
+northward in May 801. From this time Ravenna ceases to be of any
+significance in the history of Europe. The pass it held was no longer
+of importance, for the barbarian invasions were at an end, and a new
+road into Italy over the Apennines was coming into use, the Via
+Francigena, the way of the Franks. As the port upon the sea which was
+the fault between East and West it, too, ceased to exist; for East and
+West were no longer of any real importance the one to the other, and
+already the alteration of the coast line, which was one day to leave
+the old seaport some miles from the shore, had begun.
+
+The history of Ravenna, her importance in the history of Europe and
+Italy, thus comes to an end with the appearance of Charlemagne and the
+resurrection of the West. The ancient and beautiful city which had
+played so great a part in the fortunes of the empire, which had, as it
+were, twice been its birthplace and twice its tomb, herself passes
+into oblivion when that empire, Holy now and Roman still, rises again
+and in the West with the crowning of Charlemagne in S. Peter's Church
+upon Christmas Day in the year of Our Lord 800. With her subsequent
+story, interesting to us mainly in two of its episodes--the apparition
+of Dante and the incident of 1512--I shall deal when I come to
+consider the Mediaeval and Renaissance city.
+
+But in fact we always think of Ravenna as a city of the Dark Age, and
+in that we are right. She is a tomb, the tomb of the old empire, and
+like the sepulchre outside the gates of Jerusalem, that was Arimathean
+Joseph's, she held during an appalling interval of terror and doubt
+the most precious thing in the world, to be herself utterly forgotten
+in the morning of the resurrection. And surely to one who had
+approached her in the dawn, while it was yet dark, of the ninth
+century, of mediaeval Europe that is, her words would have been those
+of the angels so long ago: _Non est hic; sed surrexit_. While to us
+to-day she would say: _Venite et videte locum ubi positus erat
+Dominus_.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+THE CATHOLIC CHURCHES OF THE FIFTH CENTURY
+
+THE CATHEDRAL, BAPTISTERY, ARCIVESCOVADO, S. AGATA, S. PIETRO
+MAGGIORE, S. GIOVANNI EVANGELISTA, S. GIOVANNI BATTISTA, AND THE
+MAUSOLEUM OF GALLA PLACIDIA
+
+
+Ravenna, as we see her to-day, is like no other city in Italy. As in
+her geography and in her history, so in her aspect, she is a place
+apart, a place very distinctive and special, and with a physiognomy
+and appearance all her own. What we see in her is still really the
+city of Honorius, of Galla Placidia, of Theodoric, of Belisarius and
+Narses, of the exarchate, in a word, of the mighty revolution in which
+Europe, all we mean by Europe, so nearly foundered, and which here
+alone is still splendidly visible to us in the great Roman and
+Byzantine works of that time.
+
+For the age, the Dark Age, of her glory is illumined by no other city
+in Italy or indeed in the world. She was the splendour of that age, a
+lonely splendour. And because, when that age came to an end, she was
+practically abandoned--abandoned, that is, by the great world--just as
+about the same time she was abandoned by the sea, much of her ancient
+beauty has remained to her through all the centuries since, even down
+to our own day, when, lovelier than ever in her lonely marsh, she is a
+place so lugubrious, so infinitely still and sad, full of the autumn
+wind and the rumours of silence of the tomb, of the most reverent of
+all tombs--the tomb of the empire.
+
+We shall not find in Ravenna anything at all, any building, that is,
+or work of art, of classical antiquity; all she was, all she did, all
+she possessed in the great years of the empire has perished. Nor shall
+we find much that may have been hers in the smaller life that came to
+her in the beginning of the Middle Age, or that was hers in the time
+of the Renaissance; the memory and the dust of Dante, a few churches,
+a few frescoes, a few pictures, a few palaces; nothing beside. For all
+these we must go to Pompeii and to Rome, or to Florence, Siena,
+Assisi, and Venice; in Ravenna we shall find something more rare, but
+not these. She remains a city of the Dark Age, of the fifth, sixth,
+seventh, and eighth centuries, and she is full of the churches, the
+tombs, and the art of that time, early Christian and Byzantine things
+that we shall not find elsewhere, or, at any rate, not in the same
+abundance, perfection, and beauty.
+
+And yet though so much remains, her story since the time of
+Charlemagne might seem to be little else but a long catalogue of
+pillage and destruction. Charlemagne himself began this cruel work
+when he carried off the mosaics and the marbles, the ornaments of the
+imperial palace, to adorn Aix-la-Chapelle, and since his day not a
+century has passed without adding to this vandalism; the worst
+offenders being the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth,
+eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, which by rebuilding, by frank
+pillage, by mere destruction, by earthquakes, by contempt, and worst
+of all by restoration have utterly destroyed much that should have
+remained for ever, and have altogether spoilt and transformed most of
+that which, almost by chance it might seem, remains.
+
+And so it comes to pass that the oldest buildings remaining to us
+to-day in Ravenna are to be found in the baptistery, the cathedral,
+the arcivescovado, and the mausoleum of Galla Placidia, the oldest
+complete building being the last. Let us then first consider these.
+
+The first bishop, the "Apostle" of Ravenna, according to Agnellus, was
+S. Apollinaris, a Syrian of Antioch, the friend and disciple of S.
+Peter, who, as we know, had been bishop of Antioch for seven years
+before he went to Rome. Apollinaris followed S. Peter to the Eternal
+City and was appointed by him bishop of Ravenna, whither he came to
+establish the church. There might seem to be some doubt as to his
+martyrdom; but, according to Agnellus, he was succeeded by his
+disciple S. Aderitus, and he in his turn by S. Eleucadius, a
+theologian, who is said to have written commentaries upon the books of
+the Old and New Testaments, and to have been followed as bishop by S.
+Martianus, a noble whom S. Apollinaris had ordained deacon. There
+follows in the _Liber Pontificalis_ of Agnellus a list of twelve
+bishops, S. Calocerus, S. Proculus, S. Probus, S. Datus, S. Liberius,
+S. Agapetus, S. Marcellinus, S. Severus (c. 344), S. Liberius II., S.
+Probus II., S. Florentius, and S. Liberius III., who occupy the see
+before we come to S. Ursus, who "first began to build a Temple to God,
+so that the Christians previously scattered about in huts should be
+collected into one sheepfold."[1] S. Ursus, according to Dr.
+Holder-Egger, ruled in Ravenna from 370 to 396, and his church was
+dedicated in 385; but a later authority[2] would seem to place his
+pontificate later, and to argue that it immediately preceded that of
+S. Peter Chrysologus, who, the same authority asserts, was elected in
+429. All agree that S. Ursus reigned for twenty-six years, and
+therefore, if he immediately preceded S. Peter Chrysologus, he was
+elected not in 370, but in 403; that is to say, in or about the same
+time as Honorius took up his residence in Ravenna.
+
+[Footnote 1: "Iste piimus hic initiavit Templum construere Dei, ut
+plebes Christianorum quae in singulis tuguriis vagabant in unum ovile
+piissimus collegeret Pastor ... Igitur aedificavit iste Beatissimus
+Praesul infra hanc Civitatem Ravennam Sanctam Ecclesiam Catholicam,
+quo omnes assidue concurremus, quam de suo nomine Ursianam nominavit
+... "]
+
+[Footnote 2: A Testi Rasponi, _Note Marginali al Liber Pontificalis di
+Agnello Ravennate_ in _Atti e Memorie della R. Dep. di St. Pat. per la
+Romagna_, iii. 27 (Bologna, 1909-10).]
+
+However that may be, we must attribute the foundation of a new
+cathedral church in Ravenna to S. Ursus, for till this day it bears
+his name, Ecclesia Ursiana, though it appears to have been dedicated
+in honour of the Resurrection (Anastasis.)
+
+[Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL (_Basilica Ursiana_)]
+
+Agnellus gives us a fairly full account of this church, which
+consisted of five naves divided and upheld by four rows of
+fifty-six[1] columns of precious marble from the temple of Jupiter.
+That the church was approached by steps we learn from Agnellus in his
+life of S. Exuperantius, for he there tells us that Felix the
+patrician was killed "on the steps of the Ecclesia Ursiana." Both the
+vault and the walls were adorned with mosaics,[2] which Agnellus
+describes and which would seem to have covered then or later the whole
+of the interior; the wall on the women's side of the church being
+decorated with a figure of S. Anastasia, while over all was a dome
+"adorned with various coloured tiles representing different figures."
+When Agnellus wrote (ninth century) this great church was of course
+standing, but doubtless it had been added to and adorned from century
+to century, and it is impossible to learn from his description, or
+indeed any other that we have, what was due therein to S. Ursus and
+what to his successors. One of the most splendid ornaments the church
+possessed would seem to have been a ciborium of silver, borne by
+columns which stood over the high altar also of silver. This is said
+by Agnellus to have been placed there by the bishop S. Victor, who
+seems to have ruled in Ravenna from about 537 to 544. It is said to
+have cost, with the consent of Justinian, the whole revenue of Italy
+for a year and to have weighed some one hundred and twenty pounds. The
+whole stood in the midst of a circular choir of marble, itself covered
+with silver it might seem, if we may believe a chronicler of Vicenza
+of the fifteenth century, quoted by Zirardini,[3] who says: "In the
+great church of Ravenna all the choir, the altar, and the great
+tabernacle over the altar are of silver." Before the altar was the
+_Schola Caniorum_.
+
+[Footnote 1: Fabri, however, in his _Sacre Memorie_, says there were
+forty-nine columns.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Agnellus gives the names of the mosaicists Euserius or
+Cuserius, Paulus, Agatho, Satius, and Stephanus.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Zirardini, _De Antiquis Sacris Ravennae Aedificiis_.]
+
+Agnellus tells us further in his life of S. Felix (_c_. 693) that that
+bishop built a _Salutatorium_ (? Sacristy), "whence the bishop and his
+assistants proceeded at the Introit of the Mass into the presence of
+the people." But the Epigram which Agnellus quotes from this building
+would seem to suggest that the _salutatorium_ was rather then rebuilt
+than added for the first time to the church.
+
+The magnificent basilica, one of the most splendid in Italy, was
+sacked by the French in April 1512, but, as Dr. Corrado Ricci says, it
+was not they who destroyed the church itself, but the _accademici_ of
+the eighteenth century, who, instead of conserving the glorious
+building, then some thirteen hundred years old, began in 1733 to pull
+it down, to break up the beautiful capitals and columns of precious
+marbles, and to make out of the fragments the pavement of the new
+church we still see, begun in 1734 by Gian Francesco Buonamici da
+Rimini. Only the apse with its beautiful great mosaic remained for a
+few years till at last it too was destroyed.
+
+Thus the church we have in place of the old Basilica Ursiana is a
+building of the eighteenth century, and all that we care for in it is
+the fragments that are to be found there of its glorious predecessor.
+
+These are few in number and of little account. Supporting the central
+arch of the portico are two marble columns which belonged to the old
+basilica, and by the main door are two others of granite which came
+perhaps from the old nave.
+
+Entering the church we find ourselves in a cruciform building
+consisting of three naves, divided by twenty-four columns of marble,
+transept, and apse, with a dome over the crossing. In the second
+chapel on the right is an ancient marble sarcophagus said to be that
+of S. Exuperantius, bishop of Ravenna about 470. The magnificent tomb
+carved in high relief did not, however, belong to the old cathedral,
+but was brought here when the church of S. Agnese was destroyed. In
+the south transept is the chapel of the Madonna del Sudore, where on
+either side are two other sarcophagi of marble adorned with figures
+and symbols. That on the right is said to be the tomb of S.
+Barbatianus, confessor of Galla Placidia, and was originally in the
+church of S. Lorenzo in Caesarea, whence it was brought to the
+cathedral in the thirteenth century by the archbishop Bonifazio de'
+Fieschi, whom Dante found in Purgatory among the gluttons:
+
+  "Bonifazio
+  che pasturo col rocco molte genti..."
+
+He brought the sarcophagus to the cathedral for his own tomb and there
+I suppose he was buried. The sarcophagus upon the left was likewise
+used in 1321 as a tomb for himself by the archbishop, Rainaldo
+Concoreggio. This, too, is sculptured with a bas-relief of Christ, a
+nimbus round His head, a book in His hand, seated on a throne set on a
+rock, out of which four rivers flow. With outstretched hand He gives a
+crown to S. Paul, while S. Peter bearing a cross holds a crown, just
+received, in his hand. The sculpture on the sarcophagus of S.
+Barbatianus is ruder.
+
+The high altar is of course modern, but within it is an ancient marble
+sarcophagus of the sixth century, in which it is said the dust of nine
+bishops of about that time lies.
+
+But one noble thing remains here among all the modern trash to remind
+us of all we have lost: the glorious processional cross of silver
+called of S. Agnello. Yet even this, noble as it is, does not come to
+us from Roman or Byzantine times it seems, but is rather a work of the
+eleventh century.
+
+In the midst of this great cross, upon one side, is the Blessed Virgin
+praying, and upon the other Christ rising from the tomb. Upon the arms
+of the cross, and the uprights, are forty medallions of saints, of
+which three would seem to be archbishops. I say this beautiful and
+precious thing comes to us from the eleventh century; but it has been
+very much restored at various times and is now largely a work of the
+sixteenth century. Dr. Ricci tells us that on the side where we see
+the Madonna only the five medallions on the lower upright and the two
+last of the upper are original; while upon that of the Risen Christ,
+only the five medallions on the lower upright are untouched, all the
+rest is restoration.
+
+Beneath the eighteenth-century apse of the cathedral is the ancient
+crypt, no longer to be seen; it does not, according to Dr. Ricci, date
+earlier than the ninth century nor do any of the other crypts in the
+city.
+
+In the left aisle a few fragments from the old church remain
+recognisable. They are the marble slabs of an _ambo_ erected by S.
+Agnellus, archbishop of Ravenna in the middle of the sixth century.
+There we read: _Servus Christi Agnellus Episcopus hunc pyrgum fecit_.
+Among these are some earlier panels of the fifth century. In the
+treasury, again, we find two other panels from the _ambo_ of S.
+Agnellus, and a strange calendar carved upon a slab of marble to
+enable one to find the feast of Easter in any year from 532 to 626;
+this is certainly of the sixth century.
+
+A certain number of Mediaeval and Renaissance things are also to be
+seen in the church. Here in the treasury we have a cross of silver
+gilt, with reliefs of the Crucifixion, God the Father, the Blessed
+Virgin, S. John Baptist, and S. Mary Magdalen, dating from the middle
+of the fourteenth century (1366). Over the entrance to the sacristy is
+a fresco by Guido Reni of Elijah the prophet fed by an angel. Within,
+is a good picture by Marco Palmezzano: a Pieta with S. John Baptist;
+while the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament is decorated by him and his
+pupils.
+
+It is obvious, then, that very little remains to us of the original
+Basilica Ursiana; nor can we reckon among that little the beautiful
+round and isolated campanile. This is not older than the ninth
+century, and has been much tampered with, especially in the sixteenth
+century, after an earthquake, and in the seventeenth century after
+both earthquake and fire. Indeed, the upper storey dates entirely from
+1658.
+
+As it is with the cathedral, so it is with the _Arcivescovado_. Of the
+old palace of the Bishops of Ravenna only a few walls, a tower, and a
+wonderful little chapel remain. What we see now is work of the
+sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries after a restoration at the end
+of the nineteenth. The old vast palace which has been destroyed was
+the work of many archbishops, achieved during many centuries. It
+consisted of a series of buildings grouped about the palace which the
+archbishop S. Peter Chrysologus built in the fifth century, and its
+most magnificent part was due to S. Maximian, archbishop of Ravenna in
+the time of Justinian. All their work, which we would so gladly see,
+is gone except the little chapel of S. Peter Chrysologus, which he
+built and signed in one of the arches in the fifth century.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: According to Rasponi the chapel was dedicated originally
+to S. Andrea and is to be identified with the Monasterium di S.
+Andrea, which was not built by S. Peter Chrysologus (429-_c_. 449),
+but by Peter II. (494-_c_. 519). Cf. Rasponi, _Note Marginali al Liber
+Pontificalis di Agnello Ravennate_ (Atti e Memorie della R. Dep. di
+Stor. Pat. per la Romagna, iii. 27), Bologna, 1909-1910.]
+
+Of this great man Agnellus records: "He was beautiful in appearance,
+lovely in aspect; before him there was no bishop like him in wisdom,
+nor any other after him." He was a native of Imola, then called Forum
+Cornelii, and was ordained deacon by the bishop of that city, one
+Cornelius, of whom he always speaks with affection and gratitude. When
+the bishop of Ravenna died, it is said the clergy of the cathedral,
+then just built or building, with the people, chose a successor, and
+besought the bishop of Imola to go to Rome to obtain the confirmation
+of the pope. Cornelius took with him his deacon Peter, and the pope,
+who had been commanded so to do by the Prince of the Apostles in a
+dream, refused to ratify the election already made, but proposed Peter
+the deacon as the bishop chosen by S. Peter himself. Peter was there
+and then consecrated bishop, was conducted to Ravenna, and received
+with acclamation. He is said to have found a certain amount of
+paganism still remaining in his diocese, and to have completely
+extirpated it. He often preached before the Augusta Galla Placidia and
+her son Valentinian III., and he was perhaps the first archbishop of
+the see, Ravenna till his time having been suffragan to Milan. He
+seems to have died about 450 in Imola. Among his many buildings, which
+included the monastery of S. Andrea at Classis, is the little chapel
+now dedicated in his honour in the _Arcivescovado_ of Ravenna. It is
+perhaps the only one of his works which remains. The little square
+chamber, out of which the sanctuary opens, is upheld by four arches,
+which are covered, as is the vaulting, with most precious mosaics,
+still of the fifth century, though they have been and are still being
+much restored. On the angles of the vaulting, on a gold ground, we see
+four glorious white angels holding aloft in their upraised hands the
+symbol of Our Lord. Between them are the mighty signs of the Four
+Evangelists, the angel, the lion, the ox, and the eagle. In the key,
+as it were, of the arches east and west is a medallion of Our Lord,
+and three by three under the arch on either side the eleven Apostles
+and S. Paul, who takes the place of Judas instead of Matthias. In the
+key of the arches north and south is a medallion of the symbol of
+Christ, and three by three under the arch on either side six saints,
+the men to the right SS. Damian, Fabian, Sebastian, Chrysanthus,
+Chrysologus, and Cassianus; the women to the left SS. Cecilia,
+Eugenia, Eufemia, Felicitas, Perpetua, and Daria. Here the SS. Fabian,
+Sebastian, and Damian, Dr. Ricci tells us, are altogether
+restorations. For the rest, these mosaics have suffered much, both
+from restoration, properly so called, and from painting.
+
+The pavement is old and beautiful, as I think are the walls, but the
+frescoes, once by Luca Longhi, are most unworthy and out of place. The
+recess which now contains the altar might seem not to have made a part
+of the original chapel or oratory; it appears it was only in the
+eighteenth century that the two were thrown into one. At that time the
+mosaics of the Blessed Virgin and of S. Apollinaris and S. Vitalis
+were brought here from the old cathedral.
+
+Just outside this wonderful little chapel in the _Arcivescovado_ there
+is an apartment devoted to Roman and other remains found from time to
+time in Ravenna: a torso of a statue, a work of Roman antiquity,
+should be noted, as should certain fragments of a frieze, also an
+antique Roman work. Here, too, is preserved the splendid cope of S.
+Giovanni Angeloptes who was archbishop from 477 to 494[1] when he
+died.
+
+[Footnote 1: Cf. A. Testi Rasponi, _op. cit. supra_.]
+
+In another apartment of the _Arcivescovado_ is preserved a relic of
+another great archbishop of Ravenna: the ivory throne of S.
+Maximianus. This is a magnificent work of the early part of the sixth
+century, and is one of the most splendid works known to us of its
+kind. It was made for the cathedral of Ravenna, but in or about the
+year 1001 it was carried off by the Venetians and given by doge Pietro
+Orseolo II. to the emperor Otto III., who left it to the church of
+Ravenna on his death. It is entirely formed of ivory leaves, most of
+them carved sumptuously in relief. In front we see the monogram of
+_Maximianus Episcopus_ and under it are carvings of S. John Baptist
+between the Four Evangelists; all these between elaborately carved
+decorative panels. About the throne to right and left is the story of
+Joseph in ten panels, and upon the back in the seven panels that
+remain[2] the miracles of Our Lord. Altogether it is a work of the
+most lovely kind, and certainly Byzantine.
+
+[Footnote 2: Four of those missing, Dr. Ricci tells us, have of late
+years been discovered, one in the Naples Museum (1893), one in the
+collection of Count Stroganoff (1903), one at Pesaro (1894), and
+another in the Archaeological Museum at Milan (1905).]
+
+We shall come upon S. Maximianus again in S. Vitale, where something
+must be said of him. He lies, as has already been noted, in one of the
+great sarcophagi in the second chapel on the right in the cathedral.
+
+From the _Arcivescovado_ we pass to what is now the most remarkable
+building of the group--the Baptistery.
+
+Dr. Ricci tells us that it was originally one of the halls of the
+baths that were near the present cathedral. But it was converted into
+a baptistery and ornamented with mosaics by the archbishop Neon of
+Ravenna (_c_. 449-459) as its inscriptions tell us and is signed with
+his monogram. The original floor is three metres below that we see,
+and a second floor about a metre and a half above the original floor
+has been discovered; this it would seem is that made by Neon, while a
+third remains about half a metre under the pavement we use, and upon
+this are set the eight columns, with their capitals, two of them
+Byzantine and the rest Roman, which uphold the arches of the upper
+arcade upon which is set the great drum of the dome. The plan is a
+simple octagon, bare brick without, covered with a "tent" roof of
+amphorae under the tiles; but within, everywhere encrusted with
+glorious marbles and mosaics.
+
+It is to the mosaic of the cupola that we instinctively turn first,
+for it is, perhaps, the finest left to us in Ravenna. It is divided
+into three parts. In the midst is the Baptism of Our Lord on a gold
+ground. Christ stands up to His waist in the clear waters of the
+Jordan, the god of which river waits upon Him. S. John high up on the
+bank, his staff, topped with a cross, in his hand, pours the water
+from a shell upon Our Lord's head while the Dove, an almost heraldic
+figure, is seen above About this circular mosaic is set a greater
+circle in which we see, upon a blue ground, the twelve Apostles in
+procession, each bearing his crown. Nothing left to us of that age is
+finer or more gravely splendid than these mosaics, they seem to be the
+highest expression of a great art which has known how to reject the
+brutal realism of an earlier time and to seize perfectly the secret of
+decoration. Nothing of the kind more masterly remains to us in Europe.
+
+Beneath these two circles another is set in which are eight panels,
+each of three parts, where are represented eight temples, four of them
+with thrones signed with the Cross, and four of them with altars upon
+which the book of the Gospel is open.
+
+[Illustration: THE BAPTISTERY AND CAMPANILE OF THE CATHEDRAL]
+
+The whole cupola is borne by the upper arcade, where we see sixteen
+figures of the Prophets in stucco. The upper arcade is in its turn
+borne by the lower, which is everywhere encrusted with mosaics,
+restorations of our own time. The walls are panelled with various
+marbles. In the midst of the building is a huge octagonal font with
+its _ambo_, and in one of the wall niches is an ancient altar, and in
+another a vase of marble.
+
+The effect of all this splendour is even to-day very lovely and
+glorious; what it might have been if it had been properly cared for
+instead of "restored" we can only guess. Unhappily the "restoration"
+has been very radical. Even in the central Baptism, the head and
+shoulders and right arm of the figure of the Saviour, the head and
+shoulders and right arm, the right leg and foot of the Baptist and the
+cross in his his left hand have been destroyed and the whole dimmed
+and even spoiled. Such as it is, however, where shall we find its
+equal or anything to compare with it?
+
+From the cathedral group we now turn to the other churches which were
+built in the time of the old empire in Ravenna for the most part, in
+the days, that is, of Galla Placidia and her son Valentinian III.
+
+Among these is the church of S. Agata (entrance Via Mazzini 46), which
+though entirely rebuilt, with its campanile, in the later part of the
+fifteenth century is since the "restoration" of 1893 interesting, if
+at all, because the church dates originally from the fifth century. It
+would seem indeed that it was founded in the time of the Augusta, and
+to this the walls of part of the nave bear witness, but it was
+continued later perhaps by the archbishop Exuperantius (_c_. 470)
+whose monogram appears upon the second column to the left in the nave,
+and finally completed or in part rebuilt in the sixth century. In the
+fifteenth century (1476-94), the church was largely rebuilt again, but
+its tribune with its great mosaic remained till 1688 when it fell. In
+the sixth century it would seem to have had an atrium or narthex. Its
+main interest for us to-day lies in the beauty of its columns of bigio
+antico, cipollino, porphyry, granite, and other marbles belonging to
+the original church, with their Roman and Byzantine capitals. Also to
+the right of the nave we see a curious _ambone_ hollowed out of a
+fragment of a gigantic column of Greek marble. The altar, too, is
+formed from an ancient sarcophagus which is said to hold the dust of
+the two archbishops, Sergius, with whom the pope had so much trouble,
+and Agnellus. According to Agnellus the chronicler there was a
+portrait of the archbishop S. John Angeloptes in the apse, but this
+like the great mosaic of the tribune is gone. It was here, however,
+that S. John got that strange surname of his--Angeloptes. He and his
+predecessor S. Peter Chrysologus with S. Maximian and Sergius were the
+great archbishops of this great see. We hear that the emperor
+Valentinian III., according to Agnellus--but we should place the
+bishopric of S. John Angeloptes 477-494--"was so much affected by the
+preaching of this holy man that he took off his imperial crown and
+humbly on his knees begged his blessing.... Not long after he gave him
+fourteen cities with their churches to be governed by him
+_Archieratica potestate_. And even to this day (ninth century), these
+fourteen cities with their bishops are subject to the church of
+Ravenna.[1] This bishop first received from the emperor a _Pallium_ of
+white wool, just such as it is the custom for the pope to wear over
+the _Duplum_; and he and his successors have used such a vestment even
+to the present day."
+
+[Footnote 1: The Archbishop of Ravenna at the present day has seven
+suffragans, Bertinoro, Cervia, Cesena, Comacchio, Forli, Rimini,
+Sarsina. It is hard to decide whether this man or Peter Chrysologus
+was the first archbishop of Ravenna.]
+
+This passage of Agnellus is important, but does not seem, on
+examination, to have any real bearing upon the question of the
+dependence of the See of Ravenna upon Rome. The Pallium was originally
+an imperial gift to the popes, probably in the fourth century. And the
+fact that it is the emperor and not the pope who bestowes it upon the
+archbishop of Ravenna in the fifth century, if it be true, can have no
+meaning at all in the question of papal supremacy.
+
+Agnellus, whom I have quoted, goes on to tell us of that miracle which
+gave S. John, archbishop of Ravenna, his surname of Angeloptes or
+Angel-seer. "When the said John," he tells us, "was singing Mass in
+the Basilica of S. Agata and had accomplished all things according to
+the pontifical rite, after the reading of the Gospel, after the
+Protestation (? the Credo), the catechumens to whom it was given to
+see saw marvellous things. For when that most blessed man began the
+Canon, and made the sign of the Cross over the sacrifice, suddenly an
+angel from heaven came and stood on the other side of the altar in
+sight of the bishop. And when after finishing the consecration he had
+received the Body of the Lord, the assisting deacon who wished to
+fulfil his ministry could not see the chalice which he had to hand to
+him. Suddenly he was moved aside by the angel who offered the holy
+chalice to the bishop in his place. Then all the priests and people
+began to shake and to tremble beholding the holy chalice self-moved,
+inclined to the bishop's mouth, and again lifted into the air, and
+laid upon the holy altar. A strange thrill passed through the waiting
+multitude. Some said: 'The deacon is unworthy;' others affirmed, 'Not
+so, but it is a heavenly visitation.' And so long did the angel stand
+by the holy man until all the solemnities of the Mass were ended."
+
+Soon after this strange miracle S. John Angeloptes died and was buried
+in the basilica of S. Agata behind the altar in the place where he saw
+the angel standing.
+
+Nothing seems to remain of his tomb or his grave; but the church is
+full of curious fragments, broken pillars, bits of mosaic, ancient
+marble panels, beautifully carved, and more than one old sarcophagus.
+Somewhere there no doubt the dust of S. John Angeloptes awaits the
+resurrection.
+
+From S. Agata we pass to S. Francesco. This church was founded by S.
+Peter Chrysologus (429-_c_. 449) and was completed by S. Peter
+Chrysologus' successor, the archbishop S. Neon (_c_. 459). Its first
+title would seem to have been that of S. Peter Major; we hear, too,
+that it was called SS. Peter and Paul, and Agnellus in his life of S.
+Neon calls the church Basilica Apostolorum. The region of the city in
+which it stands would seem to have borne also the name _Regio Aposto
+lorum_, though whether it got the name from the church or the church
+from it is impossible to decide.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: The Franciscans conventuals would seem to have possessed
+the church from 1261 to 1810.]
+
+Unhappily the church has been entirely rebuilt in the eighteenth
+century, and our interest in it is confined for the most part to the
+tower, the crypt, the twenty-two columns of Greek marble which uphold
+the nave, two of which are signed 'P. E.' and four others 'E. V. G.,'
+and the tombs. The tall square tower dates, perhaps, from the tenth
+century, the crypt from the ninth, but the columns are of the fifth
+century. Perhaps the oldest thing in the church is the sarcophagus on
+the right of the main door which has on its front Pagan sculptures and
+on its sides Christian. Close to the holy water stoup is a very lovely
+sarcophagus of the fourth century with reliefs of Our Lord and eight
+Apostles. The ribs of the cover have as finials the heads of lions;
+altogether this is a very splendid and noble tomb. In the last chapel
+upon the right we find the great sarcophagus, still used as an altar,
+of S. Liberius, bishop of Ravenna (_c_. 375), "a great man, a
+never-failing fountain of charity; who brought much honour to the
+church," according to Agnellus. The sarcophagus dates from the end of
+the fourth century and is sculptured in high relief.
+
+I shall return to S. Francesco when I consider Mediaeval Ravenna.[2]
+At present I would direct the reader's attention to S. Giovanni
+Evangelista.
+
+[Footnote 2: See _infra_, p. 245 _et seq_.]
+
+This church was originally founded by Galla Placidia herself, in
+fulfilment of a vow made by her to S. John Evangelist, when, on her
+way from Constantinople to Ravenna, she was in danger of shipwreck.[3]
+Agnellus tells us that of old the church bore an inscription to this
+effect, and he gives it to us: _Sancto ac Beatissimo Apostolo Johanni
+Evangelistae Galla Placidia Augusta cum filio suo Placidio
+Valentiniano Augusta et filia sua Justa Grata Honoria Augusta,
+Liberationis penculum marts votum solmentes_. The mosaic of the apse
+of old represented the incident. Unhappily the church was almost
+entirely rebuilt in 1747, only the tower of the eleventh century and
+the portico of the fourteenth being left as they had been. The
+beautiful fourteenth-century door, however, bears above it a relief of
+that time in which we see Our Lord, S. John Evangelist, Valentinian
+III., Galla Placidia with her soldiers and her confessor, S.
+Barbatian, with priests. Below this on either side of the arch of the
+doorway is a representation of the Annunciation and within the arch
+itself a relief which recounts the miracle which attended the
+consecration of the church. For the church of S. Giovanni Evangelista
+was not only founded in recompense for a miracle, but a miracle
+attended its consecration. It seems that when the church was to be
+consecrated no relic of S. John Evangelist was to be had. Therefore
+the Augusta and her confessor gave themselves a whole night to prayer,
+and suddenly there appeared to them S. John himself, vested like a
+bishop with a thurible in his hand, with which he incensed the church.
+Then when he came to the altar to incense it, and they would have
+venerated him, he suddenly vanished, only leaving in the hand of the
+Augusta one of his shoes. This legend, which is represented in relief
+in the fourteenth-century doorway of S. Giovanni Evangelista, is also
+the subject of a picture by Rondinelli of Ravenna in the Brera at
+Milan.
+
+[Footnote 3: See _supra_, p. 41.]
+
+The church has, as I have said, been ruined by the rebuilding of 1747;
+but there still remain the twenty-four columns of bigio antico with
+their Roman capitals, which upheld the old basilica, and in the crypt
+is the ancient high altar of the fifth century. Something, too, of the
+old church would seem to remain in the much repaired walls of the apse
+without.
+
+[Illustration: THE CAMPANILE OF S. GIOVANNI EVANGELISTA]
+
+The frescoes by Giotto, sadly repainted, in the fourth chapel on the
+left, must be noted. They represent the four Evangelists with their
+symbols over them, and the four Latin fathers of the Church, S.
+Jerome, S. Ambrose, S. Austin, and S. Gregory. Certain fragments of a
+thirteenth-century mosaic pavement are to be seen in the chapel of S.
+Bartholomew, which is itself perhaps the oldest part of the church.
+
+We turn now to the church of S. Giovanni Battista which was founded by
+a certain Baduarius, according to Agnellus, and consecrated by S.
+Peter Chrysologus. It is possible that Baduarius was the mere builder,
+and that he built by order of Galla Placidia. Nothing, however, is
+left of the old church, which was entirely rebuilt in 1683, except the
+apse as it is seen from the outside, the round campanile in its first
+story and the beautiful columns sixteen in number, four of bigio
+antico, two of pavonazzetto, one of cipollino, and the rest of greco
+venato, according to Dr. Ricci.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There remains to be considered what is, when all is said, I suppose
+the noblest monument of the fifth century left to us in Italy or in
+Europe--the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia.
+
+Agnellus tells us that the Augusta built close to her palace a great
+church in the shape of a Latin cross. This she dedicated in honour of
+the Holy Cross which it will be remembered her predecessor S. Helena
+had discovered in Jerusalem. Of this church, though it has long since
+disappeared--the "western" part of it having been destroyed in 1602
+and what remained restored out of all recognition in 1716--we know a
+good deal. According to Agnellus it was covered with most precious
+stones (? marbles) and apparently with mosaics and was full of
+splendid ornaments. It had, too, a great narthex, and at the end of
+this Galla Placidia presently built a cruciform oratory for her own
+mausoleum, where she was to lie between her brother Honorius and her
+son Valentinian.
+
+[Illustration: Colour Plate THE MAUSOLEUM OF GALLA PLACIDIA]
+
+The Mausoleum of Galla Placidia is the oldest complete building left
+to us in Ravenna, for it dates from well within the first half of the
+fifth century, whereas the baptistery, altered and transformed as it
+was by S. Neon, is as we see it a work of the first years of the
+second half of that century. Simple as it is, without, a cruciform
+building of plain brick, within it is so sumptuously and splendidly
+adorned that not an inch anywhere remains that is not encrusted with
+mosaic or precious marbles. These mosaics were, before their radical
+"restoration," perhaps finer and more classical than those of the
+baptistery. It might seem, indeed, that they were perhaps the finest
+and subtlest work done in the Roman realistic tradition, nor was there
+perhaps anywhere to be found so noble a representation of the Good
+Shepherd as that which adorned this great monument. It is, however,
+impossible to speak with any confidence of what we see there now, for
+all has been restored again and again, and is now little better than a
+_rifacimento_ of our own time, a copy, faithful perhaps, but still a
+copy, of the work of the fifth century.
+
+Nevertheless, the impression of the whole is very splendid and solemn.
+The roofs and dome are covered with mosaics of a wonderful and
+indescribable night blue, powdered with stars. In the cupola is a
+cross and at the four angles are set the symbols of the four
+Evangelists, glorious heraldic figures.
+
+Above the door we see Christ the Good Shepherd, youthful, classic in
+form and repose, very noble and Roman, seated on a rock in a broken
+hilly landscape, a cross in His left hand, caressing His sheep with
+His right. This figure even after "restoration" gives us more than a
+glimpse of what it once was. Nowhere had Christian art produced so
+majestic a representation of its Lord; nor had the subject of the Good
+Shepherd been anywhere more splendidly treated than here.
+
+Over the great sarcophagus, opposite the entrance, we see a very
+different scene. Here is no longer a youthful Christ, with the hair
+and the noble aspect of Apollo, but a bearded and majestic figure in
+the fullness of manhood, His eyes full of anger, His draperies flying
+about Him, moving swiftly, the cross on His shoulders, in His left
+hand an heretical, probably Arian, book which he is about to cast into
+the furnace in the midst. Upon the extreme left is a case or cupboard
+in which we see the books of the four Gospels. In the other lunettes
+we see very gorgeous decorative work of arabesques and stags at a
+fountain and two doves drinking from a vase. Above in the spandrils of
+the arches are figures of apostles or saints. Nothing in the world is
+more solemnly gorgeous in effect than this beautiful rich interior.
+The pavement is composed of fragments of the same precious marbles as
+those which line the lower parts of the walls.
+
+Under the mosaic of the burning of the heretical books we see the
+mighty sarcophagus of plain Greek marble which once held the body of
+the Augusta. This, of old, was richly adorned with carved marbles and
+perhaps with silver or mosaic; and we know that in the fourteenth
+century certainly it was possible to see within the figure of a woman
+richly dressed seated in a chair of cedar and this was believed to be
+the mummy of the Augusta Galla Placidia. However, we hear nothing of
+it before the fourteenth century, and Dr. Ricci suggests that it may
+have been an imposture of about that time. It is possible, but perhaps
+unlikely, for the Augusta was not a saint, and what reason could men
+have in the thirteenth century, when the very meaning of the empire
+was about to be forgotten, for such an imposture? However this may be,
+the figure remained there seated in its chair during the fourteenth,
+fifteenth, and the greater part of the sixteenth centuries. And
+indeed, it might have been there still but that in 1577 some children,
+curious about it and anxious to see a thing so wonderful, thrust a
+lighted taper into the tomb through one of the holes in the marble,
+when mummy, vestments, chair and all were consumed, and in a moment
+nothing remained but a handful of dust.
+
+The sarcophagi under the arches on either side, according to various
+authorities, hold the dust of the emperor Honorius, the brother of the
+Augusta, and of Constantius her husband, or of the emperor Valentinian
+III. her son. It is impossible to decide at this late day exactly who
+does and who does not lie in these great Christian tombs.
+
+The Mausoleum of the Augusta was long known, though not from its
+origin, as the sanctuary of SS. Nazaro e Celso. When it was so
+dedicated I am ignorant, but it was not in the time of the Augusta.
+Then, in the fifteenth century, when so much was remembered and so
+much more was forgotten, it bore the title of SS. Gervasio e Protasio,
+and this name remained to it till the seventeenth century, when the
+old title was revived. To-day although it retains its name of SS.
+Nazaro and Celso, it is more rightly and universally known as the
+Mausoleum of Galla Placidia.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+THE ARIAN CHURCHES OF THE SIXTH CENTURY
+
+THE PALACE OF THEODORIC, S. APOLLINARE NUOVO, S. SPIRITO, S. MARIA IN
+COSMEDIN, THE MAUSOLEUM OF THEODORIC
+
+
+It was, as we have seen, upon March 5, 493, that Theodoric, king of
+the Ostrogoths, entered Ravenna as the representative of the emperor
+at Constantinople. One of his first acts seems to have been the
+erection of a palace designed for his habitation and that of his
+successors. Why this should have been so we do not know. It might seem
+more reasonable to find the Gothic king taking possession of the
+imperial palace, close to which the Augusta Galla Placidia had erected
+the church of S. Croce and her tomb. Perhaps this had been destroyed
+in the revolution or series of revolutions in which the empire in the
+West had fallen, perhaps it had been ruined in the Gothic siege which
+endured for some three years. Whatever had befallen it, it was not
+occupied, restored, or rebuilt by Theodoric. He chose a situation upon
+the other side of the city and there he built a new palace and beside
+it a great Arian church, for both he and his Goths were of that sect.
+We call the church to-day S. Apollinare Nuovo.
+
+The palace, of which nothing actually remains to us, though certain
+additions made to it during the exarchate are still standing, was,
+according to the various chroniclers whose works remain to us,
+surrounded by porticoes, such as Theodoric built in many places, and
+was carved with precious marbles and mosaics. It was of considerable
+size, set in the midst of a park or gardens. Something of what it was
+we may gather from the mosaics of S. Apollinare Nuovo in which it is
+conventionally represented. It came to owe much to Amalasuntha who
+lived there during her brief reign, and more to the exarchs who made
+it their official residence.
+
+In 751 when Ravenna fell into the hands of the Lombards Aistulf
+established himself there, but it might seem that the place had
+suffered grievously in the wars, and it was probably little more than
+a mighty ruin when, in 784, Charlemagne obtained permission from the
+pope to strip it of its marbles and its ornaments and to carry them
+off to Aix-la-Chapelle. Among these was an equestrian statue in gilded
+bronze, according to Agnellus a portrait of the great Gothic king, but
+as Dr Ricci suggests a statue of the Emperor Zeno. This too in the
+time of Leo III. Charlemagne carried away. According to the same
+authority the back of the palace was not then very far from the sea,
+and this was so even in 1098. Nothing I think can give us a better
+idea of the change that has come over the _contado_ of Ravenna than an
+examination of its situation to-day, more than four miles from the sea
+coast.
+
+The only memorial we have left to us _in situ_ of that palace of the
+Gothic king is a half-ruined building, really a mere facade with
+round-arched blind arcades and a central niche in the upper story, a
+colonnade in two stories, and the bases of two round towers with a
+vast debris of ruined foundations, walls, and brickwork, scarcely
+anything of which, in so far as it may be said to be still standing,
+would seem to have been a part of the palace Theodoric built. Indeed
+the ruined facade would seem to belong to a guard house built in the
+time of the exarchs in the seventh or eighth century. If we seek then
+for some memory of Theodoric in this place we shall be disappointed.
+
+Far otherwise is it with the great church, the noblest in Ravenna, of
+S. Apollinare Nuovo. This was built about the same time as the palace,
+in the first twenty years of the sixth century, as the Arian cathedral
+by the Gothic king. It was the chief temple in Ravenna of that heresy,
+and it remained in Arian hands till with the re-establishment of the
+imperial power in Italy it was consecrated, in 560, for Catholic use
+by the archbishop S. Agnellus. It consists of a basilica divided into
+three naves by twenty-four columns of Greek marble with
+Romano-Byzantine capitals. Of old it had an atrium, but this was
+removed in the sixteenth century, as was the ancient apse in the
+eighteenth. The original apse, however, was ruined in an earthquake,
+as Agnellus tells in his life of S. Agnellus, in the sixth century,
+and of the atrium only a single column remains _in situ_ before the
+church. The campanile, a noble great round tower, dates from the ninth
+century for the most part, its base is, however, new. The portico
+before the church is a work of the sixteenth century, as is the
+facade, which nevertheless contains certain ancient marbles, among
+which are two inscribed stones, one of the fourth century and the
+other of the eleventh.
+
+When Theodoric built this great and glorious church he dedicated it to
+Jesus Christ. It seems to have been dedicated in honour of S. Martin
+in 560 by the archbishop S. Agnellus who consecrated it for Catholic
+worship, and finally in the middle of the ninth century to have been
+given the title of S. Apollinare by the archbishop John, who asserted
+that he had brought hither the relics of the first archbishop of the
+see from S. Apollinare in Classe when that church was threatened by
+the Saracens.
+
+The oldest name by which the church was generally known, however, is
+that of _Coelum Aureum_. Agnellus in his life of the archbishop S.
+Agnellus says, speaking of the Catholic consecration of the church,
+"Then the most blessed Agnellus the bishop reconciled within this city
+the church of S. Martin Confessor, which Theodoric the king founded,
+and which was called _Coelum Aureum_...." And he goes on to say that
+it was found from an inscription that "King Theodoric made this church
+from its foundations in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ."[1] It got
+the name of _Coelum Aureum_ perhaps from its glorious roof of gold.
+This, however, was destroyed in 1611.
+
+[Footnote 1: Cf. also Agnellus, _Liber Pontificalis_, Vita Theodori,
+cap. n.]
+
+The church has indeed suffered very much in the course of the fourteen
+hundred years of its existence, and yet in many ways it is the best
+preserved church in Ravenna. In the sixteenth century, for instance,
+it was fast sinking into ruin; the floor of the church and the bases
+of the columns were then more than a metre and a half beneath the
+level of the soil, and it was decided that something must be done if
+the building was to be saved. In 1514 this work was undertaken; the
+columns were raised and the arches cut and thus the church and its
+great mosaics were preserved. It is, however, still sinking; the new
+pavement of the sixteenth century has disappeared, and that of 1873
+which was brought from the suppressed church of S. Niccolo covers the
+bases of the columns.
+
+If S. Apollinare Nuovo had been allowed to fall, nothing that we
+possess in the world would have compensated us for its loss. For not
+only have we here a beautiful interior very largely of the sixth
+century, but the great mosaics of the nave which cover the walls above
+the arcade under the windows are, I suppose, at once the largest and
+the most remarkable works of that time which ever existed. They are
+also of an extraordinary and exceptional beauty. They represent upon
+both sides, through the whole length of the nave, as it were two long
+processions of saints. Upon the Epistle side are the martyrs issuing
+out of the city of Ravenna to lay their crowns at the feet of Our Lord
+on His throne, guarded by four angels. Upon the Gospel side are the
+virgins headed by the three kings, who offer gifts to Our Lord in his
+Mother's arms enthroned between four angels. There is nothing in
+Christendom to compare with these mosaics. They are unique and, as I
+like to think, in their wonderful significance are the key to a
+mystery that has for long remained unsolved. For these long
+processions of saints, representing that great crowd of witnesses of
+which S. Paul speaks, stand there above the arcade and under the
+clerestory where in a Gothic church the triforium is set. But the
+triforium is the one inexplicable and seemingly useless feature of a
+Gothic building. It seems to us, in our ignorance of the mind of the
+Middle Age, of what it took for granted, to be there simply for the
+sake of beauty, to have no use at all. But what if this church in
+Ravenna, the work indeed of a very different school and time, but
+springing out of the same spiritual tradition, should hold the key?
+What if the triforium of a Gothic church should have been built as it
+were for a great crowd of witnesses--the invisible witnesses of the
+Everlasting Sacrifice, the sacrifice of Calvary, the sacrifice of the
+Mass? It is not only in the presence of the living, devout or half
+indifferent, that that great sacrifice is offered through the world,
+yesterday, to-day, and for ever, but be sure in the midst of the
+chivalry of heaven, a multitude that no man can number, none the less
+real because invisible, among whom one day we too are to be numbered.
+Not for the living only, but for the whole Church men offer that
+sacrifice _pro redemptione animarum suarum, pro spe salutis et
+incolumitatis suae. Memento etiam Domine famulorum famularumque tuarum
+qui nos praecesserunt cum signo fidei et dormiunt in somno pacis_....
+Here in S. Apollinare at any rate for ever they await the renewal of
+that moment.
+
+Those marvellous figures that appear in ghostly procession upon the
+walls of S. Apollinare here in Ravenna are really indescribable, they
+must be seen if the lovely significance of their beauty is to be
+understood. What can one say of them?
+
+Upon the Epistle side we see as it were a procession of twenty-five
+figures all in white with palms in the right hands and crowns in their
+left. They are the martyrs SS. Clement, Sixtus, Laurence, Cyprian,
+Paul, Vitalis, Gervasius, Protasius, Hippolytus, Cornelius, Cassianus,
+John, Ursinus, Namor, Felix, Apollinaris, Demetrius, Polycarp,
+Vincent, Pancras, Chrysogonus, Protus, Jovenius, and Sabinus, and
+their names are written in a long line over them; each is aureoled,
+and each upon his white robe bears a letter the significance of which
+is hidden from us. This procession comes out of the city of Ravenna
+which is magnificently represented, occupying indeed a fifth of the
+whole length of the mosaic.
+
+In the foreground is the palace of Theodoric, the whole facade of it,
+the triple arched peristyle in the midst flanked on either side by two
+triple arched loggias, each having a second story of five arches. In
+the spandrils of the arches are figures of Victories, and of old in
+the tympanum we might have seen Theodoric on horseback. Within, the
+arches are hung with curtains. On the extreme right is the great gate
+of the palace in the wall of the city, flanked on either side by
+towers. In the lunette over the gateway we see three small figures of
+Christ with the cross between two Apostles, and within the gate, I
+think, a great figure, seated. Over the facade of the palace we look
+into the city and see four churches, which Dr. Ricci suggests may be,
+on the right, this very church with its baptistery, now destroyed,
+together with the church of S. Teodoro (now S. Spirito) and the Arian
+baptistery: they are altogether Byzantine in type. Out of this city
+come the martyrs; there are twenty-five of them all in white, as I
+have said, and they are led by S. Martin Confessor, who bears of
+course no palm, is robed in purple, and bears his crown in both his
+hands. He leads the procession along a way strewn with flowers to the
+throne where Christ sits guarded by four angels.
+
+Above this great scene, between the windows, above each of which there
+is an ornamental mosaic, we see sixteen figures of Prophets or perhaps
+Fathers. Over these are twenty-seven compartments each filled with a
+mosaic. Those over the heads of the prophets are, except in the case
+of him who stands, at each end, last but one, filled with a sort of
+recessed throne in mosaic, over which in each case are set two doors.
+But the eleven compartments over the windows and the two over the two
+figures last but one at either end are filled with thirteen scenes
+from the New Testament, beginning on the left as follows: (1) The Last
+Supper, (2) The Agony in the Garden, (3) The Kiss of Judas, (4) Christ
+taken, (5) Christ before the High Priest, (6) Christ before Herod, (7)
+The Denial of Peter, (8) Judas trying to restore the money to the
+priests, (9) Christ before Pilate, (10) The Via Crucis, (n) The Maries
+at the Sepulchre, (12) The way to Emmaus, (13) The Incredulity of S.
+Thomas.
+
+Turning now to the Gospel side of the church, we find a similar
+procession over the arcade, but of twenty-one virgin martyrs bearing
+palms and crowns richly dressed with precious ornaments and jewels.
+They bear the following names: SS. Pelagia, Agatha, Eulalia, Cecilia,
+Lucia, Crispina, Valeria, Vincentia, Agnes with her lamb, Perpetua,
+Felicitas, Justina, Anastasia, Daria, Paulina, Victoria, Anatolia,
+Christina, Savona, Eugenia. They issue out of the towered gate of the
+Castello of Classis, whose wall stretches before us to the great sea
+gate through which we look upon the port with three ships on the
+water, one of which is sailing in or out. Within the castello over the
+wall of it we see buildings of a distinctly Roman type.
+
+The procession of virgins which issues forth from this castello is led
+by S Eufemia, who does not bear a palm, but carries her crown in her
+two hands. Before her go the three Magi, Balthassar, Melchior, and
+Caspar, bearing their gold, frankincense, and myrrh under the palms of
+the long way, guided by the star to where Madonna sits enthroned with
+her little Son between four angels.
+
+Above between the windows, as on the Epistle side, are sixteen figures
+in mosaic of the Prophets or Fathers; and over them again, as before,
+are thirteen scenes from the life of Our Lord: (1) The Healing of the
+cripple at Capernaum, (2) The Herd of Swine, (3) The Healing of the
+paralytic who was let down in a bed to Jesus, (4) The Parable of the
+sheep and the goats, (5) The Widow's mite, (6) The Pharisee and the
+Publican, (7) The Raising of Lazarus, (8) The Woman of Samaria at the
+well, (9) The Healing of the woman with an issue of blood, (10) The
+Healing of the two blind men, (11) The Miraculous draught of fishes,
+(12) The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes, (13) The Water turned into
+Wine.
+
+And what are we to say of these marvellous things? This first of all,
+that for the most part they are not of the time of Theodoric, but
+rather of that S. Agnellus who consecrated the church for Catholic
+use. This is not to deny that there were always in the church mosaics
+occupying the place which these we see fill; on the contrary. But the
+processions of the martyrs and of the virgins with the three Magi are
+certainly Catholic works, and of the middle or end of the sixth
+century; they obviously took the place of certain mosaics perhaps full
+of Arian doctrines which then stood there. On the other hand, the
+castello of Classis, the Christ enthroned with angels, the Virgin
+enthroned with angels, the Prophets or Fathers, and the scenes of Our
+Lord's life and teaching, above them, are of Theodoric's time. The
+city of Ravenna I am perhaps alone in attributing to the later period.
+Dr. Ricci--and he is of course an almost infallible
+authority--attributes it to the time of Theodoric. It does not seem to
+me to be so. All this, however, must be understood to refer to such
+parts of these mosaics as have not suffered restoration, which,
+however, has not often been as drastic as that which has befallen the
+figures of the Magi; of which the upper parts are new, as are the
+figures of the two outer angels.
+
+We have here then under our eyes the two schools of mosaics, that of
+Rome and that of Constantinople. It is easy to see that the Roman
+work, the original work that is, is more classical and realistic than
+the rich and glorious figures of the processions; but it is not
+decoratively so successful. Indeed I know of nothing anywhere that is
+more artistically, dramatically, and as it were liturgically
+satisfying than these long processions on either side of S. Apollinare
+Nuovo.
+
+Little else remains in the church worth notice except an ancient ambo
+under the arcade in the nave and the chapel of the Relics at the top
+of the left aisle. This was largely built of ancient fragments in the
+sixteenth century. We see there two beautiful alabaster columns with
+capitals of serpentine with two small columns of verde antico also
+with ancient capitals. The screen is Byzantine. The walls are
+ornamented with bas-reliefs and paintings, but above all these we see
+there a marvellous portrait in mosaic of the emperor Justinian as an
+old man, unhappily restored in 1863. The altar is ancient and above it
+is a marble coffer with Renaissance ornaments, upheld by four columns
+of porphyry, having two Byzantine and two Roman capitals. On the
+Epistle side of the altar here is a marble chair--a Roman thing.
+
+From that splendid and well-preserved church we pass to that of the
+Spirito Santo. Unhappily this once glorious building has suffered as
+much as any church left to us in Ravenna, for it was almost entirely
+rebuilt in 1543 when the portico we see was added to it, and in 1627
+was restored and adorned, as it was in 1854 and 1896. That it was
+founded and built by the Goths and reconciled later for Catholic use
+appears in Agnellus' life of the archbishop S. Agnellus, where we read
+that of old the Arian Episcopio stood near by, together with a bath
+and a _monastero_ of S. Apollinare. What the _monastero_ may have been
+we do not know, but the bath was perhaps the Arian baptistery known as
+S. Maria in Cosmedin.
+
+The church of the Spirito Santo was not in Arian times known under
+that dedication, but was called of S. Theodore. It owes the pleasing
+portico it now possesses, as I have said, to the sixteenth century,
+but that portico is itself largely constructed of old materials, being
+upheld by eight antique columns, of which six are of Greek marble.
+These originally supported the baldacchino over the high altar.
+Within, the church is divided into three naves by fourteen columns,
+thirteen of which are of bigio antico, and the other, the last on the
+Epistle side towards the altar, of a rare and curious marble known as
+verde sanguigno. The capitals are of Theodoric's time, late Roman
+work.
+
+Very little remains in the church that is of any interest to us. In
+the sacristy, however, we may see in the present lavabo some fragments
+of the ancient ciborio. And in the nave at the western end on the
+Gospel side is an ancient sarcophagus of Greek marble which was carved
+in the Renaissance and in the seventeenth century became the sepulchre
+of one of the Pasolini family. In the first chapel on this side of the
+church is the ancient _ambone_ removed from the nave in the sixteenth
+century, and in the second are two columns of pavonazzetto marble.
+
+Something better is to be had in the utterly desolate baptistery close
+by known as S. Maria in Cosmedin. This was originally, as we may
+think, the ancient bath of which Agnellus speaks, and it was converted
+into a baptistery by the Arians, and later consecrated for Catholic
+uses under the title of S. Maria in Cosmedin and used as an oratory.
+It is an octagonal building whose walls support a cupola which is
+covered with mosaics in circles like that of the original baptistery
+of the city. In the midst we see Christ almost a youth standing naked
+in Jordan immersed to his waist. Upon His left, S. John stands upon a
+rock, his staff in his left hand, while his right rests upon the head
+of Our Lord. Opposite to him sits enthroned the old god of Jordan, a
+reed in his hand, listening, perhaps, to the words of the Father:
+"This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased." Over Christ's head
+the Dove is displayed in the golden heaven.
+
+About the central mosaic is set a band of palm leaves, while on the
+outer circle we see the twelve Apostles very much like the martyrs of
+S. Apollinare standing dressed in white, their crowns in their hands
+between palms. Only S. Peter and another, perhaps S. John or S. Paul,
+do not bear crowns, but S. Peter his keys and the other a book.
+Between them is set a throne on which stands a jewelled cross.
+
+It is exceedingly difficult to say when these mosaics were executed,
+for they have been so entirely restored that very little of the
+original work is left to us. They are certainly very early for work of
+the Catholic restoration; and yet they remind one strongly of the
+processions of S. Apollinare Nuovo. If as a whole the design of these
+mosaics is of the time of the archbishop S. Agnellus, it is curious
+that the subject of the Baptism should have been used for a church
+which by his act had ceased to be a baptistery. The most reasonable
+hypothesis would seem to be that the design and choice of subject is
+in the main due to the Arians; that the central disc remains late work
+of their time in so far as it is original at all. While the apostles
+may be in the main the work of the Catholic restoration.
+
+Theodoric was, as these works serve to show, a great builder of
+churches in his capital. Not all of them have remained to our day. Dr.
+Ricci has thought that we see something of one of them in the Portico
+Antico of the Piazza Maggiore where there are eight columns of granite
+upon the left of the Palazzo del Comune with late Roman capitals, four
+of which have the monogram of the Gothic king. The church of S.
+Andrea,[1] according to Dr Ricci, stood by the city wall, near where
+the Venetians in the fifteenth century built their Rocca, destroying
+the church to make room for it. Dr. Ricci suggests that when they
+began to construct the Portico of the Piazza they used, as indeed they
+more than any other people were wont to do, the material of the
+demolished church in their new building and among it these great
+columns with their Roman capitals and strange monograms.
+
+[Footnote 1: S. Andrea was, according to Rasponi, _op. cit. ut supra_,
+the same as the chapel of the Arcivescovado called S, Pier Crisologo.]
+
+But astonishing though these churches are which Theodoric built by the
+art and hands of the Italians during the generation of his rule in
+Ravenna, they would not impress us with the strength and importance of
+his personality and government, as undoubtedly they do, if we had not
+in his mausoleum perhaps the most impressive late Roman building left
+to us practically intact in all Italy, a thing which, quite as much as
+the mightier tomb of Hadrian, assures us of the enormous vitality of
+Roman civilisation, its weight, endurance, and unfailing continuance
+through every sort of disaster and misgovernment.
+
+This mighty monument is situated upon the north-east of the city,
+perhaps upon the old Roman road the Via Popilia. That it was built by
+Theodoric himself might seem certain. For though it has been said that
+it was erected by Amalasuntha the Anonymus Valesii tells us that
+Theodoric built it before he died. "While yet he lived he made a
+monument of squared stone, a work of marvellous greatness, covered
+with a single stone." It is perhaps of little consequence to whom we
+owe this mighty tomb, for it is absolutely, and in any case, Roman
+work, and might seem to have been modelled upon the far larger and
+more tremendous mausoleum of Hadrian.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Choisy points out that the mausoleum of Theodoric has
+stylistic affinities with Syrian work, and Strzygowski, who reminds us
+that several bishops of Ravenna were Syrians, thinks that Ravenna in
+much derived from Syria especially from Antioch.]
+
+The mausoleum is built in two stories of block after block of hewn and
+squared stone. The lower of the two stories is decagonal and has in
+every side a vast archway or niche, one of which forms the gateway.
+Within we find a huge cruciform chamber lighted by six square
+openings. The upper story, now reached by two stairways, built with
+ancient materials in 1774, is circular, having about it eighteen blind
+arches and over it a vast circular roof hewn out of a single block of
+Istrian stone that weighs, it is said, two hundred tons. It may be
+that this upper story, smaller as it is than the lower, was of old
+surrounded by a colonnade, and it may be that the twelve projections
+upon the vast monolith of the roof once upheld statutes of the twelve
+Apostles. We do not know.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: On the other hand, these projections are thought by many
+to have been used as rings for the ropes by which the roof was hauled
+up an inclined bank of earth into place They each bear the name of an
+Apostle, and are similar to the small abutting arches round the dome
+of S. Sophia at Salonica]
+
+Here in this mighty tomb, which is known in Ravenna as _La Rotonda_,
+abandoned now in an unkempt garden, Theodoric, who expected to found a
+line of kings who would one day lie beside him; as long as he lay
+there at all, lay there alone. Not for long, however, did he enjoy
+that solitude. Already, when Agnellus wrote his _Liber Pontificalis_,
+the tomb was empty. He tells us that the porphyry urn, which had
+served as sepulchre for the Gothic king, then stood at the door of the
+Benedictine monastery close by, and that it was empty. And it seemed
+to him, he says, that the body of the king had been thrown out of the
+mausoleum because a heretic and a barbarian, as we may suppose, was
+not worthy of it. At any rate the body of Theodoric was no longer in
+the mausoleum in the beginning of the ninth century, and it is certain
+that it had been ejected thence many years before. In the year 1854 a
+gang of navvies who were excavating a dock between the railway station
+and the Corsini Canal, some two hundred yards perhaps from the
+mausoleum, and on the site of an old cemetery, came upon a skeleton
+"armed with a golden cuirass, a sword by its side, and a golden helmet
+upon its head. In the hilt of the sword and in the helmet large jewels
+were blazing." Most of this booty they disposed of, but a few pieces
+were recovered and these are now in the Museo. It might seem that this
+can have been none other than the body of the great Gothic king.
+Indeed Dr. Ricci finds the ornament upon the armour to be similar to
+the decoration upon the cornice of the mausoleum. If this be so it
+puts the matter almost beyond doubt.
+
+Theodoric was not allowed to rest in the mighty tomb that Latin genius
+had built for him; but for ages many, famous and distinguished in
+their day, sought to lie under a monument so splendid. The place
+became a sort of pantheon. Long before then, however, it had been
+consecrated as a church, S. Maria della Rotonda, and a Benedictine
+monastery had been founded close by whose monks served it. To-day that
+monastery has utterly disappeared, and there are no signs of a church
+in the _Rotonda_. Only the mausoleum remains in a tangled garden, far
+from any road, empty and deserted.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+THE BYZANTINE CHURCHES
+
+S. VITALE AND S. APOLLINARE IN CLASSE
+
+
+When Belisarius entered Ravenna in 540, he apparently found more than
+one new building begun but not finished; of these the chief was the
+church of S. Vitale. This magnificent octagonal building with its
+narthex and atrium had, according to Agnellus, been founded by the
+Archbishop S. Ecclesius, that is to say, between 521 and 534. It was
+apparently finished and decorated later by Julius Argentarius, and was
+consecrated by the archbishop S. Maximianus in 547. In plan it
+resembles very closely the church of SS. Sergius and Bacchus in
+Constantinople built by Justinian about 527. As we know both Justinian
+and Theodora, his empress, contributed largely to the perfecting of S.
+Vitale, which remains certainly his most glorious monument in the
+West.
+
+The plan of the church, as I have said, is octagonal, surmounted by a
+dome octagonal without but circular within. From one of these eight
+sides the sanctuary is thrust out, flanked on either side by a
+circular chapel with a rectangular presbytery. Standing obliquely
+across one of the two angles of the octagon, directly opposite this
+sanctuary, stretched the narthex flanked by circular towers. The great
+octagon is divided into two stories, each of which has three windows
+upon each of the eight sides, the octagonal dome being lighted by
+eight single windows.
+
+[Illustration: S. VITALE]
+
+Within the great octagon formed by the walls is a smaller octagon
+formed by an arcade of mighty piers which upholds the cupola. This
+arcade contains a double loggia which thus runs round the whole church
+with the exception of the presbytery, where it ends in lofty tribunes.
+It is upheld between the piers by columns of precious marble having
+capitals of the most marvellous beauty.
+
+The space within this inner octagon is covered with a pavement laid
+down in the sixteenth century, consisting of all sorts of fragments of
+mosaics and marbles which that century destroyed. The upper loggia was
+of old the _gyneceo_, the place of the women. Nothing I think left to
+us in the world is more sumptuous and gorgeous than this interior.
+Everywhere are glittering mosaics, precious slabs of marble, priceless
+columns of beautiful marble. And where the mosaics have been destroyed
+or left unfinished, as in the cupola and the body of the church,
+baroque artists have filled the place with their paintings, paintings
+which in their own style are matchless and which it is now foolishly
+proposed should be destroyed.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: We know nothing of any mosaics other than those in the
+presbytery and the tribunes, it may be that the church was covered
+with mosaic or was painted by the Byzantine artists, and this as well
+where the marble slabs now cover the piers as elsewhere. If so it must
+have been glorious indeed. Nothing that we can do can restore this
+work to us, and we achieve nothing but destruction by destroying the
+work that is now there.]
+
+In our examination of the church we turn first to the presbytery,
+which is entirely encrusted with most precious marbles and mosaics. In
+the midst of it stands the altar consisting of slabs of
+semi-transparent alabaster, within which of old lights were set. The
+marvellously lovely piece which serves for the altar stone itself is
+supported by four columns, and that piece which serves for frontal is
+carved with a great cross between two sheep. This altar had long
+disappeared, but piece by piece it was recovered; the beautiful altar
+stone itself was found behind an altar in a chapel now destroyed in
+this church, and was re-erected as we see it in 1899.
+
+[Illustration: Colour Plate S. VITALE: THE PRESBYTERY]
+
+In the same chapel stood till then the beautiful low fretted screens
+that now are set across the apse behind the altar, where indeed they
+remained till 1700, according to Dr. Ricci. The lower part of the apse
+and the piers of the presbytery have been covered with fine marbles,
+some of which are ancient, but the vault, the lunettes, and the walls
+are entirely encrusted with gorgeous mosaics.
+
+The presbytery is approached from the inner octagon of the church
+under a triumphal arch. In the curve of this we see amid much
+decorative ornament fifteen circular discs containing the head of Our
+Lord, the twelve Apostles, S. Gervasius, and S. Protasius. Beneath
+these are two monuments variously formed, Dr. Ricci tells us, in the
+sixteenth century. The four columns which they contain originally
+supported the baldacchino over the high altar here; three of them are
+of verde antico. Framed by these columns are two Roman reliefs from a
+frieze originally in the Temple of Neptune, other parts of which are
+in the Sala Lapidaria in the Arcivescovado here, in the Louvre, in the
+Uffizi, in the Castello of Milan, and in the Museo Archeologico at
+Venice. They are indubitably of course the oldest things in the
+church.
+
+Within this triumphal arch upon either side rise the tribunes in which
+the upper loggia of the church itself comes to an end. These tribunes,
+which are exceedingly beautiful, consist of two triple arches, one
+above the other on either side, and the columns which support them,
+with their marvellous capitals, are I suppose among the most glorious
+left in Christendom. The arches themselves and the lunettes upon
+either side are encrusted with mosaics. In the lunette upon the right
+on either side an altar gorgeously draped, Abel offers to God the
+firstling of his flock and Melchizedek Bread and Wine. Upon the face
+of the arch we see Moses tending the sheep of Jethro, Moses upon Mount
+Hebron, and Moses before the burning bush. In the lunette upon the
+left we have the sacrifice of Abraham of his only son, and the visit
+of the three angels to Abraham and Sara. Upon the face of the arch we
+see Jeremiah the Prophet and Moses upon Mount Sinai. Above, upon the
+balustrades, as it were, of the upper loggia we see angels upholding a
+circle in which is the sign of the Cross, and above again upon the
+face of the arches on either side the four Evangelists and their
+symbols. The vault is entirely covered with ornaments in mosaic, amid
+which three angels rise and support with uplifted hands the central
+disc in which is represented the Agnus Dei.
+
+Though these mosaics have suffered much from unforeseen disaster and
+from restoration they still delight us with their richness and
+splendour, and nothing I think can well be finer than their effect,
+their decorative effect as a whole. They seem to hang there like some
+gorgeous Eastern tapestry of Persian stuff, as Dr. Ricci says, some
+unfading and indestructible tapestry of the Orient left by chance or
+forgetfulness in the old capital of the West.
+
+We now turn to the apse, which we enter under a second triumphal arch
+upon the face of which we see upon the left the city of Hierusalem and
+upon the left Bethlehem. A cypress stands at the gate of each, and
+between them two angels in flight uphold a discus or aureole having
+within it eight rays. Above this again are three windows about which
+is spread a gorgeous decoration in mosaic.
+
+Beneath within the tribune of the apse we see Our Lord, "beautiful as
+Apollo," enthroned upon the orb of the world, an angel upon either
+hand, while to his right stands S. Vitalis to whom He hands a crown,
+to His left S. Ecclesius bearing the model of this church in his hand.
+
+Beneath upon either side stand the two great mosaic pictures, the most
+marvellous works of the sixth century that have come down to us and
+perhaps the most glorious and splendid works of art which that age was
+able to achieve, and it is needless to say that there is nothing like
+them anywhere in the world.
+
+Upon the left we see the great emperor, perhaps the greatest of all
+the Caesars, Justinian, bearing in his hands a golden dish; beside him
+stands the archbishop of Ravenna, S. Maximianus. A little behind these
+two figures and on either side stand five attendant priests, and on
+the extreme left of the picture is a group of soldiers.
+
+[Illustration: Capital from S. Vitale]
+
+In the mosaic upon the right we see the empress Theodora, straight
+browed, most gorgeously arrayed, very beautiful and a little sinister,
+bearing a golden chalice, attended by her splendid ladies and two
+priests. Upon the extreme left of the picture stands a little fountain
+before an open doorway hung with a curtain.
+
+What can be said of these gorgeous and astonishingly lovely works?
+Nothing. They speak too eloquently for themselves. Not there do we see
+the mere realism of Rome, the careful and often too careful
+arrangement that Roman art, able to speak but incapable of song,
+always gives us. Here we have something at once more gorgeous and more
+mysterious and more artistic, a symbolical and hieratic art, the gift
+of the Orient, of Byzantium. In the best Roman art of the best period
+there is always something of the street, something too close to life,
+too mere a transcription and a copy of actual things, a mere imitation
+without life of its own. But here is something outside the classical
+tradition, outside what imperial Rome with its philistinism and its
+puritanism has made of the art of Greece and thrust perhaps for ever
+upon Europe. Here we are free from the overwhelming common-place of
+Roman art, its mediocrity and respectable endeavour.
+
+It is, however, not in the gorgeous mosaics alone that we find the
+delight and originality of S. Vitale. The whole church is amazingly
+different from anything else to be seen in Italy, for it is altogether
+outside the Roman tradition, an absolutely Byzantine building as well
+in its construction as in its decoration. It must be compared with the
+later S. Sophia and SS Sergius and Bacchus of Constantinople. These,
+however, are works more assured and more gracious than S. Vitale, and
+yet in its plan at least S. Vitale is a masterpiece, and altogether
+the one great sanctuary of Byzantine art of the time of Justinian that
+we have in the West. Every part of it is worthy of the strictest and
+most eager attention, from the ambulatory, which was covered in 1902
+with old marble slabs and where there are two early Christian
+sarcophagi, to the restored Cappella Sancta Sanctorum with its
+fifth-century sarcophagus, the tomb of the exarch Isaac, and the lofty
+_Matronaeum_, the women's gallery, from which the best view of the
+mosaics and the marvellously carved Byzantine capitals may be had. Nor
+should the narthex be forgotten, mere skeleton though it be. It is
+characteristic of such a church as this, and set as it is obliquely to
+it, is original in conception and curious.
+
+When we have finished with S. Vitale it is well to leave Ravenna and
+to drive by the lofty road over the marshes to the solitary church of
+S. Apollinare in Classe which was built also by Giuliano Argentario
+for archbishop Ursicinus (535-538) and was consecrated by archbishop
+Maximianus in 549.
+
+Classis, Classe, as we know, was the station or port of the Roman
+fleet, established and built by Augustus Caesar. It was doubtless a
+great place enjoying the busy and noisy life of a great port and
+arsenal and possessed vast barracks for the soldiers and sailors of
+the imperial fleet. Later even when disasters had fallen upon that
+great civilisation it maintained itself, and from the fifth to the
+seventh centuries we hear of its churches, S. Apollinare, S. Severo,
+S. Probo, S. Raffaele, S. Agnese, S. Giovanni "ad Titum," S. Sergio
+_juxta viridarium_, and the great Basilica Petriana.
+
+It was joined to the city of Ravenna by the long suburb of the Via
+Caesarea, much I suppose as the Porto di Lido is joined to Venice by
+the Riva or as Rovezzano is joined to Florence by the Via Aretina. Of
+all the buildings that together made up the Castello of Classe and the
+suburb of Caesarea nothing remains to us but the mighty church of S.
+Apollinare and its great and now tottering campanile. For Classe and
+Cassarea seem to have been finally destroyed in the long Lombard wars,
+either as a precautionary measure by the people of Ravenna and the
+imperialists or by the attacking Lombards, while the sea which once
+washed the walls of Classe has retreated so far that it is only from
+the top of her last watch tower it may now be seen.
+
+Nothing can be more desolate and sad than the miserable road across
+the empty country between Ravenna and that lonely church of S.
+Apollinare. In summer deep in dust that rises, under the heavy tread
+of the great oxen which draw the curiously painted carts of the
+countryside, in great clouds into the sky; in winter and after the
+autumn rains lost in the white curtain of mist that so often surrounds
+Ravenna, it is an almost impassable morass of mud and misery. Even at
+its best in spring time it is melancholy and curiously mean without
+any beauty or nobility of its own, though it commands so much of those
+vast spaces of flat and half desolate country which the sea has
+destroyed, on the verge of which stands the lonely church.
+
+One comes to this great basilica always I think as to a ruin, to find
+without surprise the doors closed and only to be opened after long
+knocking. The round campanile that towers and seems to totter in its
+strange dilapidation beside the church is so beautiful that it
+surprises one at once by its melancholy nobility in the midst of so
+much meanness and desolation. It is a building of the ninth century,
+and may well have been used as much as a watch tower as a bell tower.
+Till recently it had at its base a sacristy, but this has been swept
+away. Of old the church too had before it a great narthex of which
+certain ruins are left, among them a little tower on the left.
+
+Within we find ourselves in a vast basilica divided into three naves
+upheld by twenty-four marvellous columns of great size and beauty, of
+Greek marble, with beautiful Byzantine bases and capitals. The central
+nave is closed by a curved apse set high over a great crypt thrust out
+beyond the rest of the church. Beyond the two aisles are two chapels
+each with its little curved apse. The walls of the church and the
+walls above the arcade were undoubtedly originally covered, in the one
+case with splendid marbles, in the other with mosaics. The walls of
+the church were, however, stripped in 1449 by Sigismondo Malatesta of
+Rimini when he was building, or rather encasing, the church of S.
+Francesco in Rimini with marbles, and turning what had been a Gothic
+church of brick into what we know as the Tempio Malatestiano, by the
+hands of Alberti. We know that a great quantity of marble of different
+kinds was gathered by Sigismondo from all parts of Italy, not only to
+furnish the interior of his _Tempio_, but to cover the exterior also
+according to the design of Leon Alberti. Even the sepulchral stones
+from the old Franciscan convent of S. Francesco in Rimini were used
+and the blocks which the people of Fano had collected for their
+church. S. Apollinare in Classe was then in Benedictine hands. With
+the consent of the Abate there, very many ancient and valuable marbles
+were torn from the walls and carried off by Sigismondo to Rimini; so
+many in fact that the people of Ravenna complained to the Venetian
+doge Francesco Foscari, saying that Sigismondo had despoiled the
+church. The doge, however, seems to have cared nothing about it and
+Sigismondo sent to Ravenna and to the Abate two hundred gold florins,
+so that both declared themselves satisfied. Then the church passed to
+me, these three sheep belong rather to the upper part of the mosaic
+which, with the Cross in the midst, bearing the face of Our Lord, and
+on either side Moses and Elias, symbolises the Transfiguration. These
+three sheep would thus represent S. Peter, S. James and S. John.
+
+[Illustration: INTERIOR OF S. APOLLINARE IN CLASSE]
+
+[Illustration: CAPITAL FROM S. VITALE]
+
+Beneath between the windows we see represented four Bishops of
+Ravenna, S. Ursinus, S. Ursus, S. Severus, and S. Ecclesius. To the
+right are the sacrifices of Abel, Melchizedek, and Abraham. To the
+left the privileges of the church of Ravenna. In the midst we see an
+archbishop and the emperor who hands him a scroll on which is written
+_privilegia_. To the left are three priests bearing fire, incense, and
+a thurible. To the right are three other figures supporting the
+emperor as the three priests support the archbishop. Doubtless this
+mosaic records the privileges granted to the church of Ravenna by
+Constantinople. The archbishop is probably Reparatus who received so
+much from the Emperor Constantinus IV. Two of the figures who attend
+the emperor represent Heraclius and Tiberius. This mosaic is the
+latest in the church, dating from 668.
+
+Over the arch of the tribune is a medallion bust of the Saviour
+holding a book in His left hand and blessing us with His right. Upon
+either side are symbols of the four Evangelists in the clouds of the
+sky. Beneath we see on either side the cities of Bethlehem and
+Hierusalem, from each of which issue six sheep--perhaps the twelve
+apostles. Beneath again are two palm trees and again the archangels
+Gabriel and Michael and S. Luke and S. Matthew.
+
+These mosaics have often been remade and repaired. When Crowe and
+Cavalcaselle examined them before 1860 they found that the whole tunic
+of the Moses had been repainted and half the face of the Elias had
+been restored. They proceed: "The head of S. Apollinare is in part
+damaged, the left hand and lower part of the figure destroyed. The
+sheep beside S. Apollinare, but particularly those on the right of
+that figure, are almost completely modern. A large part of the left
+side of the apsis is repainted, of the four bishops between the
+windows of the tribune the head of Ecclesius is preserved, the lower
+part repainted. The head of S. Ursinus is a new mosaic, and the lower
+half of the figure is restored. In the mosaic of the sacrifice half
+the head from the eyes upwards and part of the arms of Abel are
+repainted, the legs have become dropsical under repair. The figures of
+Abraham and Isaac are almost completely repainted, and the hands and
+feet are formless for that reason. This mosaic is repaired in two
+different ways with white cubes coloured over and with painted stucco.
+In the mosaic representing the tender of privileges the nimbi as
+already stated are new, but besides, the lower part of all the figures
+is repainted in stucco and the heads are all more or less repaired. Of
+the figures in the arch that of the archangel Gabriel is half ruined
+and half restored, and part of S. Matthew and S. Luke are new."
+
+Since Crowe and Cavalcaselle wrote a vast restoration has been
+undertaken, and this was finished in 1908. It was very carefully
+carried out and it is to be believed that the work as we see it is now
+secure.
+
+There is much else of interest in the church: the beautiful crypt with
+its ancient sarcophagus of S. Apollinare and its columns; the ten
+great sarcophagi which stand about the church, three of which contain
+the relics of archbishops of Ravenna; the curious tabernacle at the
+end of the north aisle. But a whole morning, or for that matter a
+whole day, is not too much to spend in this beautiful and deserted
+sanctuary which bridges for us so many centuries and in which we are
+made one with those who helped to establish the foundations of Europe.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+RAVENNA IN THE MIDDLE AGE
+
+
+The last great original work to be undertaken in Ravenna as the
+capital of the empire in the West was the building and decoration of
+the churches of S. Vitale and S. Apollinare in Classe. All the
+Byzantine work that was done later in Ravenna is merely imitative, an
+expression of failing power under the crushing disaster of the Lombard
+invasion. When at last Aistulf in 751 made himself master of the
+impregnable city, it ceased, and suddenly, to be a capital, and though
+in 754 Pepin "restored" it to the papacy and established the pope
+throughout the Exarchate and the Pentapolis, he by that act founded
+the Papal States, whose capital of necessity was Rome. Thus Ravenna
+found herself when Charlemagne had been crowned emperor in 800 little
+more than a decaying provincial city, without authority or hope of
+resurrection, and it is as a city of the provinces full only of
+gigantic memories that she appears in the Middle Age and the
+Renaissance and remains to our own day.
+
+The appearance of Charlemagne, the resurrection of the empire in the
+West, confirm and consolidate the misfortune of 751 in which indeed
+she lost everything. But when we see the great Frank strip the
+imperial palace of its marbles and mosaics it is as though the fate of
+Ravenna had been expressed in some great ceremony and not by unworthy
+hands. An emperor had set her up so high, an emperor had kept her
+there so long; it was an emperor who, as in a last great rite, stript
+her of her apparel and left her naked with her memories.
+
+[Illustration: The Campanile of S. Apollinare]
+
+Those memories, not only splendid and glorious, but gaunt and terrible
+too, smoulder in her ruined heart as the fire may do in the ashes when
+all that was living and glorious has been consumed. Almost nothing as
+she became when Charlemagne left her, a mere body still wrapt in
+gorgeous raiment stiff with gold, but without a soul, she still dreamt
+of dominion, of empire, and of power. Governed by her archbishops, she
+rebelled against Rome, struggled for a secular and sometimes a
+religious autonomy, and came at last, as surely might have been
+prophesied, to consider herself as a feudatory of the Empire, not of
+the Church.
+
+But though this struggle might have been foreseen it is futile, it has
+no life in it, it is without any real importance, it leads nowhere and
+fails to interest us. All that really concerns us in the confused
+story of Ravenna from the time of the resurrection of the empire till
+our own day are two strange incidents that have nothing fundamentally
+to do with her, that befell her by chance; I mean the apparition of
+Dante, when we see the most eager mediaeval apologist of the imperial
+idea fortunately and rightly find in her a refuge and a tomb; and the
+battle of 1512 in which fell Gaston de Foix and which cost the lives
+of twelve thousand men and achieved nothing.
+
+Nevertheless Ravenna, for so long the citadel of the empire in the
+West, of all the cities of Italy was least likely to forget her origin
+or to forsake her memories, and it is both curious and interesting to
+watch her entry, little splendid though that entry be, into the
+marvellously vital world of the Middle Age in Italy.
+
+The slow re-establishment of Latin power which followed the crowning
+of Charlemagne, and which the Church secured by that act, first began
+to come to its own with the rise of the bishops to civil power in the
+cities of Italy. Now Ravenna had certainly been governed by her
+archbishop ever since Pepin in 754 had forced Aistulf to place the
+keys of the city upon the tomb of the Prince of the Apostles. If
+nowhere else in the Cisalpine plain, Latin civilisation and law, then,
+never failed in Ravenna, and whatever may have happened elsewhere it
+might seem certain that here in Ravenna and probably throughout the
+exarchate the curia existed and endured throughout the barbarian
+confusion.
+
+This would explain the early and extraordinary development of communal
+institutions in Ravenna. And since, one may believe, the Roman legions
+were replaced throughout the empire by the religious orders, it is
+interesting to know that in the tenth century her Latin energy is
+borne witness to by the fact that in 956 she produced S. Romuald of
+the Onesti family of Ravenna, who was educated in the Benedictine
+monastery of Classe and who founded the Order of Camaldoli, and toward
+the end of the same century, in 988, she produced S. Peter Damian, the
+brother of the arch-priest of Ravenna, cardinal-bishop of Ostia and
+papal legate in Milan.
+
+Nor with the rise of the "spirito italico" everywhere in Italy do we
+find Ravenna exhausted. Far from it, she is as ardent as any other
+city of the peninsula whatsoever. Only always she is anti-papal, as
+though, living in her memories, as she could not but do, and this was
+her greatest strength, she remembered her old allegiance to the
+emperor and could not forget that when the pope became his heir in
+Italy she had fallen from her old eminence. Thus as early as the first
+years of the eleventh century her archbishop obtains confirmation from
+the emperor of his temporal powers, in which confirmation no
+recognition of the sovereignty of the pope appears at all. This act of
+allegiance to the emperor was repeated when Barbarossa appeared, and
+indeed the archbishops of Ravenna soon became the most eager if not
+most the serious supporters of the emperors in all the great plain and
+perhaps in all Italy. Ravenna, once the imperial capital, though
+fallen was imperial still. She was haunted, haunted by ghosts that
+were restless in those marvellous tombs, that litter her churches,
+loom out of the grey curtain of mist like a fortress, or shine and
+glitter with imperishable colours and are full of memories as
+imperishable as themselves.
+
+Yet though it was to her the emperors so often looked for aid and
+succour and rest, it was not always so. The present, even with her,
+was more than the past. With the great development of communal
+institutions which marked especially the twelfth century, compelled
+too to face, though never with success, the increasing state of
+Venice, which, indeed, and successfully, had usurped her place in the
+world and had realised what she had failed to achieve, she was ready
+and able in 1198 to place herself at the head of the league of the
+cities of the Romagna and the Marches against the imperial power then
+both oppressive and feeble; so that pope Innocent III. found it easy
+to restore the unforgotten rights of the Holy See there and these were
+ratified by Otto IV. and by Frederick II. as the price of papal
+support.
+
+It will thus be readily understood that if, at the opening of the
+thirteenth century, there was one city in Italy more certain than
+another to be at the mercy of the universal quarrel of Guelf and
+Ghibelline, that city was Ravenna. In its larger sense that quarrel
+was her inheritance. It was the one thought which filled her mind. But
+here, as elsewhere, the great quarrel was insoluble or at any rate not
+to be solved. It merely bred faction and divided the city against
+itself. Guelf and Ghibelline tore Ravenna as they tore Florence and
+Siena in pieces.
+
+The two great Ghibelline families were the Ubertini and the Mainardi
+and these at first gained the mastery of the city; but in 1218 Pietro
+Traversari with the aid of the Mainardi turned the Ubertini out and,
+what is more, made himself master.
+
+Pietro Traversari was succeeded as Podesta in 1225 by his son Paolo,
+who became Guelf and fought in Innocent IV.'s quarrel against the
+emperor Frederick II.; Frederick was able to turn the Traversari out
+of Ravenna in 1240 and to hold the city for eight years, but in 1248
+the pope retook it and the Traversari were restored though not I think
+to the chief power. They remained in power till in the last year of
+the reign of Gregory X., 1275, Guido da Polenta appears.
+
+Rudolph of Hapsburg was now king--not emperor, for he was never
+crowned by the pope. He had been a partisan of the second Frederick's,
+but pope Nicholas III. did not find in the founder of the Hapsburg
+dynasty the stuff of the Hohenstaufen. In 1278 he forced Rudolph to
+secure to him by an "irrevocable decree" all that the papacy had ever
+claimed in the Exarchate and the Pentapolis. The empire renounced all
+its claims in the Romagna and the Marches; the confines of the states
+of the Church were defined anew, and the cities of which the pope was
+absolute lord were named one by one. Of course among these was
+Ravenna.
+
+The Polentani appear first in the story of Ravenna in or about the
+year 1167, when we find them acting as vicars for the archbishops. We
+next hear of them as Podesta, their long rule really beginning, as I
+have said, in 1275, when Guido il Vecchio, a rather formidable
+soldier, appears as captain of the people and victor over Cervia,
+whose territory he added to the dominion of Ravenna. It was indeed
+this man who first in the Ravenna of the Middle Ages attempted to
+establish an independent or semi-independent state, by adding
+territory to territory and thus creating a lordship. For this end he
+allied himself with the Malatesta of Rimini--a master stroke, for the
+Polentani of Ravenna and the Malatesta of Rimini had long been bitter
+foes.
+
+The alliance was cemented by a marriage which all the world knows as
+an immortal tragedy. Guido Vecchio had a beautiful daughter,
+Francesca. Malatesta had two sons, the elder Giovanni called, for he
+was a cripple, _lo Sciancato_, the younger, for he was very fair,
+known as Paolo _il Bello_. To secure their alliance Polenta married
+his daughter Francesca to Malatesta's elder son Giovanni; but she had
+already learned to love, or she soon came to love, his brother Paolo
+il Bella. Giovanni came upon them one night in Rimini and killed them
+both with one thrust of his sword. The tragedy, however, should only
+be told in the immortal words of Dante, who recounts the tale
+Francesca told him in the second circle of the Inferno. For seeing
+Francesca and her lover floating for ever in each other arms "light
+before the wind," as the wind swayed them towards Virgil and himself
+the Florentine addressed them:
+
+  "O wearied spirits come, and hold discourse
+  With us, if by none else restrained.' As doves
+  By fond desire invited, on wide wings
+  And firm, to their sweet nest returning home,
+  Cleave the air, wafted by their will along,
+  Thus issued, from that troop where Dido ranks,
+  They, through the ill air speeding, with such force
+  My cry prevailed, by strong affection urged.
+  'O gracious creature and benign! who go'st
+  Visiting, through this element obscure,
+  Us, who the world with bloody stain imbrued,
+  If, for a friend, the King of all, we own'd,
+  Our prayer to him should for thy peace arise,
+  Since thou hast pity on our evil plight
+  Of whatsoe'er to hear or to discourse
+  It pleases thee, that will we hear, of that
+  Freely with thee discourse, while e'er the wind
+  As now is mute  The land that gave me birth
+  Is situate on the coast, where Po descends
+  To rest in ocean with his sequent streams
+  'Love that in gentle heart is quickly learnt
+  Entangled him by that fair form, from me
+  Ta'en in such cruel sort, as grieves me still,
+  Love that denial takes from none beloved
+  Caught me with pleasing him so passing well
+  That as thou seest, he yet deserts me not
+  'Love brought us to one death, Caina waits
+  The soul who spilt our life' Such were their words,
+  At hearing which downward I bent my looks
+  And held them there so long that the bard cried
+  'What art thou pondering?' I in answer thus
+  'Alas' by what sweet thoughts, what fond desire
+  Must they at length to that ill pass have reached'
+  Then turning, I to them my speech address'd,
+  And thus began 'Francesca! your sad fate
+  Even to tears my grief and pity moves
+  But tell me, in the time of your sweet sighs,
+  By what, and how Love granted, that ye knew
+  Your yet uncertain wishes?' She replied
+  'No greater grief then to remember days
+  Of joy when misery is at hand  That kens
+  Thy learn'd instructor  Yet so eagerly
+  If thou art bent to know the primal root
+  From whence our love gat being, I will do
+  As one who weeps and tells his tale  One day
+  For our delight we read of Lancelot,
+  How him love thrall'd  Alone we were and no
+  Suspicion near us  Oft-times by that reading
+  Our eyes were drawn together, and the hue
+  Fled from our altered cheek  But at one point
+  Alone we fell  When of that smile we read,
+  That wished smile, so rapturously kissed
+  By one so deep in love, then he, who ne'er
+  From me shall separate, at once my lips
+  All trembling kissed  The book and writer both
+  Were love's purveyors  In its leaves that day
+  We read no more'  While thus one spirit spake
+  The other wailed so sorely, that heart-struck
+  I, through compassion fainting, seem'd not far
+  From death and like a corse fell to the ground"
+
+With the name of Dante we come to the real importance Ravenna has for
+us in the Middle Age. Dante, however, was not the guest of Guido
+Vecchio. That great lord ruled in Ravenna as perpetual captain till
+his death in 1310, when he was succeeded by his son Lamberto who had
+for some time been the leading spirit in the city. He altogether
+abolished the so-called democratic government, that is to say, the
+consulship which was filled in turn by two consuls, the one succeeding
+the other every fifteen days. Lamberto made himself lord and reigned
+till 1316, when he was succeeded by his nephew Guido Novello, the
+consul of Cesena, who thus brought Cesena into the lordship. It is
+with this man that a universal interest in Ravenna may be said for a
+moment to revive, for it was he who had the honour to be the host of
+Dante Alighieri.
+
+Guido Novello was not a mere adventurer like Guido Vecchio, he was a
+man of considerable culture, with a love of learning and of the arts.
+It was, as we shall see, at his earnest solicitation that Dante came
+to visit him, and if we may believe Vasari it was at the poet's
+suggestion he invited Giotto to his court. "As it had come to the ears
+of Dante that Giotto was in Ferrara, he so contrived that the latter
+was induced to visit Ravenna, where the poet was then in exile, and
+where Giotto painted some frescoes which are moderately good ... for
+the Signori da Polenta."
+
+Dante as we may think spent the last four years of his life in
+Ravenna. Those four years we shall consider presently. Here it will be
+enough to note that he met his death at last in the service of his
+host and benefactor Guido Novello. The most disastrous action of his
+life was, it will be remembered, the embassy he made on behalf of his
+own city of Florence to pope Boniface VIII. That business cost him his
+home and the city he loved with so cruel a passion; it made him an
+exile. It was upon the longest journey of all that his last embassy
+sent him. He set out it seems as ambassador of Guido Novello for
+Venice, which so far as the sea and all its business are concerned had
+long replaced Ravenna as mistress of the Adriatic. The recent
+acquisition of the city and the salt flats of Cervia by Ravenna had
+become a grievance with the Venetians who desired that monopoly for
+themselves. It seems that in some local quarrel at Cervia certain
+Venetian sailors had been killed and Dante went on Guide's behalf to
+clear the matter up. He was to be as it happened as unsuccessful in
+his last embassy as he had been in his first. The old doge, according
+to the legend which I am bound to say is now generally regarded as a
+fable, received him coldly and, so the tale runs, invited him to
+dinner upon a fast day. "In front of the envoys of other princes who
+were of greater account than the Polentani of Ravenna, and were served
+before Dante, the larger fish were placed, while in front of Dante was
+placed the smallest. This difference of treatment nettled Dante who
+took up one of the little fish in his hand and held it to his ear as
+though expecting it to say something. The doge observing this asked
+him what his strange behaviour meant. To which Dante replied: 'As I
+knew that the father of this fish met his death in these waters I was
+asking him news of his father.'
+
+"'Well,' said the doge, 'and what did he answer?' Dante replied: 'He
+told me that he and his companions were too little to remember much
+about him; but that I might learn what I wanted to know from the older
+fish, who would be able to give me the news I asked for.'
+
+"Thereupon the doge at once ordered Dante to be served with a fine
+large fish."
+
+[Illustration: Colour Plate S. GIOVANNI BATTISTA]
+
+Thus Dante called attention to his great achievement, by which I
+suppose he hoped at once to vindicate his dignity as a great man,
+certainly greater than any one present, and by this means to lend
+importance to his mission. Whatever may have been the personal result
+of his sally, it did his mission no good at all. When the official
+interview took place Dante, if we may believe something of the
+apocryphal "Letter of Dante to Guido da Polenta," began to address the
+doge in Latin and was bidden to speak in Italian or to obtain an
+interpreter. His mission was a failure and Venice, who in the person
+of her doge did her best to show either her ignorance of the great
+poet who did her the honour of crossing her Piazza or of her
+philistine contempt of him, lives in the _Divine Comedy_ only as an
+illustration of Hell.
+
+  "Thus we from bridge to bridge ...
+  Pass'd on, and to the summit reaching, stood
+  To view another gap, within the round
+  Of Malebolge, other bootless pangs.
+  Marvellous darkness shadow'd o'er the place.
+  In the Venetian arsenal as boils
+  Through wintry months tenacious pitch, to smear
+  Their unbound vessels ...
+  So not by force of fire but art divine
+  Boiled here a glutinous thick mass, that round
+  Limed all the shore."
+
+On his way back to Ravenna by land, for the Venetians added to their
+shame by refusing him the sea passage, he caught a fever in the
+marshes and returned to Ravenna only to die: the mightiest of all
+those--emperors and kings--who lie in that "_generale sepolcro di
+santissimi corpi_."
+
+That was in 1321; and with the death of Dante our interest in Ravenna
+again becomes cold. Guido Novello soon fell, driven out of Ravenna,
+never to return, by Ostasio who had assassinated Guide's brother the
+archbishop-elect Rinaldo. Ostasio ruled with the title of vicar which
+he received both from Lewis the Bavarian and from pope Benedict XII.
+This vicious and cruel despot was succeeded by his equally cruel son
+Bernardino. He ruled for fourteen years, 1345-1359, not, however,
+without mishap, for his brothers conspired against him and flung him
+into prison at Cervia. He contrived, however, to turn the tables upon
+them and to hold them in the same dungeon where he himself had been
+their prisoner. He was succeeded at last by Guido Lucio, a man of some
+integrity; but he too was the victim of his family, his own sons
+rising up against him in his old age and in 1389 flinging him into
+prison where he died.
+
+He was followed in the lordship of Ravenna by his son Ostasio. This
+man died in 1431, that is to say, in the midst of all the confusion,
+here in Romagna and the Marches, of the fifteenth century, when the
+condottieri were one and all looking for thrones and such ambitions as
+those of the Visconti, of Francesco Sforza, of Sigismondo Malatesta,
+of Federigo of Urbino and of a host of _parvenus_ were struggling for
+dominion and mastery. Thus it was that Ostasio's successor, Ostasio,
+in 1438 was compelled to make alliance with duke Filippo Maria of
+Milan. Venice, ever watchful, saw Visconti's game, remembered Cervia,
+and insisted upon Ostasio coming to Venice. While there he learned
+that Venice had annexed his dominion. Nor are we surprised to learn
+that he ended his days in a Franciscan convent, where he was
+mysteriously assassinated, probably by order of Venice. But with the
+entry of Venice into Ravenna the Middle Age, even in that far place,
+comes to an end. The Polentani were done with. A new and vigorous
+government ushered the old imperial city into the Renaissance.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+DANTE IN RAVENNA
+
+
+Before following the fortunes of Ravenna under that new and alien
+government into the Renaissance and the modern world, it will be well
+if we turn to examine more closely her one great moment in the Middle
+Age, the moment in which Dante found in her a last refuge, and then
+linger a little among such of her mediaeval buildings as the modern
+world has left her.
+
+In any attempt to deal, however briefly, with Dante's sojourn in
+Ravenna we must first find out what we really know concerning it and
+distinguish this from what is mere conjecture or deduction. Now the
+first authority for Dante's life generally, is undoubtedly Boccaccio,
+and as it happens he was in Ravenna, where he had relations, certainly
+in 1350 and perhaps in 1346. In 1350 he was the envoy of the Or San
+Michele Society, who by his hand sent Beatrice, the daughter of Dante,
+then a nun in the convent of S. Stefano dell' Uliva in Ravenna, ten
+gold florins He was thus in communication with Dante's daughter so
+that when he came to write the Vita di Dante, probably in 1356-1357,
+he was certainly in possession of facts. It will be well then if we
+state to begin with in his own words what he has told us of the years
+Dante spent in Ravenna.
+
+But first as to the date of Dante's coming to Ravenna. Boccaccio would
+seem to place it immediately after the death of Henry VII. in 1313. To
+modern scholarship this has seemed incredible for various reasons, and
+it prefers to allow Dante to visit Verona first and to come to Ravenna
+in 1317. Yet let us hear Boccaccio.
+
+He begins by telling us that the too early death of the emperor, who
+was poisoned, as is thought, at Buonconvento in southern Tuscany on S.
+Bartholomew's day in 1313, cast every one of his faction into despair
+"and Dante most of all; wherefore no longer going about to seek his
+own return from exile he passed the heights of the Apennines and
+departed to Romagna where his last day, that was to put an end to all
+his toils, awaited him.
+
+"In those times was Lord of Ravenna (a famous and ancient city of
+Romagna) a noble cavalier whose name was Guido Novello da Polenta; he
+was well skilled in the liberal arts and held men of worth in the
+highest honour, especially such as excelled others in knowledge. And
+when it came to his ears that Dante, beyond all expectation, was now
+in Romagna and in such desperate plight, he, who had long time before
+known his worth by fame, resolved to receive him and do him honour.
+Nor did he wait to be requested by him to do this, but considering
+with how great shame men of worth ask such favours, with liberal mind
+and with free proffers he approached him, requesting from Dante of
+special grace that which he knew Dante must needs have begged of him,
+to wit, that it might please him to abide with him. The two wills,
+therefore, of him who received and of him who made the request thus
+uniting on one same end, Dante, being highly pleased by the liberality
+of the noble cavalier, and on the other side constrained by his
+necessities, awaited no further invitation but the first, and took his
+way to Ravenna, where he was honourably received by the lord thereof,
+who revived his fallen hope by kindly festerings; and giving him
+abundantly such things as were fitting, he kept him with him there for
+many years, yea, even to the last year of his life.
+
+"Never had his amorous longings, nor his grieving tears, nor his
+domestic anxieties, nor the seducing glory of public offices, nor his
+miserable exile, nor his unendurable poverty, been able with all their
+force to turn Dante aside from his main intent, to wit, from sacred
+studies; for as will be seen hereafter, when mention shall be made
+severally of the works that he composed, he will be found to have
+exercised himself in writing in the midst of all that is fiercest
+among these passions. And if in the teeth of such and so many
+adversaries as have been set forth above, he became by force of genius
+and of perseverance so illustrious as we see, what may we suppose he
+would have been if, like many another, he had had even as many
+supports; or, at least, had had no foes; or but few? Indeed I know
+not. But were it lawful so to say, I would declare that he had surely
+become a God upon the earth.
+
+[Illustration: Casa Polentana]
+
+"Dante then, having lost all hope of a return to Florence, though he
+retained the longing for it, dwelt in Ravenna for a number of years,
+under the protection of its gracious lord. And here by his teachings
+he trained many scholars in poetry, especially in the vernacular,
+which vernacular to my thinking he first exalted and brought into
+repute amongst us Italians no otherwise than did Homer his amongst the
+Greeks or Virgil his amongst the Latins. Before him, though it is
+supposed that it had already been practised some short space of years,
+yet was there none who by the numbering of the syllables and by the
+consonance of the terminal parts had the feeling or the courage to
+make it the instrument of any matter dealt with by the rules of art;
+or rather it was only in the lightest of love poems that they
+exercised themselves therein. But he showed by the effect that every
+lofty matter may be treated in it; and made our vernacular glorious
+above every other.
+
+"But since his hour is assigned to every man, Dante when already in
+the middle or thereabout of his fifty-sixth year fell sick and in
+accordance with the Christian religion received every Sacrament of the
+Church humbly, and devoutly, and reconciled himself with God by
+contrition for everything, that, being but man, he had done against
+His pleasure; and in the month of September in the year of Christ one
+thousand three hundred and twenty-one, on the day whereon the
+Exaltation of the Holy Cross is celebrated by the Church, not without
+greatest grief on the part of the aforesaid Guido and generally all
+the other Ravennese citizens, he rendered up to his Creator his
+toil-worn spirit, the which I doubt not was received into the arms of
+his most noble Beatrice, with whom, in the sight of Him who is the
+supreme good, the miseries of this present life left behind, he now
+lives most joyously in that life the felicity of which expects no end.
+
+"The magnanimous cavalier placed the dead body of Dante, adorned with
+poetic insignia, upon a funeral bier, and had it borne on the
+shoulders of his most distinguished citizens to the place of the Minor
+Friars in Ravenna, with such honour as he deemed worthy of such a
+corpse And here, public lamentations as it were having followed him so
+far, he had him placed in a stone chest, wherein he still lieth. And
+returning to the house in which Dante lately lived, according to the
+Ravennese custom he himself delivered an ornate and long discourse
+both in commendation of the profound knowledge and the virtue of the
+deceased, and in consolation of his friends whom he had left in
+bitterest grief. He purposed, had his estate and his life endured, to
+honour him with so choice a tomb that if never another merit of his
+had made him memorable to those to come, this tomb should have
+accomplished it.
+
+"This laudable intent was in brief space of time made known to certain
+who in those days were most famous for poetry in Ravenna; whereon each
+one for himself, to show his own power and to bear witness to the
+goodwill he had to the dead poet, and to win the grace and love of the
+signore, who was known to have it at heart, made verses which, if
+placed as epitaph on the tomb that was to be, should with due praises
+teach posterity who lay therein. And these verses they sent to the
+glorious signore, who, by great guilt of Fortune, in short space of
+time lost his estate, and died at Bologna; wherefore the making of the
+tomb and the placing of the verses thereon were left undone. Now when
+these verses were shown to me long afterward, perceiving that they had
+never been put in their place, by reason of the chance already spoken
+of, and pondering on the present work that I am writing, how that it
+is not indeed a material tomb, but is none the less--as that was to
+have been--a perpetual preserver of his memory, I imagined that it
+would not be unfitting to add them to this work. But in as much as no
+more than the words of some one of them (for there were several) would
+have been cut upon the marble, so I held that only the words of one
+should be written here; wherefore on examining them all I judged that
+the most worthy for art and for matter were fourteen verses made by
+Messer Giovanni del Virgilio the Bolognese, a most illustrious and
+great poet of those days, and one who had been a most especial friend
+of Dante. And the verses are these hereafter written:
+
+  "'Theologus Dantes, nullius dogmatis expers,
+  Quod foveat claro philosophia sinu,
+  Gloria musarum, vulgo gratissimus auctor,
+  Hic iacet, et fama pulsat utrumque polum,
+  Qui loca defunctis, gladiis regnumque gemellis,
+  Distribuit, laicis rhetoricisque modis.
+  Pascua Pieriis demum resonabat avenis,
+  Atropos heu letum livida rupit opus
+  Huic ingrata tulit tristem Florentia fructum,
+  Exilium, vati patria cruda suo.
+  Quem pia Guidonis gremio Ravenna Novelli
+  Gaudet honorati continuisse ducis.
+  Mille trecentenis ter septem Numinis annis,
+  Ad sua septembris idibus astra redit.'"[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: The translation is Mr. Wicksteed's The Early Lives of
+Dante. He adds a translation of the verses "Theologic Dante, a
+stranger to no teaching that philosophy may cherish in her illustrious
+bosom; glory of the Muses, author most acceptable to the commonalty,
+lieth here and smiteth either pole with his fame, who assigned their
+places to the dead, and their jurisdictions to the twin swords, in
+laic and rhetoric modes. And lastly, with Pierian pipe he was making
+the pasture lands resound, black Atropos, alas, broke off the work of
+joy. For him ungrateful Florence bore the dismal fruit of exile, harsh
+fatherland to her own bard. But Ravenna's piety rejoices to have
+gathered him into the bosom of Guido Novello, her illustrious chief.
+In one thousand three hundred and three times seven years of the
+Deity, he went back on September's Ides to his own stars."]
+
+So far Boccaccio. Though his account tells us much it certainly does
+not permit us to make many definite statements as to Dante's life in
+Ravenna. One of the first things, for instance, that any modern
+biographer would have noted with accuracy would have been the house in
+which Dante lived. Something definite, too, we might have expected as
+to his friends and correspondents, as to his occupations and habits.
+Of all this there is almost nothing. It will, however, especially be
+noted that Boccaccio speaks of Dante as "training many scholars in
+poetry especially in the vernacular." What can this mean?
+
+It has been suggested and with some authority that Dante was not
+entirely dependent upon his host Guido Novello, that he was able to
+gain a livelihood, at least, by lectures either in his own house or in
+some public place, and that it is even probable that he occupied an
+official position in Ravenna of a very honourable sort, that he was,
+in fact, professor of Rhetoric in that city. There is no evidence to
+support such a theory. It is true that though we know the names of the
+professors of Grammar or Rhetoric in the very ancient schools of
+Ravenna, schools which date from the time of Theodosius the Great, we
+do not find the name of him who filled that chair during the time of
+Dante's sojourn in Ravenna. In 1268 Pasio della Noce was lecturing on
+Jurisprudence in Ravenna; in 1298 Ugo di Riccio was professor of Civil
+Law there; in 1304 Leone da Verona is teaching Grammar and Logic in
+the city. Then we hear no more till we come to the year 1333, when a
+certain Giovanni Giacomo del Bando is professor.[1] The mere absence
+of names--a silence which does not coincide in any way with Dante's
+advent or with Dante's death--is, certainly, not enough to allow us to
+assert the probability of the great poet's having filled the office of
+lecturer or professor of Civil Law in the school of Ravenna. It is
+true that Saviozzo da Siena tells us:
+
+  "Qui comincio a leggere Dante in pria
+  Retorica vulgare e molti aperti
+  Fece di sua Poetica armonia"
+
+and that Manetti, an early biographer, seems to support the theory.
+But the best evidence, if evidence it can be called, which we have for
+this theory is to be found in a codex in the Laurentian Library,
+quoted by Bandini and cited by Dr. Ricci, which says: "It is commonly
+reported that Dante, being in Ravenna, studying and giving lectures as
+a doctor to his pupils upon various works, the schools became the
+resort of many learned men." This statement upon hearsay, however,
+does little more than confirm the definite assertion of Boccaccio that
+Dante "trained many scholars," not in civil law, but in "poetry,
+especially in the vernacular."
+
+[Footnote 1: For a full discussion of all that may be known of Dante
+at the Poleata court see Dr. Ricci's large work, _L'Ultimo Rifugio di
+Dante_ (1891). A charming book in English, _Dante in Ravenna_ (1898),
+by Catherine Mary Phillimore, is to a great extent based upon Dr.
+Ricci's work. A valuable book that should be consulted is the more
+recent volume by P.H. Wicksteed and E.G. Gardner, _Dante and Giovanni
+del Virgilio_ (1902).]
+
+It is quite unproved then that Dante lectured in Ravenna as a
+professor of Civil Law. It might seem equally certain that he did
+lecture upon Poetry and the vulgar tongue, and it seems likely that we
+have the text of his lectures in the latter if not in the earlier part
+of the _De Vulgari Eloquentia_ "in which in masterly and polished
+Latin he reproves all the vulgar dialects of Italy." Boccaccio tells
+us he composed this when he was "already nigh his death," and though
+modern criticism seems inclined to date its composition not later than
+1306 the evidence of Boccaccio is not lightly to be set aside[1].
+
+[Footnote 1: The first part of this work was certainly not written
+later than 1306 the second part may well have been later.]
+
+Lonely as he doubtless was in Ravenna he was not alone there. With him
+it would seem was his daughter Beatrice, who became a nun in S.
+Stefano dell' Uliva, and his sons Pietro and Jacopo. The latter,
+though a lawyer and not in holy orders, held two benefices in Ravenna,
+but most of his time seems to have been spent in Verona where Jacopo,
+his brother, later held a canonry. And then there were his friends.
+
+In his lectures upon Poetry one of his most eager pupils would seem to
+have been his best friend and host, Guido Novello, who evidently knew
+well at least those parts of the _Divine Comedy_, chiefly the
+_Inferno_ be it noted, which deal with his ancestors, for he quotes
+one of the most famous of them--an unforgettable line spoken by his
+aunt Francesca da Rimini:
+
+  "Questi che mai da me non fia diviso."
+
+in a sonnet of his own[2].
+
+[Footnote 2: Cf. _Ultimo Rifugio_, p. 384, where the sonnet is given
+in full.]
+
+After the lord Guido Novello, we must name the archbishop of Ravenna,
+Rainaldo Concorreggio, as among Dante's friends. It is possible that
+he had known Dante at the University of Bologna and he had been a
+chaplain of Boniface VIII. He was a brave man, learned in theology,
+law, and music, and devoted to his religion, an eager student, and he
+had composed a treatise which has come down to us upon Galla Placidia
+and her church.
+
+And then there was Giotto who came to paint if not in S. Maria in
+Porto fuori, certainly in S. Giovanni Evangelista. He was Dante's dear
+friend and it was probably at the poet's suggestion he had been
+invited to Ravenna. We do not know whether these two men attended
+Dante's lectures. But the true audience there which came simply to
+hear was probably various, consisting of poets, notaries, and all
+sorts of men, some of whom were Dante's friends and companions. There
+was Ser Dino Perini, Ser Pietro di Messer Giardino--he was a
+notary--and Fiduccio dei Milotti, who walked with Dante in the Pineta.
+All these names have come down to us in the Latin eclogues written by
+Dante while in Ravenna to his friend Giovanni del Virgilio--del
+Virgilio because he could so well imitate Virgil.
+
+These eclogues are full of shrewd and curious thought, a real
+correspondence, and they help us to see the men who surrounded the
+poet in Ravenna. They do not, however, give us so extraordinary an
+impression of the strength and keenness of Dante's powers of
+observation as many a passage in the _Divine Comedy_ in which Ravenna
+and the rude and fierce world of the Romagna of that day live for
+ever. It is in answer to the inquiries of the great _Guido of
+Montefeltro_ that Dante speaks of Romagna in the _Inferno_. Feeble and
+anaemic though the great lines become in any translation, even so all
+their virtue is not lost:
+
+  "Never was thy Romagna without war
+  In her proud tyrants' bosoms, nor is now;
+  But open war there left I none. The state
+  Ravenna hath maintained this many a year
+  Is steadfast. There Polenta's eagle[1] broods,
+  And in his broad circumference of plume
+  O'ershadows Cervia[2]. The green talons[3] grasp
+  The land, that stood e'erwhile the proof so long
+  And piled in bloody heap the host of France.
+  The old mastiff of Verrucchio and the young[4]
+  That tore Montagna[5] in their wrath still make
+  Where they are wont, an augre of their fangs,
+  Lamone's[6] city and Santerno's[7] range
+  Under the lion of the snowy lair[8],
+  Inconstant partisan, that changeth sides
+  Or ever summer yields to winter's frost.
+  And she whose flank is washed of Savio's wave[9]
+  As 'twixt the level and the steep she lies,
+  Lives so 'twixt tyrant power and liberty."
+
+[Footnote 1: The coat of the Polenta.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Cervia, the least secure of the Polenta possessions.]
+
+[Footnote 3: The green lion of the Ordelaffi of Forli.]
+
+[Footnote 4: Malatesta and Malatestino, lords of Rimini, deriving from
+Verrucchio, a castle in the hills.]
+
+[Footnote 5: The Malatesta were Guelfs, Montagna de' Parcitati, whom
+they murdered, was the leader of the Ghibelline party in Rimini.]
+
+[Footnote 6: Faenza.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Imola.]
+
+[Footnote 8: Maghinardo Pagano, whose arms were a blue lion in a white
+field.]
+
+[Footnote 9: Cesena.]
+
+All Romagna with its untamable fierceness and confusion lies in these
+lines which, as Dante wrote them, seem as unalterable as those in
+which the creation of the world is described.
+
+Nor is Dante forgetful of the great destiny that had been Ravenna's.
+In the sixth canto of the _Paradiso_ it is Justinian himself, "_Cesare
+fui e son Giustiniano_" who recounts to Dante the victories of the
+Roman eagle:
+
+  "When from Ravenna it came forth and leap'd
+  The Rubicon,"
+
+or when
+
+  "with Belisarius
+  Heaven's high hand was linked,"
+
+or when
+
+  "The Lombard tooth with fang impure
+  Did gore the bosom of the Holy Church
+  Under its wings, victorious, Charlemagne
+  Sped to her rescue."
+
+Nor is Dante forgetful of Ravenna's other claims to glory. In the
+seventh heaven, which is the planet Saturn, led by Beatrice, he finds
+S. Romualdo, and speaks of S. Peter Damiano, and blessed Peter _Il
+Peccatore_, the founder of the church of S. Maria in Porto fuori, two
+of them of the Onesti house of Ravenna.
+
+  "In that place was I Peter Damiano
+  And Peter the sinner dwelt in the house
+  Of our blest Lady on the Adriatic shore."
+
+Of the earlier Podesta, too, he is not unmindful:
+
+  "Arrigo Mainardi, Pier Traversaro,...
+  Wonder not, Tuscan, if thou seest me weep
+  When I recall those once loved names ...
+  With Traversaro's house and Anastagio's,
+  Each race disinherited."
+
+With the pitiful story of Francesca da Polenta we have seen how he
+dealt and how he spoke of Guido Vecchio. These people live because of
+him, and Ravenna in the Middle Age still holds our interest and our
+love because he dwelt there and she harboured him.
+
+It was in her service, too, he met his death as we have seen, and in
+her church of the Friars Minor that he was laid to rest by Guido
+Novello.
+
+Nine months later the lord of Ravenna received the first complete copy
+of the _Divina Commedia_, made by Jacopo Alighieri from his father's
+autograph. A very curious incident is related by Boccaccio in
+connection with this. It was Dante's custom, Boccaccio tell us,
+"whenever he had done six or eight cantos, more or less, to send them
+from whatever place he was in before any other had seen them to Messer
+Cane della Scala, whom he held in reverence above all other men; and
+when he had seen them, Dante gave access to them to whoso desired. And
+having sent to him in this fashion all save the last thirteen cantos,
+which he had finished, but had not yet sent him, it came to pass that,
+without bearing it in his mind that he was abandoning them, he died.
+And when they who were left behind, children and disciples, had
+searched many times, in the course of many months, amongst all his
+papers, if haply he had composed a conclusion to his work, and could
+by no means find the remaining cantos; and when every admirer of his
+in general was enraged that God had not at least lent him to the world
+so long that he might have had opportunity to finish what little
+remained of his work; they had abandoned further search in despair
+since they could by no means find them.
+
+[Illustration: DANTE'S TOMB]
+
+"So Jacopo and Piero, sons of Dante, both of them poets in rhyme,
+moved thereto by certain of their friends, had taken it into their
+minds to attempt to supplement the parental work, as far as in them
+lay, that it might not remain imperfect, when to Jacopo, who was far
+more zealous than the other in this work, there appeared a wondrous
+vision, which not only checked his foolish presumption but showed him
+where were the thirteen cantos which were wanting to this Divine
+Comedy and which they had not known where to find. A worthy man of
+Ravenna whose name was Piero Giardino, long time a disciple of
+Dante's, related how, when eight months had passed after the death of
+his master, the aforesaid Jacopo came to him one night near to the
+hour that we call matins, and told him that that same night a little
+before that hour he, in his sleep, had seen his father, Dante,
+approach him, clad in whitest garment, and his face shining with an
+unwonted light; whom he seemed to ask if he were yet living, and to
+hear in reply that he was, but in the true life, not in ours. Whereon
+he seemed further to ask him if he had finished his work or ever he
+passed to that true life; and if he had finished it, where was the
+missing part, which they had never been able to find. To this he
+seemed to hear again in answer, 'Yea! I finished it.' Whereon it
+seemed that he took him by the hand and led him to that chamber where
+he was wont to sleep when he was living in this life; and touching a
+certain spot said, 'Here is that which ye so long have sought.' And no
+sooner was uttered that word than it seemed that both Dante and sleep
+departed from him at the same moment. Wherefore he averred that he
+could not hold but come and signify what he had seen, that they might
+go together and search in the place indicated to him, which he held
+most perfectly stamped in his memory, to see whether a true spirit or
+a false delusion had shown it him. Wherefore since a great piece of
+the night still remained, they departed together and went to the place
+indicated, and there found a mat fixed to the wall, which they lightly
+raised and found a recess in the wall which neither of them had ever
+seen, nor knew that it was there; and there they found certain
+writings all mouldy with the damp of the wall and ready to rot had
+they stayed there much longer; and when they had carefully removed the
+mould and read, they saw that they contained the thirteen cantos so
+long sought by them. Wherefore, in great joy, they copied them out,
+and after the author's wont sent them first to Messer Cane and then
+joined them on, as was meet, to the imperfect work. In such a manner
+did the work of so many years see its completion."
+
+As Boccaccio tells us, Guido Novello had scarce buried Dante in that
+temporary tomb in the church of the Friars Minor when he lost his
+lordship. On April 1, 1322, he was elected captain of the people in
+Bologna, and when he was about to return to Ravenna he suddenly heard
+that the archbishop had been murdered and that the city was in the
+hands of his enemies. Do what he would he never returned to his own
+city, and thus his intentions with regard to the tomb of the poet were
+never carried out. The noble sepulchre which Guido had planned was not
+built and the body of Dante reposed in the ancient sarcophagus in
+which it had been first placed. There it remained when Boccaccio came
+to Ravenna, probably in 1346 and certainly in 1350, as the bearer of a
+gift from the Or San Michele Society to Beatrice di Dante, then a nun
+in S. Stefano dell' Uliva.
+
+Boccaccio, it will be remembered, had in his life of Dante bitterly
+upbraided Florence for her treatment of her greatest son, and to his
+blame had added a prophecy that she would soon repent of her shameful
+ingratitude and would envy Ravenna "the body of him whose works have
+held the admiration of the whole world." This prophecy fulfilled
+itself many times and first in 1396. In that year, upon December 22,
+Florence made the first of her many demands for the body of Dante,
+which she now wished to bury in S. Maria del Fiore. The demand, as
+Boccaccio had foreseen, was refused. It was repeated in 1429 and again
+refused. By 1476, when her next attempt was made, Ravenna had passed
+into the power of the Venetian Republic. It was therefore to Venice
+that Florence now turned through the Venetian ambassador, who is said
+to have been none other than Bernardo Bembo.
+
+Bembo's request on behalf of Florence was, of course, a failure, but
+he seems to have himself repaired the tomb and to have placed upon it
+an epitaph.
+
+  "Exigua tumuli Dantes hic sorte jacebas
+  Squallenti nulli cognite pene situ.
+  At nunc marmoreo subnixus conderis arcu
+  Omnibus et cultu splendidiore nites
+  Nimirum Bembus musis incensus ethruscis
+  Hoc tibi quem in primis hoc coluere dedit.
+
+  Ann Sal. mcccclxxxiii. vi. Kal. Jvn.
+  Bernardus Bemb. Praet. aere suo Posuit."
+
+His work of reparation and of adornment was carried out by Pietro
+Lombardo who was already at work in Ravenna for the Venetian republic,
+the sculptured effigy of Dante in relief being also from his hand.
+
+But Florence was by no means at the end of her resources. In 1509
+Ravenna had passed into the hands of the pope. In 1519 Leo X., a
+Medici, being on the throne of Peter, the Accademia Medicea of
+Florence petitioned the pope (among the signatories of the petition
+was Michelangelo, who offered to "make a worthy sepulchre for the
+divine poet in an honoured place" in Florence), to be allowed to carry
+away the bones of Dante from Ravenna to the City of Flowers. The pope
+gave the Florentine envoys the permission they required as was
+expected. They proceeded to Ravenna and opened the sarcophagus; but
+when they lifted the lid, they found it empty, save for "a fragment of
+bone and a few withered leaves of the laurel which had adorned the
+poet's head." From that time till our own day the resting place of
+Dante's bones has been a complete mystery.
+
+It is recorded that in the middle of the seventeenth century the
+Franciscans rebuilt and repaired the so-called chapel of Braccioforte
+at S. Francesco, which till then had been joined by a portico to the
+tomb of Dante. In 1658 this portico among other alterations was
+removed, and the exterior of the tomb itself was reconstructed with an
+entrance into the Piazza, as we see it. The interior of the tomb was,
+however, left in some confusion so that the papal legate determined
+himself to repair it. In this he met with much opposition from the
+friars who claimed, as of old, jurisdiction over the sepulchre.
+Nevertheless he completed the work, and in 1692 placed the following
+upon the tomb:
+
+  Exulem a Florentia Dantem Liberalissime
+  Excepit Ravenna.
+  Vivo fruens Mortuum colens
+  Magnis cineribus licet in parvo magnifici parentarunt
+  Polentani Principes erigendo
+  Bembus Praetor Luculentissime extruendo
+  Praetiosum Musis et Apollini Mausoleum
+  Quod injuria temporum pene squallens
+  E. mo Dominico Maria Cursio Legato
+  Joanne Salviato Prolegato
+  Magni civis cineres Patriae reconciliare
+  Cultus perpetuitate curantibus
+  S. P. Q. R.
+  Jure Ac Aere suo
+  Tanquam Thesaurum suum munivit
+  Instauravit ornavit
+  A.D. MDCXCII.
+
+Outside the tomb he placed his coat-of-arms, and on either side that
+of the legate of the province and that of the Franciscan Order. In
+1760 the third restoration was undertaken and the tomb assumed the
+form we now see and was given yet another inscription:
+
+  Danti Aleghiero
+  Poetae sui temporis primo
+  Restitutori
+  Politioris humanitatis
+  Guido et Hostasius Polentiani
+  clienti et hospiti peregre defuncto
+  monumentum fecerunt
+  Bernardus Bembus Praetor Venet. Ravenn.
+  Pro meritis eius ornatu excoluit.
+  Aloysius Valentius Gonzaga Card.
+  Leg. prov. Aemil.
+  Superiorum Temporum negligentia corruptum
+  Operibus ampliatis
+  Munificentia sua restituendum
+  curavit
+  Anno M DCC LXXX.
+
+At the same time the tomb was opened again and was found to be empty.
+In spite of this fact in 1864 the municipal authorities in Florence
+wrote to Ravenna again demanding the body of the poet, only to be
+again refused. This, however, was the sixth centenary of Dante's birth
+and the sarcophagus was again to be opened to "verify the remains."
+The workmen were indeed at work upon some necessary repairs and
+draining, when it was found that a part of the wall of the
+Braccioforte chapel would have to be removed. In setting to work upon
+this--little more than the removal of a few stones--the pickaxe of one
+of the workmen struck against wood, and presently a wooden box
+appeared which partly fell to pieces, revealing a human skeleton.
+Within the box was found this inscription:
+
+  Dantis ossa
+  Denuper revisa die 3 Junu
+  1677
+
+  Dantis ossa
+  A me Fre Antonio Santi
+  hic posita
+  Ano 1677 die 18 Octobris
+
+Medical experts were summoned. They made, Miss Phillimore tells us, "a
+careful examination of the bones, and proceeded to reconstruct the
+skeleton.... The stature answered to that of the poet as nearly as the
+measurement of a skeleton can represent the living form, and the skull
+found in the chest corresponded exactly with the mask taken from
+Dante's face immediately after his death, which was brought from
+Florence for the purpose of making this comparison."
+
+What seems to have happened has been made clear for us by Dr. Ricci.
+Between 1483, when Bembo reconstructed the tomb, and 1520, when the
+Florentines again claimed the body, and for the first time with a
+certainty of success, the body of Dante disappeared. It seems that in
+1520 the Franciscans entered the mausoleum, abstracted the body, and
+hid it to save it for Ravenna. In June 1677 Fra Antonio visited the
+bones in their hiding place and verified them. In October of the same
+year they were built into the new wall where the old entrance to the
+Braccioforte chapel had been; to be discovered by chance in 1865.
+
+It is curious that even as the last cantos of the _Divine Comedy_ were
+discovered by means of a dream, so a dream went before the discovery
+of the bones of Dante.
+
+"The sacristan of the Franciscan confraternity," we read, "called La
+Confraternita della Mercede, was wont to sleep in the damp recesses of
+the ancient chapel of Braccioforte." His name was Angelo Grillo ...
+This sacristan declared himself to have seen in a dream a shade issue
+from the spot where the body was found, clad in red, that it passed
+through the chapel into the adjoining cemetery. It approached him, and
+on being asked who it was, replied, 'I am Dante.' The sacristan died
+in May 1865, a few days before the discovery of the bones on the 27th
+of that month. Upon June 26, 1865, the bones of Dante were replaced in
+their original sarcophagus, ornamented by Pietro Lombardi, after
+having lain in state for three days, during which thousands from all
+over Italy passed before them. There it is to be hoped they will
+remain.
+
+[Illustration: CAMPANILE OF S. FRANCESCO]
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+MEDIAEVAL RAVENNA
+
+THE CHURCHES
+
+
+When we come to examine what is left to us of mediaeval Ravenna, of
+the buildings which were erected there during the Middle Age, we shall
+find, as we might expect, very little that is either great or
+splendid, for, as we have seen, after the first year of the ninth
+century Ravenna fell from her great position and became nothing more
+than a provincial city, perhaps more inaccessible than any other in
+the peninsula. Her achievement such as it was in the earlier mediaeval
+period consisted in the production of three men of real importance, S.
+Romuald of the Onesti family of Ravenna, who was born in the city
+about the year 956 and who founded, as we know, the Order of
+Camaldoli; S. Peter Damian, who was born there about 988; and Blessed
+Peter of Ravenna, Pietro degli Onesti, called _Il Peccatore_, of the
+same stock as S. Romuald.
+
+The work of S. Romuald was a reform of the Benedictine Order. The
+Order of Camaldoli which he founded was the second reform which had
+come out of the great brotherhood of S. Benedict; it was younger than
+the Cluniac but older than the Cistercian reform, and it was begun in
+1012. In that year S. Romuald, who was a Benedictine abbot, having
+been dismissed by all the houses over which he had successively ruled,
+for they would not bear the penitential strictness of his government,
+founded a hermitage at Camaldoli above the upper valley of the Arno
+called the Casentino. There each monk lived in a separate dwelling,
+all being enclosed in a great wall some five hundred and thirty yards
+about, beyond which the monks were forbidden to go. They followed the
+Rule of S. Benedict, kept two Lents in the year, and never tasted
+meat. They had, of course, a church in common where they were bound to
+recite the divine office, for this is of the essence of the Rule of S.
+Benedict, but certain among them--and this is the essence of the
+reform of Camaldoli--never quitted their cells, their food being
+brought to them in their huts, where, if the lecluse were a priest, he
+said his Mass, assisted by some one close by but not in the same room.
+Thus we see the monks and the hermits living side by side, but
+scarcely together, and so they continued from the year 1012 till our
+own day, which has seen the great Camaldoli suppressed. The device of
+the order was a cup or chalice out of which two doves drank,
+representing thus the two classes of hermits and monks, the
+contemplative and the active life.
+
+[Illustration: Colour Plate S. MARIA IN PORTO]
+
+The second great Ravennese of the Middle Age, S. Peter Damian, who was
+born about 988 in Ravenna, of a good but at that time poor family, was
+the youngest of many children. He was early left an orphan, and living
+in his brother's house was treated, it would appear, rather as a beast
+than a man. Presently, however, another brother, then archpriest of
+Ravenna, took pity on him and had him educated, first at Faenza but
+after at Parma, where he studied under a famous master. Here he became
+immersed in the religious life so that when two monks belonging to
+Fonte Avellana, "a desert at the foot of the Apennines in Umbria,"
+happened to call at the place of his abode he followed them. After a
+life of penitence and hardship, in 1057 pope Stephen IX. prevailed
+upon him to quit his desert and made him cardinal-bishop of Ostia, and
+later pope Nicholas II. sent him to Milan as his legate, till in 1062
+the successor of Nicholas allowed him to return to his solitude; but
+in 1063 he was sent to France as papal legate. Later we find him as
+papal ambassador in Ravenna--this in 1072. He was then a very old man,
+and on his way back to Rome he died at Faenza.
+
+This famous saint has often been confused with the third great
+Ravennese of this time, Pietro degli Onesti, called Pietro _Il
+Peccatore_[1] This confusion, which Dante disposes of in the
+well-known passage of the _Paradiso_:
+
+  "In quel loco fui 10, Pier Damiano,
+  e Pietro Peccator fu nella casa
+  Di nostra Donna in sul lito Adriano,"[2]
+
+is commented upon in one of Boccaccio's letters to his friend
+Petrarch.[3] It is true both Peters were of Ravenna, but whereas
+Blessed Pietro _Il Peccatore_ was of the Onesti family, as was S.
+Romuald, S. Pietro Damiano was not; the last died in 1072 at Faenza as
+we have seen, the first as we may think in 1119.
+
+[Footnote 1: It is I confess doubtful whether Pietro degli Onesti was
+ever called _Il Peccatore_ till a later epoch. The authenticity of the
+letters in which he so styles himself is open to question and the
+inscription on his tomb is it seems of the fifteenth century.]
+
+[Footnote 2: _Paradiso_, xxi. 121-123. "In quel loco" refers to Fonte
+Avellana.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Cf. Corazzini, _Lettere edite ed inedite di Giovanni
+Boccaccio_ (Firenze, 1877), p. 307.]
+
+Now though all were famous and all were of Ravenna it is the last and
+I suppose the least of them who is most closely connected with the
+city. The others went away and won, not only great place in the world,
+but an everlasting fame. Blessed Pietro _Il Peccatore_ stayed in
+Ravenna and built there outside the walls in the marsh between Ravenna
+and Classe the great home of Our Lady, S. Maria in Porto fuori. About
+the middle of the eleventh century, Dr Ricci tells us, certain
+religious retired into the solitude by the shore of the Adriatic and
+there built a little church or oratory that was called S. Maria _in
+fossula_. In this act we may certainly see the example of S. Romuald.
+But about 1096 there joined himself to them Pietro degli Onesti called
+_Il Peccatore_, and perhaps because he was of the Onesti he built
+there a new and a larger church, it is said in fulfilment of a vow
+made, as was Galla Placidia's, in a storm at sea. It is this church
+which in great part we still see, with additions of the thirteenth
+century, a lonely and beautiful thing in the emptiness of the sodden
+fields to the south-east of Ravenna between the Canale del Molino and
+the Fiumi Uniti.
+
+The lonely and melancholy church of S. Maria in Porto fuori is a
+basilica consisting of three naves which formed a part of the original
+church of the Blessed Pietro, and a presbytery, apse, and chapels
+which are of the thirteenth century. There we see some frescoes of a
+very beautiful and early character which have been erroneously
+attributed to Giotto, and as erroneously it might seem to Peter of
+Rimini.
+
+[Illustration: INTERIOR OF S. MARIA IN PORTO FUORI]
+
+They were the gift of a certain Graziadeo, a notary who in 1246
+provided the cost of the work, which was carried out it would seem by
+Maso da Faenza (1314), Rastello da Forll (1350-60), Giovanni da
+Ravenna (1368-96), and other painters of the Romagnuol school.[1]
+These works, which are among the loveliest we have of the school, may
+be noted as follows: in the nave to the left we see the Madonna and
+Child with four saints; here, too, is S. Julian. Upon the triumphal
+arch we see in the midst the Saviour and on the one side Antichrist
+and the martyrdom of the saints, on the other the defeat and end of
+Antichrist who is beheaded by angels. Beneath are scenes of Paradise
+and Hell. On the roof of the choir we see the Evangelists with their
+symbols and the Doctors of the Church. Upon the right the Death,
+Assumption, and Coronation of the Blessed Virgin, together with the
+Massacre of the Innocents and the Last Supper and perhaps S. Francis
+and S. Clare. Upon the left we have the Birth and Presentation of the
+Blessed Virgin in the Temple. The last two figures upon the right here
+are said to be portraits of Giotto and Guido da Polenta by those who
+attribute these works to the Florentine master. In the chapel on the
+left we see pope John I. before Theodoric, pope John in prison, and in
+the lunette the martyrdom of a saint. Close by are other frescoes
+repainted of S. Apollinaris and S. Antony Abbot. In the chapel on the
+right we see perhaps S. John baptising a king, S. John preaching, and
+Blessed Pietro _Il Peccatore_ healing the blind and sick. Here too
+would appear to be scenes from the life of S. Matthew, but unhappily
+the subjects are all of them obscure and difficult to interpret. At
+the end of the apse we see the three Maries at the Sepulchre and the
+Incredulity of S. Thomas.
+
+[Footnote 1: Cf. Dr. Ricci, _Guida di Ravenna_ (Bologna, fourth
+edition), and see Anselmi, _Memorie del Pittore Trecentista Petrus da
+Rimini_ in _La Romagna_ (1906), vol. III. fasc. Settembre.]
+
+Of these majestic but spoilt works undoubtedly the noblest in design
+is that of the Death of the Blessed Virgin. The Last Supper is also
+exceedingly beautiful, and the Incredulity of S. Thomas is a splendid
+piece of work. But in the course of ages these latter works especially
+have suffered grievously, as of course has the whole church.
+
+Built in the marsh it has sunk so deeply into it that its pillars are
+covered half way up, and the church seems always about to be wholly
+engulfed. It was called S. Maria in Porto because it was originally
+built near to the famous Port that Augustus Casar had established and
+which for so long was the headquarters of the eastern fleet. In the
+sixteenth century when the Canons Regular of the Lateran, who then
+served it, were compelled to abandon it, they built within the city of
+Ravenna another church which they named after that they had left, S.
+Maria in Porto. Thereafter the old church without the walls was known
+as S. Maria in Porto fuori.
+
+The mighty tower which rises beside S. Maria in Porto fuori has been
+thought to be in part the famous Pharos of which Pliny speaks.[1] It
+is almost certainly founded upon it, but the lower part in its huge
+strength is, as we see it, a work of the end of the twelfth century,
+as is the lofty campanile which rises from it.
+
+[Footnote 1: See _supra_, p. 24.]
+
+S. Maria in Porto fuori is undoubtedly the greatest monument that
+remains to Ravenna of the Middle Age; nothing really comparable with
+it is to be found in the city itself.
+
+The earliest of the friars' churches, those great monuments of the
+Middle Age in Italy, is S. Chiara which with its convent is now
+suppressed and lost in the Recovero di Mendicita (Corso Garibaldi,
+19). This convent, which dates certainly from 1255, was founded by
+Chiara da Polenta and was rebuilt in 1794. It is from its garden that
+we get our best idea of the church which within possesses frescoes of
+the Romagnuol school, where in the vault we see the four Evangelists
+with their symbols and the four Doctors of the Church. Upon the walls
+we see a spoiled fresco of the Presepio, that peculiarly Franciscan
+subject, and again the Annunciation, the Adoration of the Magi, the
+Baptism of Our Lord, Christ in the Garden, the Crucifixion, and
+various saints. These frescoes are the work of the men who painted in
+S. Maria in Porto fuori.
+
+It cannot have been much later that the church of S. Pier Maggiore, of
+which I have already spoken,[2] came into Franciscan hands, and
+certainly from 1261 it was called S. Francesco, when the archbishop
+Filippo Fontana handed it over to the Conventuals who held it till
+1810. Its chief mediseval interest lies for us of course in the fact
+that Dante was buried, probably at his own desire, within its
+precincts. But there are other things too. Close to the entrance door
+is a slab of red Verona marble dated 1396, which is the tomb of
+Ostasio da Polenta who was a Tertiary of the Franciscan Order, and was
+therefore buried in the habit of the friars. The figure carved there
+in relief to represent Ostasio is evidently a portrait and a very fine
+and noble piece of work. To the left, again, is another slab of red
+Verona marble which marks the tomb of the General of the Franciscan
+Order, Padre Enrico Alfieri, who died of fever in Ravenna in 1405. The
+fine Renaissance pilasters in the Cappella del Crocefisso should be
+noted, and the beautiful sixteenth-century monument of Luffo Numai by
+Tommaso Flamberti at the end of the left aisle.
+
+[Footnote 2: See _supra_, pp. 174 _et seq_.]
+
+The Dominicans have not been more fortunate than the Franciscans.
+Somewhat to the north of the Piazza Venti Settembre in the Via Cavour
+we find their church S. Domenico. It is said that originally there
+stood here a Byzantine church dedicated in honour of S. Maria
+Callopes, but this Dr. Ricci denies. S. Domenico was built from its
+foundations it seems in October 1269 for the Dominicans and was
+enlarged in 1374 according to an inscription in the sacristy; but it
+was almost entirely rebuilt in the beginning of the eighteenth
+century. The facade and the side portico are perhaps now the most
+genuine parts of the church. The chief treasure is, however, not of
+the Middle Age at all, but of the Renaissance, and consists of four
+large pictures painted in tempera, probably organ shutters,
+representing the Annunciation, S. Peter Martyr, and S. Dominic. They
+are the excellent work of Niccold Rondinelli the pupil of Giovanni
+Bellini.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: See _infra_, pp. 267 _et seq_.]
+
+[Illustration: TORRE DEL COMUNE]
+
+From S. Domenico we pass again to S. Giovanni Evangelista if only to
+note the beautiful Gothic portal of the fourteenth century, of which I
+have already spoken,[2] and the spoiled frescoes by Giotto in the
+vaulting of the fourth chapel on the left. Giotto, according to
+Vasari, came to Ravenna at the instigation of Dante and painted in S.
+Francesco, but whatever he may have done there has utterly perished,
+and there only remains in Ravenna his spoilt work in this little
+chapel in S. Giovanni Evangelista. Here we see in a ceiling divided by
+two diagonals, at the centre of which the Lamb and Cross are painted
+on a medallion, the four Evangelists enthroned with their symbols and
+the four Doctors of the Church, a subject common everywhere and
+especially so in Ravenna. These works have suffered very greatly from
+restoration, but they seem indeed to be the work of the master in so
+far as the design is concerned, all surely that is left after the
+repaintings that have befallen them.
+
+[Footnote 2: See _supra_, pp. 175 _et seq_.]
+
+The mosaic pavements of 1213, representing scenes from the third
+crusade, in the chapel to the left of the choir should be noted.
+
+We must not leave S. Giovanni Evangelista without a look at the great
+tower of the eleventh century which overshadows it. It might seem to
+be contemporary with the greater Torre Comunale in the Via Tredici
+Giugno as the street is now absurdly named. Nor should any one omit to
+visit the Casa Polentana near Porta Ursicina and the Casa Traversari
+in the Via S. Vitale, grand old thirteenth-century houses that speak
+to us, not certainly of Ravenna's great days, but of a greater day
+than ours, and one, too, in which the most tragic of Italians wandered
+up and down these windy ways eating his heart out for Florence. Indeed
+Dante consumes all our thoughts in mediaeval Ravenna.
+
+There is a tale told by Franco Sacchetti that I will set down here,
+for it expresses what in part we must all feel, and what in the
+confusion of philosophy at the end of the Middle Age was felt far more
+keenly by men who visited this strange city.
+
+"Maestro Antonio of Ferrara was a man of very great parts, almost a
+poet, and as entertaining as a jester, but he was very vicious and
+sinful. Being in Ravenna during the time that Messer Bernardino of
+Polenta held the lordship, it chanced that this Messer Antonio, who
+was a very great gambler, had been gambling one day and had lost
+nearly all he possessed. Being in despair, he entered the church of
+the Friars Minor, where there is the tomb which holds the body of the
+Florentine poet Dante, and having seen an antique Crucifix half-burned
+and smoked by the great number of lights placed around it, and finding
+just then many candles lighted there, he immediately went and took all
+the tapers and candles which were burning there and going to the tomb
+of Dante he placed them before it saying, 'Take them, for thou art far
+more worthy of them than it is.' The people beholding this and
+marvelling greatly said, 'What doth this man?' And they all looked at
+one another...."
+
+[Illustration: PORTAL OF S. GIOVANNI EVANGELISTA]
+
+Sacchetti does not answer the question asked by the astonished people
+of Ravenna, but goes on to tell us of the lord "who delighted in such
+things as do all lords." He could not have answered it for he did not
+know himself what it meant. We are in better case, I think, and know
+that what that wild and half--blasphemous act meant was that the
+Renaissance had made an end of the Middle Age here in Ravenna as
+elsewhere.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+RAVENNA IN THE RENAISSANCE
+
+THE BATTLE OF 1512
+
+
+When in the year 1438 duke Filippo Maria Visconti of Milan forced
+Ostasio da Polenta, the fifth of that name, into an alliance and the
+Venetians thereupon invited him to visit them, Venice had decided for
+her own safety to annex Ravenna and Ostasio soon learned that the new
+government had proclaimed itself in his old capital. He, as I have
+said, presently disappeared, the victim of a mysterious assassination;
+and Venice governed Ravenna by _provveditori_ and _podesta_, as
+happily and successfully, it might seem, as she governed Venetia and a
+part of Lombardy. For her doubtless the acquisition of Ravenna was not
+a very great thing, nor does it seem to have changed in any very great
+degree the half-stagnant life of the city itself, which, as we may
+suppose, had for so long ceased to play any great part in the life of
+Italy, that a change of government there was not of much importance to
+any one except the Holy See, the true over-lord.
+
+The Holy See, however, had no intention of submitting to the incursion
+of the republic into its long established territories without a
+protest. In the war of Ferrara, Venice had come into collision with
+the pope and had in reality been worsted, though the peace of Bagnolo
+(1484) gave her Rovigo, the Polesine, and Ravenna. But she had adopted
+a fatal policy in appealing to the French, a policy which led straight
+on to Cambray, which, as we may think, so unfortunately crippled her
+for ever.
+
+The descent of the French was successful at least in this, that it
+aroused the cupidity and ambition of the king of Spain and of the
+emperor. Italy was proved to be any one's prize at Fornovo, and when
+Louis XII. succeeded Charles VIII. in 1498 and combined in his own
+person the claim of the French crown to Naples and to Genoa and the
+Orleans claim to Milan, Venice, instead of being doubly on guard,
+thought she saw a chance of extending her Lombard dominions. She
+refused the alliance Sforza offered and promised to assist Louis in
+return for Cremona and its _contado_. In other words, she committed
+treason to Italy and thus justified, if anything could justify, the
+League of Cambray.
+
+Sforza's first act was to urge the Turk, who needed no invitation, to
+attack the republic, whose fleet in 1499 was utterly defeated at sea
+by the Orientals, who presently raided into Friuli. Venice was forced
+to accept a humiliating peace. It was in these circumstances that,
+with all Italy alienated from her, the papacy began to act against
+her.
+
+Its first and most splendid effort to create a reality out of the
+fiction of the States of the Church was the attempt of Cesare Borgia,
+who actually made himself master of the whole of the Romagna. Venice
+watched him with the greatest alarm, but chance saved her, for with
+the death of Alexander VI., Cesare and his dream came to nothing.
+Venice acted at once, for indeed even in her decline she was the most
+splendid force in Italy. She induced by a most swift and masterly
+stroke the leading cities of the Romagna to place themselves under her
+protection. It was a great stroke, the last blow of a great and
+desperate man; that it failed does not make it less to be admired.
+
+The rock which broke the stroke as it fell and shattered the sword
+which dealt it was Pope Julius II.
+
+Louis and the emperor had come together, and when in June 1508 a truce
+was made they would have been content to leave Venice alone; it was
+the pope who refused, and by the end of the year had formed the
+European League for the purpose of "putting a stop to losses,
+injuries, rapine, and damage which Venice had inflicted not merely on
+the Holy See, but also on the Holy Roman Empire, the House of Austria,
+the Duchy of Milan, the King of Naples and other princes, seizing and
+tyrannically occupying their territories, cities, and castles as
+though she were conspiring to the common ill...." So ran the preamble
+of the League of Cambray. It contemplated among other things the
+return of Ravenna, Faenza, Rimini, and the rest of the Romagna to the
+Holy See; Istria, Fruili, Treviso, Padua, Vicenza, and Verona being
+handed to the emperor; Brescia, Bergamo, Crema, and Cremona passing to
+France, and the sea-coast towns in Apulia to the king of Spain;
+Dalmatia was to go to the king of Hungary and Cyprus to the duke of
+Savoy.
+
+[Illustration: ROCCA VENIZIANA]
+
+In the spring of 1507, Julius launched his bull of excommunication
+against Venice; Ravenna, which was held by the podesta Marcello and by
+Zeno, was attacked by the pope's general, the duke of Urbino, and
+after the disastrous defeat of the Venetians by the French and
+Milanese, at Aguadello, on the Adda, the republic ordered the
+restoration of Ravenna to the Holy See, together with the other cities
+of the Romagna.
+
+The pope was now content, but France and the emperor were not, and
+Venice was forced to ally herself first with one side and then with
+the other.
+
+In the brutal struggle of the foreigner for Cisalpine Gaul there were
+two desperate battles, that of Ravenna in 1512, in which the French,
+though victorious, lost their best leader, Gaston de Foix, and that of
+Novara in 1513, which induced the French to leave Italy. As the first
+of these battles concerns Ravenna we must consider it more closely.
+
+At this time Venice was in alliance with Spain and the pope against
+the French, who were commanded by Gaston de Foix, Duke of Nemours, a
+nephew of the French king. The combined Spanish and papal troops,
+about 20,000 strong, were led by Raimondo da Cardona. The French were
+south of the Apennines when the Papal-Spanish force swung round from
+Milan into the Ferrarese, seized the territory south of the Po, and
+laid siege to Bologna. A Venetian force was hurrying to aid them.
+
+Gaston de Foix did not hesitate. On February 5, he flung himself over
+the ice-bound Apennine and hastened to relieve Bologna. Cardona
+retreated before him down the Aemilian Way; but Brescia opened its
+gates to the Venetians, and this, which hindered Gaston, so enraged
+him that when he had taken the city he gave it up to a pillage in
+which more than eight thousand were slain and his men "were so laden
+with spoil that they returned to France forthwith to enjoy it."
+
+Gaston was compelled to return to Milan to re-form his troops, for he
+was determined both by necessity and by his own nature, which loved
+decision, to force a battle with the allies. The truth was that the
+position of France was precarious, her career in Italy was deeply
+threatened by the allies, Henry VIII. of England contemplated a
+descent upon Normandy, and until the enemy in Italy was disposed of
+her way was barred to Naples.
+
+So Gaston set out with some 7000 cavalry and 17,000 infantry, French,
+Italian, German, to pursue and to defeat Cardona, who did not wish to
+fight. The army of the allies was chiefly Spanish and it numbered some
+6000 cavalry and 16,000 infantry of most excellent fighting quality.
+
+As the French advanced along the Via Aemilia, Cardona withdrew to
+Faenza. Gaston went on to Ravenna, which he besieged. Cardona was
+forced to intervene and try to save the city. He, too, approached
+Ravenna. Upon Easter Day, 1512, the two armies met in the marsh
+between Ravenna and the sea; and, in the words of Guicciardini, "there
+then began a very great battle, without doubt one of the greatest that
+Italy had seen for these many years.... All the troops were
+intermingled in a battle fought thus on a plain without impediments
+such as water or banks, and where both armies fought, each obstinately
+bent on death or victory, and inflamed not only with danger, glory,
+and hope, but also with the hatred of nation against nation. It was a
+memorable spectacle in the hot engagement between the German and
+Spanish infantry to see two very noted officers, Jacopo Empser, a
+German, and Zamudio, a Spaniard, advance before their battalions and
+encounter one another as if it were by challenge, in which combat the
+Spaniard went off conqueror by killing his adversary. The cavalry of
+the army of the League was not at best equal to that of the French,
+and having been shattered and torn by the artillery was become much
+inferior. Wherefore after they had sustained for some time, more by
+stoutness of heart than by strength of arms, the fury of the enemy,
+Yves d'Allegre with the rearguard and a thousand foot that were left
+at the Montone under Paliose and now recalled charging them in flank,
+and Fabrizio Colonna, fighting valiantly, being taken prisoner by the
+soldiers of the Duke of Ferrara, they turned their backs, in which
+they did no more than follow the example of their generals; for the
+Viceroy and Carvagiale, without making the utmost proof of the valour
+of their troops, betook themselves to flight, carrying off with them
+the third division or rearguard almost entire with Antonio da Leva, a
+man of that time of low rank though afterwards by a continual exercise
+of arms for many years, rising through all the military degrees, he
+became a very famous general. The whole body of light horse had been
+already broken, and the Marchese di Pescara, their commander, taken
+prisoner, covered with blood and wounds. And the Marchese della
+Palude, who had led up the second division, or main battle, through a
+field full of ditches and brambles in great disorder to the fight, was
+also taken. The ground was covered with dead men and horses, and yet
+the Spanish infantry, though abandoned by the horse, continued
+fighting with incredible fierceness; and though, at the first
+encounter with the German foot, they had received some damage from the
+firm and close order of the pikes, yet afterwards getting their
+enemies within the length of their swords, and many of them, covered
+with targets, pushing with daggers between the legs of the Germans,
+they had penetrated with very great slaughter almost to the centre of
+their battalions. The Gascon foot who were posted by the Germans on
+the ground between the river and a rising bank had attacked the
+Italian infantry, which, though they had greatly suffered by the
+artillery, would have repulsed them highly to their honour, had not
+Yves d'Allegre entered among them with a squadron of horse. But the
+fortune of that general did not answer his valour, for his son
+Viverais being almost immediately killed before his eyes, the father,
+unwilling to survive so great a loss, threw himself with his horse
+into the thickest of the enemies, where, fighting like a most valiant
+captain and killing several, he was at last cut to pieces. The Italian
+foot, unable to resist so great a multitude, gave way; but part of the
+Spanish infantry hastening to support them, they rallied. On the other
+side, the German infantry, being sorely pressed by the other part of
+the Spaniards, were hardly capable of making any resistance; but the
+cavalry of the confederates being all fled out of the field, Foix with
+a great body of horse turned to fall upon them. The Spaniards,
+therefore, rather retiring than driven out of the field, without the
+least disorder in their ranks, took their way between the river and
+the bank, marching slowly and with a close front, by the strength of
+which they beat off the French and began to disengage themselves; at
+which time Navarre, choosing rather to die than to save himself, and
+therefore refusing to leave the field, was made a prisoner. But Foix,
+thinking it intolerable that this Spanish infantry should march off in
+battle array like conquerors and knowing that the victory was not
+perfect if these were not broken and dispersed like the rest, went
+furiously to attack them with a squadron of horse and did execution
+upon the hindmost; but being surrounded and thrown from his horse, or,
+as some say, his horse falling upon him, while he was fighting, he
+received a mortal thrust with a pike in his side. And if it be
+desirable, as it is believed, for a man to die in the height of his
+prosperity, it is certain that he met with a most happy death in dying
+after he had obtained so great a victory. He died very young, but
+famous through the world, having in less than three months, and being
+a general almost before he was a soldier, with incredible ardour and
+expedition obtained so many victories. Near him lay on the ground for
+dead Lautrec, having received twenty wounds; but being carried to
+Ferrara he was by diligent care of the surgeons recovered.
+
+"By the death of Foix, the Spanish infantry were suffered to pass off
+unmolested, the remainder of the army being already dispersed and put
+to flight, and the baggage, colours, and cannons taken. The pope's
+legate was also taken by the Stradiotti and carried to Federigo da
+Bozzolo, who made a present of him to the legate of the council. There
+were taken also Fabrizio Colonna, Pietro Navarra, the Marchese della
+Palude, the Marchese di Bitonto, and the Marchese di Pescara, with
+many other lords, barons, and honourable gentlemen, Spaniards and
+Neapolitans. Nothing is more uncertain than the number of the killed
+in battles; but amidst the variety of accounts it is the most common
+opinion that there died of both armies at least 10,000, of which a
+third was of the French and two-thirds of their enemies: some talk of
+many more, but they were without question almost all of them of the
+most valiant and choice soldiers, among whom, belonging to the papal
+forces, was Raffaello de' Pazzi, an officer of high reputation; and
+great numbers were wounded. But in this respect the loss of the
+conqueror was without comparison much the greater by the death of
+Foix, Yves d'Allegre, and many of the French nobility, and many other
+brave officers of the German infantry, by whose valour, though at vast
+expense of their blood, the victory was in a great measure acquired.
+Molard also fell with many other officers of the Gascons and Picards,
+which nation lost all their glory that day among the French. But their
+loss was exceeded by the death of Foix, with whom perished the very
+sinews and spirits of that army. Of the vanquished that escaped out of
+the field of battle the greater part fled towards Cesena, whence they
+continued their flight to more distant places; nor did the Viceroy
+stop till he came to Ancona where he arrived with a very few horse.
+Many were stripped and murdered in their flight; for the peasants
+scoured all the roads and the Duke of Urbino, who from his sending
+some time before Baldassare da Castiglione to the King of France, and
+employing some trusty persons as his agents with Foix, was supposed to
+have entered into a private agreement against his uncle, not only
+raised the country against those that fled, but sent his soldiers to
+intercept them in the territories of Pesaro; so that only those who
+took their flight through the dominions of the Florentines were by
+orders of the magistrates, confirmed by the republic, suffered to pass
+unmolested.
+
+"The victorious army was no sooner returned to camp than the people of
+Ravenna sent deputies to treat of surrendering their city; but when
+they had agreed or were upon the point of agreement, and the
+inhabitants being employed in preparing provisions to be sent to the
+camp were negligent in guarding the walls, the German and Gascon foot
+entered through the breach that had been made and plundered the town
+in a most barbarous manner, their cruelty being exasperated not only
+by their natural hatred to the name of the Italians, but by a spirit
+of revenge for the loss they had sustained in the battle. On the
+fourth day after this, Marcantonio Colonna gave up the citadel, into
+which he had retired, on condition of safety to their persons and
+effects, but obliging himself on the other hand, together with the
+rest of the officers, not to bear arms against the King of France nor
+the Pisan Council till the next festival of S. Mary Magdalen; and not
+many days after, Bishop Vitello, who commanded in the castle with a
+hundred and fifty men, agreed to surrender it on terms of safety for
+life and goods. The cities of Imola, Forli, Cesena, and Rimini, and
+all the castles of the Romagna, except those of Forli and Imola,
+followed the fortune of the victory and were received by the legate in
+the name of the council."
+
+The site of this great battle is marked by a monument, a square
+pilaster of marble, called the Colonna dei Francesi, adorned with
+bas-reliefs and inscriptions, raised in 1557 by the President of the
+Romagna, Pier Donato Cesi, on the right bank of the Ronco, some three
+miles from the city. We may recall Ariosto's verses:
+
+  "Io venni dove le campagne rosse
+  eran del sangue barbaro e latino
+  che fiera stella dianzi a furor mosse.
+
+  "E vidi un morto all' altro si vicino
+  che, senza premer lor, quasi il terreno
+  a molte miglia non dava il cammino.
+
+  "E da chi alberga fra Garonna e Reno
+  vidi uscir crudelta, che ne dovria
+  tutto il mondo d'orror rimaner pieno."
+
+The League of Cambray had succeeded in breaking the real security and
+confidence of Venice; the death of Gaston de Foix, "the hero boy who
+died too soon," destroyed the energy of her ally, the French army, in
+Italy; and the battle of Novara, as I have said, in 1513, inducing
+that ally to withdraw from the peninsula, left the republic to be
+menaced by Cardona, who failed only to take Venice itself.
+
+Nor was that great government more fortunate in the long struggles
+which followed between Francis I. and Charles V. In 1523, seeing that
+the French were failing, Venice came to terms with the emperor, by
+that time the real arbiter of Italy. In 1527, though then in alliance
+with pope Clement VII, she seized once more Ravenna and the Romagna,
+but the emperor intervened, and by the peace of Cambray in 1529, which
+on payment of a fine confirmed Venice in her Lombard possessions as
+far as the Adda, she was compelled to restore Ravenna and the Romagna
+to the pope.
+
+The treaty of Cambray had so far as Ravenna was concerned a certain
+finality about it. Thenceforth the popes ruled the city through a
+cardinal legate, and an era of a certain social and artistic splendour
+began; the city was adorned with at least one new church, S. Maria in
+Porto, with many monuments and palaces, and some great public works
+were undertaken.
+
+So Ravenna in the arms of the Church slumbered till, in 1797, the
+great soldier of the Revolution descended upon Italy in that
+marvellous campaign which so closely recalls the achievement of
+Caesar. Ravenna then became a part first of the Cispadan and later of
+the Cisalpine republic. Then, as we know, came the Austrians who took
+Ravenna from the French, but were in their turn expelled in 1800, when
+the city was incorporated into the short-lived kingdom of Italy. But
+it was again attacked by the Austrians, and later restored once again
+to the pope. A period of uncertainty and confusion followed in which
+various provisional governments were established for Ravenna, but at
+last in 1860 the city and its province were, by a vote of the people,
+included in the kingdom of United Italy.
+
+[Illustration: MONUMENT OF GASTON DE FOIX]
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+RENAISSANCE RAVENNA
+
+CHURCHES AND PALACES
+
+
+The period of the Renaissance which saw the papal government
+re-established in Ravenna in 1529, has left its mark upon the city in
+many a fine monument, indelibly stamped with the style of that
+fruitful period. Among such monuments we must note the beautiful tombs
+of Guidarello Guidarelli, by Tullio Lombardi, erected in 1557, now in
+the Accademia, and of Luffo Numai by Tommaso Flamberti in S.
+Francesco, erected about fifty years earlier (1509). Above all,
+however, must be named the great church of S. Maria in Porto (1553)
+and the palaces of Minzoni, Graziani, and others, with the Loggia del
+Giardino at S. Maria in Porto. And there is, too, the work of the
+painters Niccolo Rondinelli, Cotignola, Luca Longhi and his sons,
+Guido Reni, and others.
+
+Later the papal government undertook many great public works. The
+Venetians had, as we shall see, re-fortified Ravenna; these
+fortifications the papal government enlarged, and in the middle of the
+seventeenth century undertook the digging and construction of the
+Canale Pamfilio, so named in honour of Innocent X., and in the
+following century of the Canale Corsini. These works were necessary,
+it is said, not only for the maritime commerce of the city, which one
+may think was scarcely large enough to have excused them, but for the
+preservation of Ravenna from inundation consequent upon the silting up
+of the rivers.
+
+But the earliest work done in Ravenna after the close of the Middle
+Age was that undertaken by the Venetians. It was in 1457 that they
+began to build the really tremendous fortification or Rocca, the ruins
+of which we may still see. They were engaged during some ten years
+upon this great fortress, the master of the works being Giovanni
+Francesco da Massa. They employed as material the ruins of the church
+of S. Andrea dei Goti, built by Theodoric, which they had been
+compelled to destroy to make room for the fortress, as well as the
+materials of a palace of the Polentani. The Rocca with its great
+citadel played a considerable part in the battle of 1512, and the
+subsequent sack of the city. But when Ravenna came again into the
+government of the Holy See, though the fortifications of the city as a
+whole were enlarged, the Rocca itself soon fell into a decay and was
+indeed in great part destroyed in the middle of the seventeenth
+century, the monastery and the church of Classe being repaired and
+enlarged with its ruins and the Ponte Nuovo over the Fiumi Uniti,
+according to Dr. Ricci, being also constructed from its remains, as
+were other buildings in Ravenna. Then like the Rocca Malatestiana at
+Rimini it came to be used as a mere prison, and when it failed to
+prove useful for that purpose it was allowed to become the picturesque
+ruin we see.
+
+Upon the Torre del Ponte of old were set two great reliefs; on high
+the Madonna and Child and beneath the Lion of S. Mark. The Madonna and
+Child, a mediocre work, remains, but when Venice was turned out of
+Ravenna the Lion was taken down and behind it were carved the papal
+arms. Both Madonna and Lion would seem to have been the work of Marino
+di Marco Ceprini.
+
+Another work undertaken and achieved by the Venetians was the
+enlargement and the adornment of the Piazza Maggiore. There in 1483,
+when their work was finished, they raised two columns which still
+stand before the Palazzo del Comune. They stand upon circular bases in
+three tiers, sculptured in relief by Pietro Lombardi with the signs of
+the Zodiac and other symbols and ornaments. The capitals of both the
+columns are beautiful. Upon the northern column of old stood a statue
+of S. Apollinaris, the true patron of the city, while upon the
+southern column stood the Lion of S. Mark. But when in 1509 Ravenna
+came into the hands of Julius II. the Lion was removed and in 1640 the
+statue of S. Apollinaris from the northern column took its place,
+while there, where of old S. Apollinaris had stood, a statue of S.
+Vitalis was set as we see to-day. The Palazzo del Comune was entirely
+reconstructed in 1681, while the Palazzo Governativo was built in 1696
+by the Cardinal Legate Francesco Barberini and the Orologio Pubblico,
+originally dating from 1483, was transformed, as we see it, in 1785 Of
+the Portico Antico I have already spoken.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: See _supra_, p. 192.]
+
+One of the most interesting and accessible fifteenth-century houses in
+Ravenna is to be found in the Albergo del Cappello, with its fine
+original windows in the Via Rattazzi, not far from S. Domenico; it may
+stand as an example of many other old houses in the Via Arcivescovado,
+but I must especially name that beautiful Venetian house in the Via
+Ponte Marino--it is No. 15--the Casa Graziani with its lovely balcony,
+the Casa Baldim (Via Mazzini, 31) with its double loggia in the
+_cortile_, the Casa Fabbri next door (No. 33), the Casa Zirardini (Via
+Belle Arti, No. i), the Casa Baromo (Via Romolo Gessi, Nos. 6 and 16),
+and the Casa Ghigi with its lovely door and portico (No. 7 of the same
+street).
+
+[Illustration: THE CLOISTER OF S. GIOVANNI EVANGELISTA]
+
+Undoubtedly the greatest monument which the sixteenth century has left
+us in Ravenna is the church of S. Maria in Porto. This was built by
+the Canons Regular of the Lateran, the most ancient community of
+canons still extant, in the year 1553, when for about fifty years they
+had been compelled to abandon the church of S. Maria in Porto fuori
+outside the city, in the marsh. They not only furnished their new
+church, but to a considerable extent built it, out of the materials of
+S. Lorenzo in Cesarea, which they thus destroyed.
+
+[Illustration: Colour Plate PORTA SERRATA]
+
+S. Maria in Porto as we see it has suffered from restoration, and the
+facade is a work of the eighteenth century, but the church itself
+remains a noble sixteenth-century building divided within into three
+naves by huge pilasters and columns and covered at the crossing with a
+great octagonal cupola. There is, however, little that is very
+precious to be seen, a few fine marbles and the beautiful marble
+relief of the Madonna in prayer in the transept, called the Madonna
+Greca, a Byzantine work probably brought to Ravenna, according to Dr.
+Ricci, at the time of the crusades. It was originally in S. Maria in
+Porto fuori. The noble choir should also be noticed and the beautiful
+ciborio.
+
+Close by the church is the Monastero of the Canons, within which there
+remains the lovely cloister which should be compared with those at S.
+Vitale and S. Giovanni Evangelista of the same period. This of S.
+Maria in Porto, however, is the finest, having doubled storied logge.
+Above all the exquisite Loggia del Giardino should not be missed. It
+was built in 1508, and looks on to a piece of the sixth-century wall
+of Ravenna.
+
+Not far away in the Via Girotto Guaccimanni near the Hotel Byron is
+the church of S. Maria delle Croci, founded in the tenth century, but
+entirely rebuilt in the sixteenth. The rose in terracotta of the
+facade is a work of this time, as is the exquisite baldacchino over
+the high altar within, upheld by two pilasters and two columns of
+Greek marble. The picture, too, of the Assumption over the altar is by
+a master, perhaps Gaspare Sacch' of Imola, of the sixteenth century.
+Of the same period is the massive Porta Serrata at the north end of
+the Corso Garibaldi.
+
+The best monument of later times left in Ravenna is the fine Palazzo
+Rasponi in Via S. Agnese (No. 2) built in or about 1700.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+THE GALLERY AND THE MUSEUM
+
+
+Ravenna isolated in her marsh and altogether, both geographically and
+politically, out of the Italian world that began to flower so
+wonderfully in Tuscany, then in Umbria, and later still in Venice in
+the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, is the last city
+in which to look for pictures. Nevertheless a few delightful pieces
+among much that is negligible are to be found in the Accademia delle
+Belle Arti in the Via Alfredo Baccarini. The collection was begun
+about 1827, and though what is to be seen there is never of the first
+importance it is certainly more than we had the right to expect.
+
+The first two rooms upon the upper floor are devoted to the Romagnuol
+and Bolognese painters, the best of them here pupils or disciples of
+the one master Ravenna can boast, Niccolo Rondinelli.
+
+We have seen Rondinelli's organ shutters in S. Domenico, here we have
+something better. This really fine pupil of Giovanni Bellini was born
+it seems in Ravenna in the middle of the fifteenth century. Vasari
+tells us that "there also flourished in Romagna an excellent painter
+called Rondinello.... Giovanni Bellini, whose disciple he had been,
+had availed himself to a considerable extent of his services in
+various works. But after Rondinello had left Giovanni Bellini he
+continued to practise his art and in such a manner that, being
+exceedingly diligent, he produced numerous works which are highly
+deserving of and have obtained considerable praise.... For the altar
+of S. Maria Maddalena in the cathedral of Ravenna this master painted
+a picture in oil, wherein he portrayed the figure of that saint only;
+but in the predella he executed three stories, the small figures of
+which are very gracefully depicted. In one of these is our Saviour
+Christ appearing to Mary Magdalen in the form of the gardener; another
+shows S. Peter leaving the ship and walking upon the waves of the sea,
+and between them is the Baptism of Christ. All these representations
+are executed in an exceedingly beautiful manner.[1] Rondinello
+likewise painted two pictures in the church of S. Giovanni Evangelista
+in the same city. One of these portrays the Consecration of the church
+by S. Giovanni[2] and the other exhibits three martyrs, S. Cancio, S.
+Canciano, and S. Cancianilla, all very beautiful figures.[3] For the
+church of S. Apollinare also in Ravenna this master painted two
+pictures, each containing a single figure, S. Giovanni Battista and S.
+Sebastiano, namely, both highly extolled.[4] There is a picture by the
+hand of Rondinello in the church of S. Spirito likewise; the subject,
+Our Lady between S. Jerome and the virgin martyr S. Catherine.[5] In
+S. Francesco, Rondinello painted two pictures, in one of which are S.
+Catherine and S. Francesco; while in the other our artist depicted the
+Madonna accompanied by many figures, as well as by the apostle S.
+James and by S. Francesco.[6] For the church of S. Domenico,
+Rondinello painted two pictures; one is to the left of the high altar
+and exhibits Our Lady with numerous figures; the other is on the
+fagade of the church and is very beautiful.[7] In the church of S.
+Niccolo, a monastery of Augustinians, this master painted a picture
+with S. Lorenzo and S. Francesco, a work which was most highly
+commended, in so much that it caused Rondinello to be held in the
+utmost esteem for the remainder of his life, not in Ravenna only, but
+in all Romagna.[8] The painter here in question lived to the age of
+sixty years, and was buried in S. Francesco at Ravenna."[9]
+
+[Footnote 1: This picture would seem to be lost.]
+
+[Footnote 2: This picture is now in the Brera at Milan, No. 452.]
+
+[Footnote 3: This picture would seem to be lost. Milanesi says it was
+taken to Milan. _Vas_. v. 254, n. 2.]
+
+[Footnote 4: There is a Sebastian by this master in the Duomo at
+Forli; the S. Giovanni panel seems to be lost.]
+
+[Footnote 5: This is now in the Accademia of Ravenna, No. 6.]
+
+[Footnote 6: This would seem to have disappeared; but cf. Brera, 455.]
+
+[Footnote 7: The first of these remains in S. Domenico, the other is,
+I think, now in the Accademia, No. 7.]
+
+[Footnote 8: This picture, too, seems to be lost.]
+
+[Footnote 9: Vasari (trs. Foster), vol. III. pp 382-384.]
+
+In another place, Vasari tells us that the pupil who copied Giovanni
+Bellini most closely and did him most honour was "Rondinello of
+Ravenna, of whose aid the master availed himself much in all his
+works.... Rondinello painted his best work for the church of S.
+Giovanni Battista in Ravenna. The church belongs to the Carmelite
+Friars and in the painting, besides a figure of Our Lady, Rondinello
+depicted that of S. Alberto, a brother of their order;[10] the head of
+the saint is extremely beautiful, and the whole work very highly
+commended."[11]
+
+[Footnote 10: Now in the Accademia, unnumbered; it represents the
+Madonna between S. Alberto and S. Sebastian.]
+
+[Footnote 11: Vasari (trs. Foster), vol. II. pp. 171-172.]
+
+Of all the works thus named by Vasari as painted by Rondinelli in
+Ravenna only four remain, three in the Accademia and one in S.
+Domenico. I have already spoken of the tempera pieces in S.
+Domenico.[12] Of the three pieces in the Accademia, the Madonna and
+Child between S. Catherine and S. Jerome (No. 6) comes from S.
+Spirito; the Madonna and Child between SS. Catherine, Mary Magdalen,
+John Baptist, and Thomas Aquinas comes from S. Domenico, and is, I am
+convinced, the picture spoken of by Vasari rather than the
+sixteenth-century work that still hangs there, which is, according to
+Dr. Ricci, perhaps the mediocre work of Ragazzini. The third picture
+by Rondinelli in the Accademia, the Madonna and Child between S.
+Alberto and S. Sebastian, comes from the church of the Carmelites, S.
+Giovanni Battista.
+
+[Footnote 12: See _supra_, p. 246.]
+
+Beside these three fine works of Rondinelli hangs the work of a man he
+strongly influenced, Francesco Zaganelli da Cotignola. When Vasari
+tells us that Rondinelli was buried in S. Francesco at Ravenna, he
+goes on to say that "after him came Francesco da Cotignola, who was
+also greatly esteemed in that city and painted numerous pictures
+there. On the high altar of the church which belongs to the Abbey of
+Classe, for example, there is one from his hand of tolerably large
+size, representing the Raising of Lazarus with many figures[1].
+Opposite to this work in the year 1548 Giorgio Vasari painted another
+for Don Romualdo da Verona, the abbot of that place. This represents a
+Deposition of Christ from the Cross, and has also a large number of
+figures[2]. Francesco Cotignola painted a picture in S. Niccolo,
+likewise a very large one, the subject of which is the Birth of
+Christ, with two in S. Sebastiano exhibiting numerous figures[3]. For
+the hospital of S. Caterina, Francesco painted a picture of Our Lady,
+S. Caterina, and many other figures[4]; and in S. Agata, he painted a
+figure of our Saviour Christ on the Cross, the Madonna being at the
+foot thereof, with a considerable number of other figures; this work
+also has received commendation[5]. In the church of S. Apollinare in
+the same city are three pictures by this artist, one at the high altar
+with Our Lady, S. Giovanni Battista, S. Apollinare, S. Jerome, and
+other saints; in the second is also the Madonna with S. Peter and S.
+Catherine[6]; and in the third and last is Jesus Christ bearing his
+Cross, but this Francesco could not finish having been overtaken by
+death before its completion[7]. Francesco coloured in a very pleasing
+manner, but had not such power of design as Rondinello; he was
+nevertheless held in great account by the people of Ravenna. It was
+his desire to be buried in S. Apollinare, where he had painted certain
+figures, as we have said, wishing that in the place where he had lived
+and laboured his remains might find their repose after his death."
+
+[Footnote 1: This is in the ex-church of S. Romuald in Classe in the
+sacristy, now part of the Museo]
+
+[Footnote 2: This is now in the Accademia, No 40]
+
+[Footnote 3: The first of these is in the Accademia (No. 10), as I
+suppose are the two other undescribed pictures]
+
+[Footnote 4: Is this a Marriage of S. Catherine in S. Girolamo in
+Ravenna?]
+
+[Footnote 5: Now in the Accademia, No 13.]
+
+[Footnote 6: Of these I know nothing]
+
+[Footnote 7: Now in the canonica of S. Croce in Ravenna]
+
+To-day in Ravenna there remain the three works described by Vasari,
+one in the ex-church S. Romualdo di Classe, the other, as I think,
+once in the Hospital of S. Catherine and now in S. Girolamo, and
+another at S. Croce. In the Accademia there are nine of his works, of
+which the S. Niccolo Presepio (No. 10) and the S. Agata Crucifixion
+(No. 13) are the better. A S. Sebastian (No. 12) and a S. Catherine
+(No. 11) should also be noticed. By his brother and assistant,
+Bernardino, there is one picture in the Accademia, the Agony in the
+Garden (No. 194).
+
+Another master of the Romagnuol school, Marco Palmezzano, the pupil of
+Melozza da Forli, a contemporary of Rondinelli, who influenced him to
+some small extent, is represented in the Accademia by two works in
+Sala II., the Nativity and the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin
+(Nos. 189 and 190); in the Vescovado there is a Madonna and Child with
+four saints from his hand. Vasari says nothing of him, but only
+mentions his name, yet he has a good deal to tell us of perhaps a
+lesser man, Luca Longhi (1507-1580), who was born in Ravenna.
+
+"Maestro Luca de' Longhi of Ravenna," he says, "a man of studious
+habits and quiet reserved character, has painted many beautiful
+pictures in oil, with numerous portraits from the life in his native
+city and its neighbourhood. Among other productions of Longhi are two
+sufficiently graceful little pictures which the reverend Don Antonio
+da Pisa, then abbot of the monastery, caused him to paint no long time
+since for the monks of Classe; many other works have also been
+executed by this painter. It is certain that Luca Longhi, being
+studious, diligent, and of admirable judgment as he is, would have
+become an excellent master had he not always confined himself to
+Ravenna where he still remains with his family; his works are
+accomplished with much patience and study; and of this I can bear
+testimony since I know the progress which he made during the time of
+my stay in Ravenna both in the practise and comprehension of art. Nor
+will I omit to mention that a daughter of his, called Barbara, still
+but a little child, draws very well and has begun to paint also in a
+very good manner and with much grace."
+
+There are five pictures by Luca Longhi in the Accademia besides three
+portraits. In Sala I. we have an early work painted at the age of
+twenty-two, the Marriage of S. Catherine (No. 14); a Madonna and Child
+with S. Benedict, S. Apollinaris, S. Barbara, and S. Paul (No. 23). In
+Sala II. the Dead Christ between S. Bartholomew and Don Antonio da
+Pisa, abbot of the monastery of Classe (No. 17), and two pictures of
+the Adoration of the Shepherds (Nos. 15, 16). Here, too, are the three
+portraits from his hand which represent Raffaele Rasponi (No. 22),
+Giovanni Arrigoni (No. 21), and Girolamo Rossi (No. 20). By Luca's son
+Francesco there is a feeble Crucifixion (No. 29) in Sala I.;[1] and
+happily in Sala II. three pictures by Barbara, Luca's daughter, of
+whom Vasari speaks; a S. Catherine, which is really a portrait of the
+painter (No. 81), a Madonna and Child (No. 27), and a Judith (No.
+28).[2]
+
+[Footnote 1: There is another work, an Annunciation, by Francesco
+Longhi in S. Croce.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Another work by Barbara Longhi, S. Peter visiting S.
+Agata in Prison, may be seen in S. Maria Maggiore.]
+
+Only one picture by a Bolognese master is really worthy of much notice
+here; I mean the S. Romuald of Guercino (No. 33) in Sala I. In the
+floor of this first room there is set a fine mosaic from S. Apollinare
+in Classe which should be noted.
+
+The third room in the Accademia, filled with various works of little
+merit of the sundry schools of Italy, may be neglected. The fourth
+room, however, is devoted to the beautiful tomb of Guidarello
+Guidarelli, the very glorious work of Tullio Lombardi. Of old this
+exquisite tomb stood in the Cappella Braccioforte at S. Francesco.
+Guidarello of Ravenna was killed in battle at Imola in 1501, and
+Tullio Lombardi, the son of Pietro, was employed to make his tomb. "I
+doubt," says M. de Vogue, "whether, apart from the work of Donatello,
+the early Renaissance produced anything more beautiful." Guidarello
+the knight is represented in marble, a life-size figure, lying on his
+back, his body encased in armour, his helmet on his head, his visor
+raised, his gloved hands crossed over his sword which lies along his
+body. He seems, weary of fighting at last, to be sleeping, but the
+sweet expression upon the tired face makes us think rather of a monk
+than a soldier. In truth he was a knight of the olden time.
+
+We leave the room in which he sleeps for ever in his marble,
+reluctantly, and, passing Sala V., which is full of late pictures of
+no interest, come to Sala VI. where there are several delightful early
+Italian works. One would not certainly expect to find in Ravenna a
+picture of the most exquisite school in Tuscany, the school of Siena.
+Yet here is a delightful Madonna and Child with S. Peter and S.
+Barbara (No. 191) by Matteo di Giovanni (1435-1495); and a
+fourteenth-century Annunciation (No. 176) from Tuscany. In the
+Crucifixion (No. 225) we seem to have an early Venetian work, and
+another Crucifixion (No. 181) might almost be from the hand of Lorenzo
+Monaco. It is probable that we see a work of Antonio da Fabriano in
+the S. Peter Damiano (No. 188), and certainly an Umbrian work in the
+S. Francis receiving the Stigmata (216). But the most remarkable
+Umbrian picture here is the Christ with the Cross between two angels
+(No. 202), the work of Niccolo da Foligno. A few early works by the
+mediocre masters of the Romagnuol school (Nos. 174, 171, 172, 182) are
+to be seen here also.
+
+Sala VI. is entirely devoted to an immense number of pictures in the
+Byzantine manner, of considerable interest and much beauty, but not
+yet to be discussed.
+
+We leave the Accademia for the Museo close by. The building in which
+the collections are housed is the old Camaldulensian monastery of
+Classe built in 1515 by the monks of S. Apollinare in Classe, and
+since S. Romuald, the founder of the order, was a Ravennese one may
+think the monastery might have been left in the hands of the monks.
+Even as it is it has considerably more interest for us than the
+collections gathered within it. The beautiful seventeenth-century
+cloisters, the old convent church of S. Romualdo in the baroque style
+of 1630, and the convent itself are delightful. The collections are
+mediocre. But here we may see all that is to be seen of the Ravenna of
+Augustus and of the great years of the empire, fragments and
+inscriptions and reliefs now and then of real interest, as in the
+relief representing the Apotheosis of Augustus, in the eastern walk of
+the cloisters, and in the remains of that suit of gold armour thought
+to be Theodoric's in the old sacristy. But for the most part the
+collection is without much attraction, yet certainly not to remain
+unvisited.
+
+[Illustration: THE PINETA]
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+THE PINETA
+
+
+Ravenna has so much that is rare and precious to show us that few
+among the many who spend a day or two within her walls have the
+inclination to explore the melancholy marshes in which she stands. No
+doubt most of us drive out to S. Apollinare in Classe, but the road
+thither does not encourage a further journey, for it is rude and rough
+and the country over which it passes is among the most featureless in
+Italy. Nevertheless he does himself a wrong who leaves Ravenna for
+good without having spent one day at any rate in the Pineta which,
+ruined though it now be, is still one of the loveliest and most
+mysterious places in the Romagna.
+
+But lovely though it is, and full of memories, what can be said of
+this vast ruined forest of stone pines with its mystery of mere and
+fen, its coolness and shadow, its astonishing silence? Only this I
+think, that if once you find it, nothing else in Ravenna will seem
+half so precious as this green wood. You will love it always and for
+its own sake more than anything else in Ravenna, and in this you will
+not be alone; every one who has come to it these thousand years has
+felt the same, Dante, Boccaccio, Byron, Carducci, the Pineta knows the
+footsteps of them all and they seem to haunt it still.
+
+Dante would seem to have loved it best in the morning; out of it he
+conjures his _Paradiso Terrestre_ in the twenty-eighth canto of the
+_Purgatorio_:
+
+  "Through that celestial forest, whose thick shade
+  With lively greenness the new-springing day
+  Attemper'd, eager now to roam, and search
+  Its limits round, forthwith I left the bank;
+  Along the champain leisurely my way
+  Pursuing, o'er the ground, that on all sides
+  Delicious odour breathed. A pleasant air
+  That intermitted never, never veer'd,
+  Smote on my temples, gently as a wind
+  Of softest influence, at which the sprays,
+  Obedient all, lean'd trembling to that part
+  Where first the holy mountain casts his shade,
+  Yet were not so disordered, but that still
+  Upon their top the feathered quiristers
+  Applied their wonted art, and with full joy
+  Welcomed those hours of prime, and warbled shrill
+  Amid the leaves that to their jocund lays
+  Kept tenour; even as from branch to branch
+  Along the piny forests on the shore
+  Of Chiassi rolls the gathering melody
+  When Eolus hath from his cavern loosed
+  The dripping south. Already had my steps,
+  Though slow, so far into that ancient wood
+  Transported me, I could not ken the place
+  Where I had entered; when, behold, my path
+  Was bounded by a rill which to the left
+  With little rippling waters bent the grass
+  That issued from its brink. On earth no wave
+  How clear so'er that would not seem to have
+  Some mixture in itself, compared with this
+  Transpicuous clear; yet darkly on it rolled,
+  Darkly beneath perpetual gloom, which ne'er
+  Admits or sun or moon-light there to shine."
+
+Well, is not it the very place? And did not Dante, who knew Italy as
+few have known it, do well to remember it when he would describe for
+us the Earthly Paradise? In the forest the morning is sacred to him
+and there one should turn, with less misunderstanding than anywhere
+else, the precious pages of that poem which is in itself a universe.
+
+But if the clear morning there is Dante's, when we may still hear the
+voice he heard pass by there, in the stillness, singing, _Beati quorum
+tecta sunt peccata_, the long noon belongs to Boccaccio, for it is
+full of the most tragic and pitiful of his tales.
+
+[Illustration: THE PINETA]
+
+"Ravenna being a very ancient City in Romania, there dwelt sometime a
+great number of worthy Gentlemen, among whom I am to speake of one
+more especially, named Anastasio, descended from the Family of the
+Honesti, who by the death of his Father, and an Unckle of his, was
+left extraordinarily abounding in riches, and growing to yeares
+fitting for marriage, (as young Gallants are easily apt enough to do)
+he became enamored of a very bountifull Gentlewoman, who was Daughter
+to Signior Paulo Traversario, one of the most ancient and noble
+Families in all the Countrey. Nor made he any doubt, but by his meanes
+and industrious endeavour, to derive affection from her againe; for he
+carried himselfe like a brave-minded Gentleman, liberall in his
+expences, honest and affable in all his actions, which commonly are
+the true notes of a good nature, and highly to be commended in any
+man. But, howsoever Fortune became his enemy, these laudable parts of
+manhood did not any way friend him, but rather appeared hurtfull to
+himselfe: so cruell, unkind, and almost meerely savage did she shew
+her self to him; perhaps in pride of her singular beauty, or presuming
+on her nobility by birth, both which are rather blemishes, then
+ornaments in a woman, especially when they be abused.
+
+"The harsh and uncivill usage in her, grew very distastefull to
+Anastasio, and so unsufferable, that after a long time of fruitlesse
+service, requited still with nothing but coy disdaine; desperate
+resolutions entred into his brain, and often he was minded to kill
+himselfe. But better thoughts supplanting those furious passions, he
+abstained from any such violent act; and governed by more manly
+consideration, determined, that as shee hated him, he would requite
+her with the like, if he could: wherein he became altogether deceived,
+because as his hopes grew to a dayly decaying, yet his love enlarged
+it selfe more and more.
+
+"Thus Anastasio persevering still in his bootlesse affection, and his
+expences not limited within any compasse; it appeared in the judgement
+of his Kindred and Friends, that he was falne into a mighty
+consumption, both of his body and meanes. In which respect, many times
+they advised him to leave the City of Ravenna, and live in some other
+place for such a while; as might set a more moderate stint upon his
+spendings, and bridle the indiscreete course of his love, the onely
+fuell which fed this furious fire.
+
+"Anastasio held out thus a long time, without lending an eare to such
+friendly counsell: but in the end, he was so neerely followed by them,
+as being no longer able to deny them, he promised to accomplish their
+request. Whereupon, making such extraordinary preparation, as if he
+were to set thence for France or Spaine, or else into some further
+distant countrey: he mounted on horsebacke, and accompanied with some
+few of his familiar friends, departed from Ravenna, and rode to a
+countrey dwelling house of his owne, about three or foure miles
+distant from the Cittie, which was called Chiasso, and there (upon a
+very goodly greene) erecting divers Tents and Pavillions, such as
+great persons make use of in the time of a Progresse: he said to his
+friends, which came with him thither, that there he determined to make
+his abiding, they all returning backe unto Ravenna, and might come to
+visite him againe so often as they pleased.
+
+"Now, it came to passe, that about the beginning of May, it being then
+a very milde and serrene season, and he leading there a much more
+magnificent life, then ever hee had done before, inviting divers to
+dine with him this day, and as many to morrow, and not to leave him
+till after supper: upon the sodaine, falling into remembrance of his
+cruell Mistris, hee commanded all his servants to forbeare his
+company, and suffer him to walke alone by himselfe awhile, because he
+had occasion of private meditations, wherein he would not (by any
+meanes) be troubled. It was then about the ninth houre of the day, and
+he walking on solitary all alone, having gone some halfe miles
+distance from his Tents, entred into a Grove of Pine-trees, never
+minding dinner time, or any thing else, but onely the unkind requitall
+of his love.
+
+"Sodainly he heard the voice of a woman, seeming to make most
+mournfull complaints, which breaking off his silent considerations,
+made him to lift up his head, to know the reason of this noise. When
+he saw himselfe so farre entred into the Grove, before he could
+imagine where he was; hee looked amazedly round about him, and out of
+a little thicket of bushes and briars, round engirt with spreading
+trees, hee espyed a young Damosell come running towards him, naked
+from the middle upward, her haire dishevelled on her shoulders, and
+her faire skinne rent and torne with the briars and brambles, so that
+the blood ran trickling downe mainely; she weeping, wringing her
+hands, and crying out for mercy so lowde as she could. Two fierce
+Blood-hounds also followed swiftly after, and where their teeth tooke
+hold, did most cruelly bite her. Last of all (mounted on a lusty
+blacke Courser) came galloping a Knight, with a very sterne and angry
+countenance, holding a drawne short Sword in his hand, giving her very
+vile and dreadful speeches, and threatning every minute to kill her.
+
+"This strange and uncouth sight, bred in him no meane admiration, as
+also kinde compassion to the unfortunate woman; out of which
+compassion, sprung an earnest desire, to deliver her (if he could)
+from a death so full of anguish and horror: but seeing himselfe to be
+without Armes, he ran and pluckt up the plant of a Tree, which
+handling as if it had bene a staffe, he opposed himselfe against the
+Dogges and the Knight, who seeing him comming, cryed out in this
+manner to him. Anastasio, put not thy selfe in any opposition, but
+referre to my Hounds and me, to punish this wicked woman as she hath
+justly deserved. And in speaking these words, the Hounds tooke fast
+hold on her body, so staying her, untill the Knight was come neerer to
+her, and alighted from his horse: when Anastasio (after some other
+angry speeches) spake thus unto him: I cannot tell what or who thou
+art, albeit thou takest such knowledge of me, yet I must say, that it
+is meere cowardize in a Knight, being armed as thou art, to offer to
+kill a naked woman, and make thy dogges thus to seize on her, as if
+she were a savage beast; therefore beleeve me, I will defend her so
+farre as I am able.
+
+"Anastasio, answered the Knight, I am of the same City as thou art,
+and do well remember, that thou wast a little Ladde, when I (who was
+then named Guido Anastasio, and thine Unckle) became as intirely in
+love with this woman, as now thou art of Paulo Traversarioes daughter.
+But through her coy disdaine and cruelty, such was my heavy fate, that
+desperately I slew my selfe with this short sword which thou beholdest
+in mine hand: for which rash sinfull deede, I was, and am condemned to
+eternall punishment. This wicked woman, rejoycing immeasurably in mine
+unhappy death, remained no long time alive after me, and for her
+mercilesse sinne of cruelty, and taking pleasure in my oppressing
+torments; dying unrepentant, and in pride of her scorne, she had the
+like sentence of condemnation pronounced on her, and sent to the same
+place where I was tormented.
+
+"There the three impartiall Judges, imposed this further infliction on
+us both; namely, that she should flye in this manner before me, and I
+(who loved her so deerely while I lived) must pursue her as my deadly
+enemy, not like a woman that had a taste of love in her. And so often
+as I can overtake her, I am to kill her with this sword, the same
+Weapon wherewith I slew my selfe. Then am I enjoyned, therewith to
+open her accursed body, and teare out her hard and frozen heart, with
+her other inwards, as now thou seest me doe, which I give unto my
+Hounds to feede on. Afterward, such is the appointment of the supreame
+powers, that she reassumeth life againe, even as if she had not bene
+dead at all, and falling to the same kinde of flight, I with my Hounds
+am still to follow her; without any respite or intermission. Every
+Friday, and just at this houre, our course is this way, where she
+suffereth the just punishment inflicted on her. Nor do we rest any of
+the other dayes, but are appointed unto other places, where she
+cruelly executed her malice against me, being now (of her deare
+affectionate friend) ordained to be her endlesse enemy, and to pursue
+her in this manner for so many yeares, as she exercised moneths of
+cruelty towards me. Hinder me not then, in being the executioner of
+divine justice; for all thy interposition is but in vaine, in seeking
+to crosse the appointment of supreame powers.
+
+"Anastasio having attentively heard all this discourse, his haire
+stood upright like Porcupines quils, and his soule was so shaken with
+the terror, that he stept backe to suffer the Knight to do what he was
+enjoyned, looking yet with milde commisseration on the poore woman.
+Who kneeling most humbly before the Knight, and stearnely seized on by
+the two blood-hounds, he opened her brest with his weapon, drawing
+foorth her heart and bowels, which instantly he threw to the dogges,
+and they devoured them very greedily. Soone after, the Damosell (as if
+none of this punishment had bene inflicted on her) started up
+sodainly, running amaine towards the Sea shore, and the Hounds swiftly
+following her, as the Knight did the like, after he had taken his
+sword, and was mounted on horse-backe; so that Anastasio had soone
+lost all sight of them, and could not gesse what was become of them.
+
+"After he had heard and observed all these things, he stoode a while
+as confounded with feare and pitty, like a simple silly man, hoodwinkt
+with his owne passions, not knowing the subtle enemies cunning
+illusions in offering false suggestions to the sight, to worke his
+owne ends thereby, and encrease the number of his deceived servants.
+Forthwith he perswaded himselfe, that he might make good use of this
+womans tormenting, so justly imposed on the Knight to prosecute, if
+thus it should continue still every Friday. Wherefore, setting a good
+note or marke upon the place, he returned backe to his owne people,
+and at such time as he thought convenient, sent for divers of his
+kindred and friends from Ravenna, who being present with him, thus he
+spake to them.
+
+"Deare Kinsmen and Friends, ye have a long while importuned me, to
+discontinue my over-doating love to her, whom you all thinke, and I
+find to be my mortall enemy: as also, to give over my lavish expences,
+wherein I confesse my selfe too prodigall; both which requests of
+yours, I will condiscend to, provided, that you will performe one
+gracious favour for me; Namely, that on Friday next, Signior Paulo
+Traversario, his wife, daughter, with all other women linked in linage
+to them, and such beside onely as you shall please to appoint, will
+vouchsafe to accept a dinner heere with me; as for the reason thereto
+mooving me, you shall then more at large be acquainted withall. This
+appeared no difficult matter for them to accomplish: wherefore, being
+returned to Ravenna, and as they found the time answerable to their
+purpose, they invited such as Anastasio had appointed them. And
+although they found it some-what an hard matter, to gaine her company
+whom he so deerely affected; yet notwithstanding, the other women won
+her along with them.
+
+"A most magnificent dinner had Anastasio provided, and the tables were
+covered under the Pine-trees, where he saw the cruell Lady so pursued
+and slaine: directing the guests so in their seating, that the yong
+Gentlewoman his unkinde Mistresse, sate with her face opposite unto
+the place, where the dismall spectacle was to be seen. About the
+closing up of dinner, they beganne to heare the noise of the poore
+prosecuted Woman, which drove them all to much admiration; desiring to
+know what it was, and no one resolving them, they arose from the
+Tables, and looking directly as the noise came to them, they espyed
+the wofull Woman, the Dogges eagerly pursuing her; and the armed
+Knight on horsebacke, gallopping fiercely after them with his drawne
+weapon, and came very nere unto the company, who cryed out with lowd
+exclaimes against the dogs and the Knight, stepping forth in
+assistance of the injured woman.
+
+"The Knight spake unto them, as formerly he had done to Anastasio,
+(which made them draw backe, possessed with feare and admiration)
+acting the same cruelty as he did the Friday before, not differing in
+the least degree. Most of the Gentlewomen there present, being neere
+allyed to the unfortunate Woman, and likewise to the Knight,
+remembring well both his love and death, did shed teares as
+plentifully, as if it had bin to the very persons themselves, in
+usuall performance of the action indeede. Which tragicall Scoene being
+passed over, and the Woman and Knight gone out of their sight: all
+that had seene this straunge accident, fell into diversity of confused
+opinions, yet not daring to disclose them, as doubting some further
+danger to ensue thereon.
+
+"But beyond all the rest, none could compare in feare and astonishment
+with the cruell yong Maide affected by Anastasio, who both saw and
+observed all with a more inward apprehension, knowing very well, that
+the morall of this dismall spectacle, carried a much neerer
+application to her then any other in all the company. For now she
+could call to mind, how unkinde and cruell she had shewne her selfe to
+Anastasio, even as the other Gentlewoman formerly did to her Lover,
+still flying from him in great contempt and scorne: for which, she
+thought the Blood-hounds also pursued her at the heeles already, and a
+sword of vengeance to mangle her body. This feare grew so powerfull in
+her, that to prevent the like heavy doome from falling on her, she
+studied (by all her best and commendable meanes, and therein bestowed
+all the night season) how to change her hatred into kinde love, which
+at the length she fully obtained, and then purposed to prosecute in
+this manner.
+
+"Secretly she sent a faithfull Chamber-maide of her owne, to greete
+Anastasio on her behalfe; humbly entreating him to come see her:
+because now she was absolutely determined, to give him satisfaction in
+all which (with honour) he could request of her. Whereto Anastasio
+answered, that he accepted her message thankfully, and desired no
+other favour at her hand, but that which stood with her owne offer,
+namely, to be his Wife in honourable marriage. The Maide knowing
+sufficiently, that he could not be more desirous of the match, then
+her Mistresse shewed her selfe to be, made answer in her name, that
+this motion would be most welcome to her.
+
+"Heereupon, the Gentlewoman her selfe, became the solicitour to her
+Father and Mother, telling them plainly, that she was willing to be
+the Wife of Anastasio: which newes did so highly content them, that
+upon the Sunday next following, the marriage was very worthily
+solemnized, and they lived and loved together very kindly. Thus the
+divine bounty, out of the malignant enemies secret machinations, can
+cause good effects to arise and succeede. For, from this conceite of
+fearfull imagination in her, not onely happened this long desired
+conversion, of a Maide so obstinately scornfull and proud; but
+likewise all the women of Ravenna (being admonished by her example)
+grew afterward more kind and tractable to mens honest motions, then
+ever they shewed themselves before. And let me make some use hereof
+(faire Ladies) to you, not to stand over-nicely conceited of your
+beauty and good parts, when men (growing enamored of you by them)
+solicite you with their best and humblest services. Remember then this
+disdainfull Gentlewoman, but more especially her, who being the death
+of so kinde a Lover, was therefore condemned to perpetuall punishment,
+and he made the minister thereof, whom she had cast off with coy
+disdaine, from which I wish your minds to be as free, as mine is ready
+to do you any acceptable service."[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: This translation is from the English version of _The
+Decameron_, first published in 1620, but in 1569 had appeared _A
+Notable Historye of Nastagto and Traversan_, or rhymed version of
+Boccaccio's tale, by C.T., usually supposed to be Christopher Tye the
+musician. Dryden used this story for his fable _Theodore and Honoria_.
+It is curious to note that Anita, Garibaldi's wife, was actually
+hunted to death here in the Pineta by the Austrians.]
+
+To Dante and to Boccaccio belong of right morning and noon in the
+Pineta; but the evening is ours for it belongs to Byron:
+
+  "Sweet hour of twilight' in the solitude
+  Of the pine forest, and the silent shore
+  Which bounds Ravenna's immemorial wood,
+  Rooted where once the Adrian wave flowed o'er,
+  To where the last Caesarean fortress stood,
+  Evergreen forest I which Boccaccio's lore
+  And Dryden's lay made haunted ground to me
+  How have I loved the twilight hour and thee;
+
+  "The shrill cicalas, people of the pine,
+  Making their summer lives one ceaseless song,
+  Were the sole echoes, save my steed's and mine,
+  And vesper bells that rose the boughs along,
+  The spectre huntsman of Onesti's line,
+  His hell-dogs, and their chase, and the fair throng
+  Which learn'd from this example not to fly
+  From a true lover--shadow'd my mind's eye
+
+  "Soft hour! which wakes the wish and melts the heart
+  Of those who sail the seas, on the first day
+  When they from their sweet friends are torn apart.
+  Or fills with love the pilgrim on his way
+  As the far bell of vesper makes him start,
+  Seeming to weep the dying day's decay,
+  Is this a fancy which our reason scorns?
+  Ah, surely nothing dies but something mourns!"
+
+That "sweet hour of twilight" in the Pineta is the most precious hour
+of the day, when far off across the marsh softly, softly comes the Ave
+Maria....
+
+  "_O tu rinnovellata
+  itala gente da le molte vite
+  rendi la voce
+
+  "de ta preghiera, la campana squilli
+  ammonitrice, il campanil risorto
+  canti di clivo in clivo a la campagna
+  Ave Maria.
+
+  "Ave Maria! Quando su l'aure corre
+  l'umil saluto, i piccioh mortali
+  scovrono il capo, curvano la fronte
+  Dante ed Aroldo_"
+
+[Illustration: TO PORTO CORSINI]
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Ravenna, A Study, by Edward Hutton
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12542 ***