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Introduction to Java Programming and Data Structures Comprehensive Version Y Daniel Liang pdf download

The document is an overview of the book 'Introduction to Java Programming and Data Structures' by Y. Daniel Liang, detailing its comprehensive approach to teaching Java programming, data structures, and algorithms. It highlights the book's structure, which includes fundamental programming concepts, object-oriented programming, and practical applications, along with various pedagogical features to enhance learning. The latest edition includes updates to align with Java 8 and additional resources for instructors and students.

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100% found this document useful (1 vote)
27 views

Introduction to Java Programming and Data Structures Comprehensive Version Y Daniel Liang pdf download

The document is an overview of the book 'Introduction to Java Programming and Data Structures' by Y. Daniel Liang, detailing its comprehensive approach to teaching Java programming, data structures, and algorithms. It highlights the book's structure, which includes fundamental programming concepts, object-oriented programming, and practical applications, along with various pedagogical features to enhance learning. The latest edition includes updates to align with Java 8 and additional resources for instructors and students.

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aabanpammy3f
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Introduction to JAVA
Introduction to Java™ Programming and
Data Structures
Comprehensive Version
Eleventh Edition

Y. Daniel Liang
Armstrong State University

330 Hudson Street, NY NY 10013


To Samantha, Michael, and Michelle
Senior Vice President Courseware Portfolio M
­ anagement: Marcia J.
Horton
Director, Portfolio Management: Engineering, C
­ omputer Science &
Global Editions: Julian Partridge
Higher Ed Portfolio Management: Tracy Johnson (Dunkelberger)
Portfolio Management Assistant: Kristy Alaura
Managing Content Producer: Scott Disanno
Content Producer: Robert Engelhardt
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(LSC): Maura Zaldivar-Garcia
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Product Marketing Manager: Bram Van Kempen
Marketing Assistant: Jon Bryant
Cover Designer: Marta Samsel
Cover Photography: Germano Poli/123RF.com
Full-Service Project Management: Shylaja Gattupalli, SPi Global

Java™ and Netbeans™ screenshots ©2017 by Oracle Corporation,


all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Credits and acknowledgments borrowed from other sources and


reproduced, with permission, in this textbook appear on the
appropriate page within text.
Microsoft and/or its respective suppliers make no representations
about the suitability of the information c­ ontained in the documents
and related graphics published as part of the services for any
purpose. All such documents and related graphics are provided “as
is” without warranty of any kind. Microsoft and/or its respective
suppliers hereby disclaim all warranties and conditions with regard to
this information, including all warranties and conditions of
merchantability, whether express, implied or statutory, fitness for a
particular purpose, title and non-infringement. In no event shall
Microsoft and/or its respective suppliers be liable for any special,
indirect or consequential ­damages or any damages whatsoever
resulting from loss of use, data or profits, whether in an action of
contract, negligence or other tortious action, arising out of or in
connection with the use or performance of ­information ­available from
the services. The documents and related graphics contained herein
could include technical ­inaccuracies or typographical errors.
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and/or its respective suppliers may make improvements and/or
changes in the product(s) and/or the program(s) described herein at
any time. Partial screen shots may be viewed in full within the
software version specified.

Copyright © 2018, 2015, 2013, 2011 by Pearson Education, Inc.,


Hoboken, New Jersey 07030. All rights reserved. Printed in the
United States of America. This publication is protected by Copyright,
and permission should be obtained from the publisher prior to any
prohibited reproduction, storage in a retrieval system, or ­-
transmission in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or likewise. To obtain permission(s) to use
material from this work, please submit a written request to Pearson
Education, Inc., Permissions Department, P
­ earson Education, Inc.,
Hoboken, New Jersey 07030.

Many of the designations by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish


their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations
appear in this book, and the publisher was aware of a trademark
claim, the designations have been printed in initial caps or all caps.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Liang, Y. Daniel, author.

Title: Introduction to Java programming and data structures / Y.


Daniel

Liang, Armstrong State University.

Other titles: Introduction to Java programming

Description: Eleventh edition. Comprehensive version. | New York,


NY :

Pearson Education, 2017. | Revised edition of: Introduction to


Java
programming / Y. Daniel Liang, Armstrong Atlantic State University.
Tenth

edition. Comprehensive version. 2015. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017002082| ISBN 9780134670942 | ISBN


0134670949

Subjects: LCSH: Java (Computer program language)

Classification: LCC QA76.73.J38 L52 2017 | DDC 005.13/3--dc23


LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017002082

1–17

ISBN-10: 0-13-467094-9

ISBN-13: 978-0-13-467094-2
Preface
Dear Reader,

Many of you have provided feedback on earlier editions


of this book, and your comments and suggestions have
greatly improved the book. This edition has been
substantially enhanced in presentation, organization,
examples, exercises, and supplements.

The book is fundamentals first by introducing basic


programming concepts and techniques before
designing custom classes. The fundamental concepts
and techniques of selection statements, loops,
methods, and arrays are the foundation for
programming. Building this strong foundation prepares
students to learn object-oriented programming and
advanced Java programming.

fundamentals-first
This book teaches programming in a problem-driven
way that focuses on problem solving rather than
syntax. We make introductory programming interesting
by using thought-­provoking problems in a broad
context. The central thread of early chapters is on
problem solving. Appropriate syntax and library are
introduced to enable readers to write programs for
solving the problems. To support the teaching of
programming in a problem-driven way, the book
provides a wide variety of problems at various levels of
difficulty to motivate students. To appeal to students in
all majors, the problems cover many application areas,
including math, science, business, financial, gaming,
animation, and multimedia.

problem-driven

The book seamlessly integrates programming, data


structures, and algorithms into one text. It employs a
practical approach to teach data structures. We first
introduce how to use various data structures to develop
efficient algorithms, and then show how to implement
these data structures. Through implementation,
students gain a deep understanding on the efficiency of
data structures and on how and when to use certain
data structures. Finally, we design and implement
custom data structures for trees and graphs.

data structures

The book is widely used in the introductory


programming, data structures, and algorithms courses
in the universities around the world. This
comprehensive version covers fundamentals of
programming, object-oriented programming, GUI
programming, data structures, algorithms, concurrency,
networking, database, and Web programming. It is
designed to prepare students to become proficient
Java programmers. A brief version (Introduction to Java
Programming, Brief Version, Eleventh Edition) is
available for a first course on programming, commonly
known as CS1. The brief version contains the first 18
chapters of the comprehensive version. An AP version
of the book is also available for high school students
taking an AP Computer Science course.
comprehensive version

brief version

AP Computer Science

The best way to teach programming is by example,


and the only way to learn p
­ rogramming is by doing.
Basic concepts are explained by example and a large
number of exercises with various levels of difficulty are
provided for students to practice. For our programming
courses, we assign programming exercises after each
lecture.

examples and exercises


Our goal is to produce a text that teaches problem
solving and programming in a broad context using a
wide variety of interesting examples. If you have any
comments on and ­suggestions for improving the book,
please email me.

Sincerely,

Y. Daniel Liang

[email protected]

www.cs.armstrong.edu/liang

www.pearsonhighered.com/liang
ACM/IEEE Curricular 2013 and
ABET Course Assessment
The new ACM/IEEE Computer Science Curricular 2013 defines the
Body of Knowledge organized into 18 Knowledge Areas. To help
instructors design the courses based on this book, we provide
sample syllabi to identify the Knowledge Areas and Knowledge
Units. The ­sample syllabi are for a three semester course sequence
and serve as an example for institutional ­customization. The sample
syllabi are accessible from the Instructor Resource Website.

Many of our users are from the ABET-accredited programs. A key


component of the ABET accreditation is to identify the weakness
through continuous course assessment against the course
outcomes. We provide sample course outcomes for the courses and
sample exams for measuring course outcomes on the ­Instructor
Resource Website.
What’s New in This Edition?
This edition is completely revised in every detail to enhance clarity,
presentation, content, examples, and exercises. The major
improvements are as follows:

The book’s title is changed to Introduction to Java Programming


and Data Structures with new enhancements on data structures.
The book uses a practical approach to introduce design,
implement, and use data structures and covers all topics in a
typical data structures course. Additionally, it provides bonus
chapters that cover advanced data structures such as 2-4 trees,
B-trees, and red-black trees.
Updated to the latest Java technology. Examples and exercises
are improved and simplified by using the new features in Java 8.
The default and static methods are introduced for interfaces in
Chapter 13 .
The GUI chapters are updated to JavaFX 8. The examples are
revised. The user interfaces in the examples and exercises are
now resizable and displayed in the center of the window.
Inner classes, anonymous inner classes, and lambda
expressions are covered using practical examples in Chapter
15 .
More examples and exercises in the data structures chapters use
lambda expressions to simplify coding. Method references are
introduced along with the Comparator interface in Section
20.6.
The forEach method is introduced in Chapter 20 as a simple
alternative to the foreach loop for applying an action to each
element in a collection.
Use the default methods for interfaces in Java 8 to redesign and
simplify MyList , ­MyArrayList , MyLinkedList , Tree , BST ,
AVLTree , MyMap , MyHashMap , MySet , MyHashSet , Graph ,
UnweightedGraph , and WeightedGraph in Chapters 24 –29 .
Chapter 30 is brand new to introduce aggregate operations for
collection streams.
FXML and the Scene Builder visual tool are introduced in
Chapter 31 .
The Companion Website has been redesigned with new
interactive quiz, CheckPoint questions, animations, and live
coding.
More than 200 additional programming exercises with solutions
are provided to the instructor on the Instructor Resource Website.
These exercises are not printed in the text.

Please visit www.pearsonhighered.com/liang for a complete list of


new features as well as correlations to the previous edition.
Pedagogical Features
The book uses the following elements to help students get the most
from the material:

The Objectives at the beginning of each chapter list what


students should learn from the chapter. This will help them
determine whether they have met the objectives after ­completing
the chapter.
The Introduction opens the discussion with a thought-provoking
question to motivate the reader to delve into the chapter.
Key Points highlight the important concepts covered in each
section.
Check Points provide review questions to help students track
their progress as they read through the chapter and evaluate
their learning.
Problems and Case Studies, carefully chosen and presented in
an easy-to-follow style, teach problem solving and programming
concepts. The book uses many small, simple, and stimulating
examples to demonstrate important ideas.
The Chapter Summary reviews the important subjects that
students should understand and remember. It helps them
reinforce the key concepts they have learned in the chapter.
Quizzes are accessible online, grouped by sections, for students
to do self-test on ­programming concepts and techniques.
Programming Exercises are grouped by sections to provide
students with opportunities to apply the new skills they have
learned on their own. The level of difficulty is rated as easy (no
asterisk), moderate (*), hard (**), or challenging (***). The trick of
learning programming is practice, practice, and practice. To that
end, the book provides a great many exercises. Additionally,
more than 200 programming exercises with solutions are
provided to the instructors on the Instructor Resource Website.
These exercises are not printed in the text.
Notes, Tips, Cautions, and Design Guides are inserted
throughout the text to offer valuable advice and insight on
important aspects of program development.

Note

Provides additional information on the subject and reinforces


important concepts.

Tip

Teaches good programming style and practice.


Caution

Helps students steer away from the pitfalls of programming


errors.

Design Guide

Provides guidelines for designing programs.


Flexible Chapter Orderings
The book is designed to provide flexible chapter orderings to enable
GUI, exception ­handling, recursion, generics, and the Java
Collections Framework to be covered earlier or later. The ­diagram on
the next page shows the chapter dependencies.
Organization of the Book
The chapters can be grouped into five parts that, taken together,
form a comprehensive introduction to Java programming, data
structures and algorithms, and database and Web programming.
Because knowledge is cumulative, the early chapters provide the
conceptual basis for understanding programming and guide students
through simple examples and exercises; subsequent chapters
progressively present Java programming in detail, culminating with
the development of comprehensive Java applications. The
appendixes contain a mixed bag of topics, including an introduction
to number systems, bitwise operations, regular expressions, and
enumerated types.
Part I: Fundamentals of Programming
(Chapter 1 –8 )
The first part of the book is a stepping stone, preparing you to
embark on the journey of learning Java. You will begin to learn about
Java (Chapter 1 ) and fundamental programming ­techniques with
primitive data types, variables, constants, assignments, expressions,
and operators (­Chapter 2 ), selection statements (Chapter 3 ),
mathematical functions, characters, and strings (Chapter 4 ),
loops (Chapter 5 ), methods (Chapter 6 ), and arrays (Chapters
7 –8 ). After ­Chapter 7 , you can jump to Chapter 18 to
learn how to write recursive methods for solving inherently recursive
problems.
Part II: Object-Oriented Programming
(Chapters 9 –13 , and 17 )
This part introduces object-oriented programming. Java is an object-
oriented programming language that uses abstraction,
encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism to provide great
flexibility, modularity, and reusability in developing software. You will
learn programming with objects and classes (Chapters 9 –10 ),
class inheritance (Chapter 11 ), polymorphism (­Chapter 11 ),
exception handling (Chapter 12 ), abstract classes (Chapter
13 ), and interfaces (Chapter 13 ). Text I/O is introduced in
Chapter 12 and binary I/O is discussed in Chapter 17 .
Part III: GUI Programming (Chapters
14 –16 and Bonus Chapter 31 )
JavaFX is a new framework for developing Java GUI programs. It is
not only useful for developing GUI programs, but also an excellent
pedagogical tool for learning object-oriented programming. This part
introduces Java GUI programming using JavaFX in Chapters 14 –
16 . Major topics include GUI basics (Chapter 14 ), container
panes (Chapter 14 ), drawing shapes (Chapter 14 ), event-
driven programming (Chapter 15 ), animations (Chapter 15 ),
and GUI ­controls (Chapter 16 ), and playing audio and video
(Chapter 16 ). You will learn the ­architecture of JavaFX GUI
programming and use the controls, shapes, panes, image, and video
to develop useful applications. Chapter 31 covers advanced
features in JavaFX.
Part IV: Data Structures and Algorithms
(Chapter 18 –30 and Bonus Chapters
42–43)
This part covers the main subjects in a typical data structures and
algorithms course. Chapter 18 introduces recursion to write
methods for solving inherently recursive problems. Chapter 19
presents how generics can improve software reliability. Chapters
20 and 21 introduce the Java Collection Framework, which
defines a set of useful API for data structures. Chapter 22
discusses measuring algorithm efficiency in order to choose an
appropriate algorithm for applications. Chapter 23 describes
classic sorting algorithms. You will learn how to implement several
classic data structures lists, queues, and priority queues in Chapter
24 . Chapters 25 and 26 introduce binary search trees and
AVL trees. Chapter 27 presents hashing and implementing maps
and sets using hashing. Chapters 28 and 29 introduce graph
applications. Chapter 30 introduces aggregate operations for
collection streams. The 2-4 trees, B-trees, and red-black trees are
covered in Bonus Chapters 42 –43 .
Part V: Advanced Java Programming
(Chapters 32 -41 , 44 )
This part of the book is devoted to advanced Java programming.
Chapter 32 treats the use of multithreading to make programs
more responsive and interactive and introduces parallel
programming. Chapter 33 discusses how to write programs that
talk with each other from different hosts over the Internet. Chapter
34 introduces the use of Java to develop database projects.
Chapter 35 delves into advanced Java database programming.
Chapter 36 covers the use of internationalization support to
develop projects for international audiences. Chapters 37 and
38 introduce how to use Java servlets and JavaServer Pages to
generate dynamic content from Web servers. Chapter 39
introduces modern Web application development using JavaServer
Faces. Chapter 40 introduces remote method invocation and
Chapter 41 discusses Web services. Chapter 44 introduces
testing Java programs using JUnit.
Appendixes
This part of the book covers a mixed bag of topics. Appendix A
lists Java keywords. ­Appendix B gives tables of ASCII characters
and their associated codes in decimal and in hex. Appendix C
shows the operator precedence. Appendix D summarizes Java
modifiers and their usage. Appendix E discusses special floating-
point values. Appendix F introduces number systems and
conversions among binary, decimal, and hex numbers. Finally,
Appendix G introduces bitwise operations. Appendix H
introduces regular expressions. Appendix I covers enumerated
types.
Java Development Tools
You can use a text editor, such as the Windows Notepad or
WordPad, to create Java programs and to compile and run the
programs from the command window. You can also use a Java
development tool, such as NetBeans or Eclipse. These tools support
an integrated development environment (IDE) for developing Java
programs quickly. Editing, compiling, building, executing, and
debugging programs are integrated in one graphical user interface.
Using these tools effectively can greatly increase your programming
productivity. NetBeans and Eclipse are easy to use if you follow the
tutorials. Tutorials on NetBeans and Eclipse can be found in the
supplements on the Companion Website
www.pearsonhighered.com/liang.

IDE tutorials
Other documents randomly have
different content
(Jobst of Moravia,
rival).
1417 Martin V.
1431 Eugene IV.
[*]Albert II. 1438
1439 Felix V (Anti-
pope).
Frederick III. 1440
1447 Nicholas V.
1455 Calixtus IV.
1458 Pius II.
1464 Paul II.
1471 Sixtus IV.
1484 Innocent VIII.
1493 Alexander VI. [*]Maximilian I. 1493
1503 Pius III.
1503 Julius II.
1513 Leo X.
Charles V.[3] 1519
1522 Hadrian VI.
1523 Clement VII.
1534 Paul III.
1550 Julius III.
1555 Marcellus II.
1555 Paul IV.
[*]Ferdinand I. 1558
1559 Pius IV.
[*]Maximilian II. 1564
1566 Pius V.
1572 Gregory XIII.
[*]Rudolf II. 1576
1585 Sixtus V.
1590 Urban VII.
1590 Gregory XIV.
1591 Innocent IX.
1592 Clement VIII.
1604 Leo XI.
1604 Paul V.
[*]Matthias. 1612
[*]Ferdinand II. 1619
1621 Gregory XV.
1623 Urban VIII.
[*]Ferdinand III. 1637
1644 Innocent X.
1655 Alexander VII.
[*]Leopold I. 1658
1667 Clement IX.
1670 Clement X.
1676 Innocent XI.
1689 Alexander VIII.
1691 Innocent XII.
1700 Clement XI.
[*]Joseph I. 1705
[*]Charles VI. 1711
1720 Innocent XIII.
1724 Benedict XIII.
1740 Benedict XIV.
[*]Charles VII. 1742
[*]Francis I. 1745
1758 Clement XII.
[*]Joseph II. 1765
1769 Clement XIII.
1775 Pius VI.
[*]Leopold II. 1790
[*]Francis II. 1792
1800 Pius VII.
Abdication of
Francis II. 1806
1823 Leo XII.
1829 Pius VIII.
1831 Gregory XVI.
1846 Pius IX.
[†]The names in italics are those of German kings who never made any claim to the
imperial title.
[*] Those marked with an asterisk were never actually crowned at Rome.

THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.


CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.

Of those who in August, 1806, read in the English newspapers that the
Emperor Francis II had announced to the Diet his resignation of the
imperial crown, there were probably few who reflected that the oldest
political institution in the world had come to an end. Yet it was so. The
Empire which a note issued by a diplomatist on the banks of the
Danube extinguished, was the same which the crafty nephew of Julius
had won for himself, against the powers of the East, beneath the cliffs
of Actium; and which had preserved almost unaltered, through
eighteen centuries of time, and through the greatest changes in extent,
in power, in character, a title and pretensions from which all meaning
had long since departed. Nothing else so directly linked the old world
to the new—nothing else displayed so many strange contrasts of the
present and the past, and summed up in those contrasts so much of
European history. From the days of Constantine till far down into the
middle ages it was, conjointly with the Papacy, the recognised centre
and head of Christendom, exercising over the minds of men an
influence such as its material strength could never have commanded. It
is of this influence and of the causes that gave it power rather than of
the external history of the Empire, that the following pages are
designed to treat. That history is indeed full of interest and brilliance,
of grand characters and striking situations. But it is a subject too vast
for any single canvas. Without a minuteness of detail sufficient to make
its scenes dramatic and give us a lively sympathy with the actors, a
narrative history can have little value and still less charm. But to trace
with any minuteness the career of the Empire, would be to write the
history of Christendom from the fifth century to the twelfth, of
Germany and Italy from the twelfth to the nineteenth; while even a
narrative of more restricted scope, which should attempt to disengage
from a general account of the affairs of those countries the events that
properly belong to imperial history, could hardly be compressed within
reasonable limits. It is therefore better, declining so great a task, to
attempt one simpler and more practicable though not necessarily
inferior in interest; to speak less of events than of principles, and
endeavour to describe the Empire not as a State but as an Institution,
an institution created by and embodying a wonderful system of ideas.
In pursuance of such a plan, the forms which the Empire took in the
several stages of its growth and decline must be briefly sketched. The
characters and acts of the great men who founded, guided, and
overthrew it must from time to time be touched upon. But the chief
aim of the treatise will be to dwell more fully on the inner nature of the
Empire, as the most signal instance of the fusion of Roman and
Teutonic elements in modern civilization: to shew how such a
combination was possible; how Charles and Otto were led to revive the
imperial title in the West; how far during the reigns of their successors
it preserved the memory of its origin, and influenced the European
commonwealth of nations.
Strictly speaking, it is from the year 800 A.D., when a King of the Franks
was crowned Emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III, that the
beginning of the Holy Roman Empire must be dated. But in history
there is nothing isolated, and just as to explain a modern Act of
Parliament or a modern conveyance of lands we must go back to the
feudal customs of the thirteenth century, so among the institutions of
the Middle Ages there is scarcely one which can be understood until it
is traced up either to classical or to primitive Teutonic antiquity. Such a
mode of inquiry is most of all needful in the case of the Holy Empire,
itself no more than a tradition, a fancied revival of departed glories.
And thus, in order to make it clear out of what elements the imperial
system was formed, we might be required to scrutinize the antiquities
of the Christian Church; to survey the constitution of Rome in the days
when Rome was no more than the first of the Latin cities; nay, to travel
back yet further to that Jewish theocratic polity whose influence on the
minds of the mediæval priesthood was necessarily so profound.
Practically, however, it may suffice to begin by glancing at the condition
of the Roman world in the third and fourth centuries of the Christian
era. We shall then see the old Empire with its scheme of absolutism
fully matured; we shall mark how the new religion, rising in the midst
of a hostile power, ends by embracing and transforming it; and we shall
be in a position to understand what impression the whole huge fabric
of secular and ecclesiastical government which Roman and Christian
had piled up made upon the barbarian tribes who pressed into the
charmed circle of the ancient civilization.
CHAPTER II.

THE ROMAN EMPIRE BEFORE THE INVASIONS OF THE


BARBARIANS.

That ostentation of humility which the subtle policy


The Roman Empire
in the second
of Augustus had conceived, and the jealous
century. hypocrisy of Tiberius maintained, was gradually
dropped by their successors, till despotism became
at last recognised in principle as the government of the Roman Empire.
With an aristocracy decayed, a populace degraded, an army no longer
recruited from Italy, the semblance of liberty that yet survived might be
swept away with impunity. Republican forms had never been known in
the provinces at all, and the aspect which the imperial administration
had originally assumed there, soon reacted on its position in the
capital. Earlier rulers had disguised their supremacy by making a
slavish senate the instrument of their more cruel or arbitrary acts. As
time went on, even this veil was withdrawn; and in the age of
Septimius Severus, the Emperor stood forth to the whole Roman world
as the single centre and source of power and political action. The
warlike character of the Roman state was preserved in his title of
General; his provincial lieutenants were military governors; and a more
terrible enforcement of the theory was found in his dependence on the
army, at once the origin and support of all authority. But, as he united
in himself every function of government, his sovereignty was civil as
well as military. Laws emanated from him; all officials acted under his
commission; the sanctity of his person bordered on divinity. This
increased concentration of power was mainly required by the
necessities of frontier defence, for within there was more decay than
disaffection. Few troops were quartered through the country: few
fortresses checked the march of armies in the struggles which placed
Vespasian and Severus on the throne. The distant crash of war from
the Rhine or the Euphrates was scarcely heard or heeded in the
profound quiet of the Mediterranean coasts, where, with piracy, fleets
had disappeared. No quarrels of race or religion disturbed that calm,
for all national distinctions were becoming merged in
Obliteration of
national
the idea of a common Empire. The gradual extension
distinctions. of Roman citizenship through the coloniæ, the
working of the equalized and equalizing Roman law,
the even pressure of the government on all subjects, the movement of
population caused by commerce and the slave traffic, were steadily
assimilating the various peoples. Emperors who were for the most part
natives of the provinces cared little to cherish Italy or conciliate Rome:
it was their policy to keep open for every subject a career by whose
freedom they had themselves risen to greatness, and to recruit the
senate from the most illustrious families in the cities of Gaul, Spain,
and Asia. The edict by which Caracalla extended to all natives of the
Roman world the rights of Roman citizenship, though prompted by no
motives of kindness, proved in the end a boon. Annihilating legal
distinctions, it completed the work which trade and literature and
toleration to all beliefs but one were already performing, and left, so
far as we can tell, only two nations still cherishing a national feeling.
The Jew was kept apart by his religion: the Greek boasted his original
intellectual superiority. Speculative philosophy lent her aid to this
general assimilation. Stoicism, with its doctrine of a universal system of
nature, made minor distinctions between man and man seem
insignificant: and by its teachers the idea of cosmopolitanism was for
the first time proclaimed. Alexandrian Neo-Platonism, uniting the tenets
of many schools, first bringing the mysticism of the East into
connection with the logical philosophies of Greece, had opened up a
new ground of agreement or controversy for the minds of all the world.
Yet Rome's commanding position was scarcely
The Capital.
shaken. Her actual power was indeed confined within
narrow limits. Rarely were her senate and people
permitted to choose the sovereign: more rarely still could they control
his policy; neither law nor custom raised them above other subjects, or
accorded to them any advantage in the career of civil or military
ambition. As in time past Rome had sacrificed domestic freedom that
she might be the mistress of others, so now to be universal, she, the
conqueror, had descended to the level of the conquered. But the
sacrifice had not wanted its reward. From her came the laws and the
language that had overspread the world: at her feet the nations laid
the offerings of their labour: she was the head of the Empire and of
civilization, and in riches, fame, and splendour far outshone as well the
cities of that time as the fabled glories of Babylon or Persepolis.
Scarcely had these slowly working influences brought
Diocletian and
Constantine.
about this unity, when other influences began to
threaten it. New foes assailed the frontiers; while the
loosening of the structure within was shewn by the long struggles for
power which followed the death or deposition of each successive
emperor. In the period of anarchy after the fall of Valerian, generals
were raised by their armies in every part of the Empire, and ruled great
provinces as monarchs apart, owning no allegiance to the possessor of
the capital.
The founding of the kingdoms of modern Europe might have been
anticipated by two hundred years, had the barbarians been bolder, or
had there not arisen in Diocletian a prince active and politic enough to
bind up the fragments before they had lost all cohesion, meeting
altered conditions by new remedies. By dividing and localizing
authority, he confessed that the weaker heart could no longer make its
pulsations felt to the body's extremities. He parcelled out the supreme
power among four persons, and then sought to give it a factitious
strength, by surrounding it with an oriental pomp which his earlier
predecessors would have scorned. The sovereign's person became
more sacred, and was removed further from the subject by the
interposition of a host of officials. The prerogative of Rome was
menaced by the rivalry of Nicomedia, and the nearer greatness of
Milan. Constantine trod in the same path, extending the system of titles
and functionaries, separating the civil from the military, placing counts
and dukes along the frontiers and in the cities, making the household
larger, its etiquette stricter, its offices more important, though to a
Roman eye degraded by their attachment to the monarch's person. The
crown became, for the first time, the fountain of honour. These
changes brought little good. Heavier taxation depressed the
aristocracy[4]: population decreased, agriculture withered, serfdom
spread: it was found more difficult to raise native troops and to pay
any troops whatever. The removal of the seat of power to Byzantium, if
it prolonged the life of a part of the Empire, shook it as a whole, by
making the separation of East and West inevitable. By it Rome's self-
abnegation that she might Romanize the world, was completed; for
though the new capital preserved her name, and followed her customs
and precedents, yet now the imperial sway ceased to be connected
with the city which had created it. Thus did the idea of Roman
monarchy become more universal; for, having lost its local centre, it
subsisted no longer historically, but, so to speak, naturally, as a part of
an order of things which a change in external conditions seemed
incapable of disturbing. Henceforth the Empire would be unaffected by
the disasters of the city. And though, after the partition of the Empire
had been confirmed by Valentinian, and finally settled on the death of
Theodosius, the seat of the Western government was removed first to
Milan and then to Ravenna, neither event destroyed Rome's prestige,
nor the notion of a single imperial nationality common to all her
subjects. The Syrian, the Pannonian, the Briton, the Spaniard, still
called himself a Roman[5].
For that nationality was now beginning to be
Christianity.
supported by a new and vigorous power. The
Emperors had indeed opposed it as disloyal and
revolutionary: had more than once put forth their whole strength to
root it out. But the unity of the Empire, and the ease of communication
through its parts, had favoured the spread of Christianity: persecution
had scattered the seeds more widely, had forced on it a firm
organization, had given it martyr-heroes and a history. When
Constantine, partly perhaps from a genuine moral sympathy, yet
doubtless far more in the well-grounded belief that he had more to
gain from the zealous sympathy of its professors than he could lose by
the aversion of those who still cultivated a languid paganism, took
Christianity to be the religion of the Empire, it was already a great
political force, able, and not more able than willing, to repay him by aid
and submission. Yet the league was struck in no mere mercenary spirit,
for the league was inevitable. Of the evils and
Its alliance with the
dangers incident to the system then founded, there
State.
was as yet no experience: of that antagonism
between Church and State which to a modern appears so natural,
there was not even an idea. Among the Jews, the State had rested
upon religion; among the Romans, religion had been an integral part of
the political constitution, a matter far more of national or tribal or
family feeling than of personal[6]. Both in Israel and at Rome the
mingling of religious with civic patriotism had been harmonious, giving
strength and elasticity to the whole body politic. So perfect a union was
now no longer possible in the Roman Empire, for the new faith had
already a governing body of her own in those rulers and teachers
whom the growth of sacramentalism, and of sacerdotalism its
necessary consequence, was making every day more powerful, and
marking off more sharply from the mass of the Christian people. Since
therefore the ecclesiastical organization could not be identical with the
civil, it became its counterpart. Suddenly called from danger and
ignominy to the seat of power, and finding her inexperience perplexed
by a sphere of action vast and varied, the Church was compelled to
frame herself upon the model of the secular administration. Where her
own machinery was defective, as in the case of doctrinal disputes
affecting the whole Christian world, she sought the interposition of the
sovereign; in all else she strove not to sink in, but to reproduce for
herself the imperial system. And just as with the extension of the
Empire all the independent rights of districts, towns, or tribes had
disappeared, so now the primitive freedom and diversity of individual
Christians and local Churches, already circumscribed by the frequent
struggles against heresy, was finally overborne by the idea of one
visible catholic Church, uniform in faith and ritual; uniform too in her
relation to the civil power and the increasingly oligarchical character of
her government. Thus, under the combined force of doctrinal theory
and practical needs, there shaped itself a hierarchy of patriarchs,
metropolitans, and bishops, their jurisdiction, although still chiefly
spiritual, enforced by the laws of the State, their provinces and
dioceses usually corresponding to the administrative divisions of the
Empire. As no patriarch yet enjoyed more than an honorary supremacy,
the head of the Church—so far as she could be said to have a head—
was virtually the Emperor himself. The inchoate right to intermeddle in
religious affairs which he derived from the office of Pontifex Maximus
was readily admitted; and the clergy, preaching the duty of passive
obedience now as it had been preached in the days of Nero and
Diocletian[7], were well pleased to see him preside in councils, issue
edicts against heresy, and testify even by arbitrary measures his zeal
for the advancement of the faith and the overthrow of pagan rites. But
though the tone of the Church remained humble, her strength waxed
greater, nor were occasions wanting which revealed the future that was
in store for her. The resistance and final triumph of Athanasius proved
that the new society could put forth a power of opinion such as had
never been known before: the abasement of Theodosius the Emperor
before Ambrose the Archbishop admitted the supremacy of spiritual
authority. In the decrepitude of old institutions, in the barrenness of
literature and the feebleness of art, it was to the Church that the life
and feelings of the people sought more and more to attach
themselves; and when in the fifth century the horizon grew black with
clouds of ruin, those who watched with despair or apathy the approach
of irresistible foes, fled for comfort to the shrine of a religion which
even those foes revered.
But that which we are above all concerned to remark
It embraces and
preserves the
here is, that this church system, demanding a more
imperial idea. rigid uniformity in doctrine and organization, making
more and more vital the notion of a visible body of
worshippers united by participation in the same sacraments,
maintained and propagated afresh the feeling of a single Roman people
throughout the world. Christianity as well as civilization became
conterminous with the Roman Empire[8].
CHAPTER III.

THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS.

Upon a world so constituted did the barbarians of the


The Barbarians.
North descend. From the dawn of history they shew
as a dim background to the warmth and light of the
Mediterranean coast, changing little while kingdoms rise and fall in the
South: only thought on when some hungry swarm comes down to
pillage or to settle. It is always as foes that they are known. The
Romans never forgot the invasion of Brennus; and their fears, renewed
by the irruption of the Cimbri and Teutones, could not let them rest till
the extension of the frontier to the Rhine and the Danube removed
Italy from immediate danger. A little more perseverance under Tiberius,
or again under Hadrian, would probably have reduced all Germany as
far as the Baltic and the Oder. But the politic or jealous advice of
Augustus[9] was followed, and it was only along the frontiers that
Roman arts and culture affected the Teutonic races. Commerce was
brisk; Roman envoys penetrated the forests to the courts of rude
chieftains; adventurous barbarians entered the provinces, sometimes to
admire, oftener, like the brother of Arminius[10], to take service under
the Roman flag, and rise to a distinction in the legion which some feud
denied them at home. This was found even more
Admitted to Roman
titles and honours.
convenient by the hirer than by the employed; till by
degrees barbarian mercenaries came to form the
largest, or at least the most effective, part of the Roman armies. The
body-guard of Augustus had been so composed; the prætorians were
generally selected from the bravest frontier troops, most of them
German; the practice could not but increase with the extinction of the
free peasantry, the growth of villenage, and the effeminacy of all
classes. Emperors who were, like Maximin, themselves foreigners,
encouraged a system by whose means they had risen, and whose
advantages they knew. After Constantine, the barbarians form the
majority of the troops; after Theodosius, a Roman is the exception. The
soldiers of the Eastern Empire in the time of Arcadius are almost all
Goths, vast bodies of whom had been settled in the provinces; while in
the West, Stilicho[11] can oppose Rhodogast only by summoning the
German auxiliaries from the frontiers. Along with this practice there had
grown up another, which did still more to make the barbarians feel
themselves members of the Roman state. Whatever the pride of the
old republic might assert, the maxim of the Empire had always been
that birth and race should exclude no subject from any post which his
abilities deserved. This principle, which had removed all obstacles from
the path of the Spaniard Trajan, the Pannonian Maximin, the Numidian
Philip, was afterwards extended to the conferring of honour and power
on persons who did not even profess to have passed through the
grades of Roman service, but remained leaders of their own tribes.
Ariovistus had been soothed by the title of Friend of the Roman People;
in the third century the insignia of the consulship[12] were conferred on
a Herulian chief: Crocus and his Alemanni entered as an independent
body into the service of Rome; along the Rhine whole tribes received,
under the name of Laeti, lands within the provinces on condition of
military service; and the foreign aid which the Sarmatian had proffered
to Vespasian against his rival, and Marcus Aurelius had indignantly
rejected in the war with Cassius, became the usual, at last the sole
support of the Empire, in civil as well as in external strife.
Thus in many ways was the old antagonism broken down—Romans
admitting barbarians to rank and office, barbarians catching something
of the manners and culture of their neighbours. And thus when the
final movement came, and the Teutonic tribes slowly established
themselves through the provinces, they entered not as savage
strangers, but as colonists knowing something of the system into which
they came, and not unwilling to be considered its members; despising
the degenerate provincials who struck no blow in their own defence,
but full of respect for the majestic power which had for so many
centuries confronted and instructed them.
Great during all these ages, but greatest when they
Their feelings
were actually traversing and settling in the Empire,
towards the Roman
Empire. must have been the impression which its elaborate
machinery of government and mature civilization
made upon the minds of the Northern invaders. With arms whose
fabrication they had learned from their foes, these dwellers in the
forest conquered well-tilled fields, and entered towns whose busy
workshops, marts stored with the productions of distant countries, and
palaces rich in monuments of art, equally roused their wonder. To the
beauty of statuary or painting they might often be blind, but the rudest
mind must have been awed by the massive piles with which vanity or
devotion, or the passion for amusement, had adorned Milan and
Verona, Arles, Treves, and Bordeaux. A deeper awe would strike them
as they gazed on the crowding worshippers and stately ceremonial of
Christianity, most unlike their own rude sacrifices. The exclamation of
the Goth Athanaric, when led into the market-place of Constantinople,
may stand for the feelings of his nation: 'Without doubt the Emperor is
a God upon earth, and he who attacks him is guilty of his own
blood[13].'
The social and political system, with its cultivated language and
literature, into which they came, would impress fewer of the
conquerors, but by those few would be admired beyond all else. Its
regular organization supplied what they most needed and could least
construct for themselves, and hence it was that the greatest among
them were the most desirous to preserve it. The Mongol Attila
excepted, there is among these terrible hosts no destroyer; the wish of
each leader is to maintain the existing order, to spare life, to respect
every work of skill and labour, above all to perpetuate the methods of
Roman administration, and rule the people as the deputy or successor
of their Emperor. Titles conferred by him were the
Their desire to
preserve its
highest honours they knew: they were also the only
institutions. means of acquiring something like a legal claim to
the obedience of the subject, and of turning a
patriarchal or military chieftainship into the regular sway of an
hereditary monarch. Civilis had long since endeavoured to govern his
Batavians as a Roman general[14]. Alaric became master-general of the
armies of Illyricum. Clovis exulted in the consulship; his son
Theodebert received Provence, the conquest of his own battle-axe, as
the gift of Justinian. Sigismund the Burgundian king, created count and
patrician by the Emperor Anastasius, professed the deepest gratitude
and the firmest faith to that Eastern court which was absolutely
powerless to help or to hurt him. 'My people is yours,' he writes, 'and
to rule them delights me less than to serve you; the hereditary
devotion of my race to Rome has made us account those the highest
honours which your military titles convey; we have always preferred
what an Emperor gave to all that our ancestors could bequeath. In
ruling our nation we hold ourselves but your lieutenants: you, whose
divinely-appointed sway no barrier bounds, whose blessed beams shine
from the Bosphorus into distant Gaul, employ us to administer the
remoter regions of your Empire: your world is our fatherland[15].' A
contemporary historian has recorded the remarkable disclosure of his
own thoughts and purposes, made by one of the ablest of the
barbarian chieftains, Athaulf the Visigoth, the brother-in-law and
successor of Alaric. 'It was at first my wish to destroy the Roman
name, and erect in its place a Gothic empire, taking to myself the place
and the powers of Cæsar Augustus. But when experience taught me
that the untameable barbarism of the Goths would not suffer them to
live beneath the sway of law, and that the abolition of the institutions
on which the state rested would involve the ruin of the state itself, I
chose the glory of renewing and maintaining by Gothic strength the
fame of Rome, desiring to go down to posterity as the restorer of that
Roman power which it was beyond my power to replace. Wherefore I
avoid war and strive for peace[16].'
Historians have remarked how valuable must have been the skill of
Roman officials to princes who from leaders of tribes were become
rulers of wide lands; and in particular how indispensable the aid of the
Christian bishops, the intellectual aristocracy of their new subjects,
whose advice could alone guide their policy and conciliate the
vanquished. Not only is this true; it is but a small part of the truth; one
form of that manifold and overpowering influence which the old system
exercised over its foes not less than its own children. For it is hardly
too much to say that the thought of antagonism to the Empire and the
wish to extinguish it never crossed the mind of the barbarians[17]. The
conception of that Empire was too universal, too august, too enduring.
It was everywhere around them, and they could remember no time
when it had not been so. It had no association of people or place
whose fall could seem to involve that of the whole fabric; it had that
connection with the Christian Church which made it all-embracing and
venerable.
There were especially two ideas whereon it rested,
The belief in its
eternity.
and from which it obtained a peculiar strength and a
peculiar direction. The one was the belief that as the
dominion of Rome was universal, so must it be eternal. Nothing like it
had been seen before. The empire of Alexander had lasted a short
lifetime; and within its wide compass were included many arid wastes,
and many tracts where none but the roving savage had ever set foot.
That of the Italian city had for fourteen generations embraced all the
most wealthy and populous regions of the civilized world, and had laid
the foundations of its power so deep that they seemed destined to last
for ever. If Rome moved slowly for a time, her foot was always planted
firmly: the ease and swiftness of her later conquests proved the solidity
of the earlier; and to her, more justly than to his own city, might the
boast of the Athenian historian be applied: that she advanced farthest
in prosperity, and in adversity drew back the least. From the end of the
republican period her poets, her orators, her jurists, ceased not to
repeat the claim of world-dominion, and confidently predict its
eternity[18]. The proud belief of his countrymen which Virgil had
expressed—
'His ego nec metas rerum, nec tempora pono:
Imperium sine fine dedi'—

was shared by the early Christians when they prayed for the
persecuting power whose fall would bring Antichrist upon earth.
Lactantius writes: 'When Rome the head of the world shall have fallen,
who can doubt that the end is come of human things, aye, of the earth
itself. She, she alone is the state by which all things are upheld even
until now; wherefore let us make prayers and supplications to the God
of heaven, if indeed his decrees and his purposes can be delayed, that
that hateful tyrant come not sooner than we look for, he for whom are
reserved fearful deeds, who shall pluck out that eye in whose extinction
the world itself shall perish[19].' With the triumph of Christianity this
belief had found a new basis. For as the Empire had decayed, the
Church had grown stronger; and now while the one, trembling at the
approach of the destroyer, saw province after province torn away, the
other, rising in stately youth, prepared to fill her place and govern in
her name, and in doing so, to adopt and sanctify and propagate anew
the notion of a universal and unending state.
The second chief element in this conception was the
Sanctity of the
imperial name.
association of such a state with one irresponsible
governor, the Emperor. The hatred to the name of
King, which their earliest political struggles had left in the Romans, by
obliging their ruler to take a new and strange title, marked him off from
all the other sovereigns of the world. To the provincials especially he
became an awful impersonation of the great machine of government
which moved above and around them. It was not merely that he was,
like a modern king, the centre of power and the dispenser of honour:
his pre-eminence, broken by no comparison with other princes, by the
ascending ranks of no aristocracy, had in it something almost
supernatural. The right of legislation had become vested in him alone:
the decrees of the people, and resolutions of the senate, and edicts of
the magistrates were, during the last three centuries, replaced by
imperial constitutions; his domestic council, the consistory, was the
supreme court of appeal; his interposition, like that of some terrestrial
Providence, was invoked, and legally provided so to be, to reverse or
overleap the ordinary rules of law[20]. From the time of Julius and
Augustus his person had been hallowed by the office of chief pontiff[21]
and the tribunician power; to swear by his head was considered the
most solemn of all oaths[22]; his effigy was sacred[23], even on a coin;
to him or to his Genius temples were erected and divine honours paid
while he lived[24]; and when, as it was expressed, he ceased to be
among men, the title of Divus was accorded to him, after a solemn
consecration[25]. In the confused multiplicity of mythologies, the
worship of the Emperor was the only worship common to the whole
Roman world, and was therefore that usually proposed as a test to the
Christians on their trial. Under the new religion the form of adoration
vanished, the sentiment of reverence remained: the right to control
Church as well as State, admitted at Nicæa, and habitually exercised by
the sovereigns of Constantinople, made the Emperor hardly less
essential to the new conception of a world-wide Christian monarchy
than he had been to the military despotism of old. These
considerations explain why the men of the fifth century, clinging to
preconceived ideas, refused to believe in that dissolution of the Empire
which they saw with their own eyes. Because it could not die, it lived.
And there was in the slowness of the change and its external aspect,
as well as in the fortunes of the capital, something to favour the
illusion. The Roman name was shared by every subject; the Roman city
was no longer the seat of government, nor did her capture extinguish
the imperial power, for the maxim was now accepted, Where the
Emperor is, there is Rome[26]. But her continued existence, not
permanently occupied by any conqueror, striking the nations with an
awe which the history or the external splendours of Constantinople,
Milan, or Ravenna could nowise inspire, was an ever new assertion of
the endurance of the Roman race and dominion. Dishonoured and
defenceless, the spell of her name was still strong enough to arrest the
conqueror in the moment of triumph. The irresistible impulse that drew
Alaric was one of glory or revenge, not of destruction: the Hun turned
back from Aquileia with a vague fear upon him: the Ostrogoth adorned
and protected his splendid prize.
In the history of the last days of the Western Empire,
Last days of the
Western Empire.
two points deserve special remark: its continued
union with the Eastern branch, and the way in which
its ideal dignity was respected while its representatives were despised.
After Stilicho's death, and Alaric's invasion, its fall was a question of
time. While one by one the provinces were abandoned by the central
government, left either to be occupied by invading tribes or to maintain
a precarious independence, like Britain and Armorica[27] , by means of
municipal unions, Italy lay at the mercy of the barbarian auxiliaries and
was governed by their leaders. The degenerate line of Theodosius
might have seemed to reign by hereditary right, but after their
extinction in Valentinian III each phantom Emperor—Maximus, Avitus,
Majorian, Anthemius, Olybrius—received the purple from the haughty
Ricimer, general of the troops, only to be stripped of it when he
presumed to forget his dependence. Though the division between
Arcadius and Honorius had definitely severed the two realms for
administrative purposes, they were still supposed to constitute a single
Empire, and the rulers of the East interfered more than once to raise to
the Western throne princes they could not protect upon it. Ricimer's
insolence quailed before the shadowy grandeur of the imperial title: his
ambition, and Gundobald his successor's, were bounded by the name
of patrician. The bolder genius of Odoacer[28], general of the barbarian
auxiliaries, resolved to abolish an empty pageant, and extinguish the
title and office of Emperor of the West. Yet over him too the spell had
power; and as the Gaulish warrior had gazed on the silent majesty of
the senate in a deserted city, so the Herulian revered the power before
which the world had bowed, and though there was no force to check or
to affright him, shrank from grasping in his own barbarian hand the
sceptre of the Cæsars. When, at Odoacer's bidding, Romulus
Augustulus, the boy whom a whim of fate had chosen to be the last
native Cæsar of Rome, had formally announced his
Its extinction by
Odoacer, A.D. 476.
resignation to the senate, a deputation from that
body proceeded to the Eastern court to lay the
insignia of royalty at the feet of the Eastern Emperor Zeno. The West,
they declared, no longer required an Emperor of its own; one monarch
sufficed for the world; Odoacer was qualified by his wisdom and
courage to be the protector of their state, and upon him Zeno was
entreated to confer the title of patrician and the administration of the
Italian provinces[29]. The Emperor granted what he could not refuse,
and Odoacer, taking the title of King[30], continued the consular office,
respected the civil and ecclesiastical institutions of his subjects, and
ruled for fourteen years as the nominal vicar of the Eastern Emperor.
There was thus legally no extinction of the Western Empire at all, but
only a reunion of East and West. In form, and to some extent also in
the belief of men, things now reverted to their state during the first
two centuries of the Empire, save that Byzantium instead of Rome was
the centre of the civil government. The joint tenancy which had been
conceived by Diocletian, carried further by Constantine, renewed under
Valentinian I and again at the death of Theodosius, had come to an
end; once more did a single Emperor sway the sceptre of the world,
and head an undivided Catholic Church[31]. To those who lived at the
time, this year (476 A.D.) was no such epoch as it has since become,
nor was any impression made on men's minds commensurate with the
real significance of the event. For though it did not destroy the Empire
in idea, nor wholly even in fact, its consequences were from the first
great. It hastened the development of a Latin as opposed to Greek and
Oriental forms of Christianity: it emancipated the Popes: it gave a new
character to the projects and government of the Teutonic rulers of the
West. But the importance of remembering its formal aspect to those
who witnessed it will be felt as we approach the era when the Empire
was revived by Charles the Frank.
Odoacer's monarchy was not more oppressive than
Odoacer.
those of his neighbours in Gaul, Spain, and Africa.
But the mercenary fœderati who supported it were a
loose swarm of predatory tribes: themselves without cohesion, they
could take no firm root in Italy. During the eighteen years of his reign
no progress seems to have been made towards the re-organization of
society; and the first real attempt to blend the peoples and maintain
the traditions of Roman wisdom in the hands of a new and vigorous
race was reserved for a more famous chieftain, the greatest of all the
barbarian conquerors, the forerunner of the first barbarian Emperor,
Theodoric the Ostrogoth. The aim of his reign,
Theodoric.
though he professed allegiance to the Eastern court
which had favoured his invasion[32], was the
establishment of a national monarchy in Italy. Brought up as a hostage
in the court of Byzantium, he learnt to know the advantages of an
orderly and cultivated society and the principles by which it must be
maintained; called in early manhood to roam as a warrior-chief over
the plains of the Danube, he acquired along with the arts of command
a sense of the superiority of his own people in valour and energy and
truth. When the defeat and death of Odoacer had left the peninsula at
his mercy, he sought no further conquest, easy as it would have been
to tear away new provinces from the Eastern realm, but strove only to
preserve and strengthen the ancient polity of Rome, to breathe into her
decaying institutions the spirit of a fresh life, and without endangering
the military supremacy of his own Goths, to conciliate by indulgence
and gradually raise to the level of their masters the degenerate
population of Italy. The Gothic nation appears from the first less cruel
in war and more prudent in council than any of their Germanic
brethren[33] : all that was most noble among them shone forth now in
the rule of the greatest of the Amali. From his palace at Verona[34],
commemorated in the song of the Nibelungs, he issued equal laws for
Roman and Goth, and bade the intruder, if he must occupy part of the
lands, at least respect the goods and the person of his fellow-subject.
Jurisprudence and administration remained in native hands: two annual
consuls, one named by Theodoric, the other by the Eastern monarch,
presented an image of the ancient state; and while agriculture and the
arts revived in the provinces, Rome herself celebrated the visits of a
master who provided for the wants of her people and preserved with
care the monuments of her former splendour. With peace and plenty
men's minds took hope, and the study of letters revived. The last
gleam of classical literature gilds the reign of the barbarian. By the
consolidation of the two races under one wise government, Italy might
have been spared six hundred years of gloom and degradation. It was
not so to be. Theodoric was tolerant, but toleration was itself a crime in
the eyes of his orthodox subjects: the Arian Goths were and remained
strangers and enemies among the Catholic Italians. Scarcely had the
sceptre passed from the hands of Theodoric to his unworthy offspring,
when Justinian, who had viewed with jealousy the
Italy reconquered,
by Justinian.
greatness of his nominal lieutenant, determined to
assert his dormant rights over Italy; its people
welcomed Belisarius as a deliverer, and in the struggle that followed
the race and name of the Ostrogoths perished for ever. Thus again
reunited in fact, as it had been all the while united in name, to the
Roman Empire, the peninsula was divided into counties and dukedoms,
and obeyed the exarch of Ravenna, viceroy of the Byzantine court, till
the arrival of the Lombards in A.D. 568 drove him from some districts,
and left him only a feeble authority in the rest.
Beyond the Alps, though the Roman population had
The Transalpine
now ceased to seek help from the Eastern court, the
provinces.
Empire's rights still subsisted in theory, and were
never legally extinguished. As has been said, they were admitted by
the conquerors themselves: by Athaulf, when he reigned in Aquitaine
as the vicar of Honorius, and recovered Spain from the Suevi to restore
it to its ancient masters; by the Visigothic kings of Spain, when they
permitted the Mediterranean cities to send tribute to Byzantium; by
Clovis, when, after the representatives of the old government, Syagrius
and the Armorican cities, had been overpowered or absorbed, he
received with delight from the Eastern emperor Anastasius the grant of
a Roman dignity to confirm his possession. Arrayed like a Fabius or
Valerius in the consul's embroidered robe, the Sicambrian chieftain
rode through the streets of Tours, while the shout of the provincials
hailed him Augustus[35]. They already obeyed him, but his power was
now legalised in their eyes, and it was not without a melancholy pride
that they saw the terrible conqueror himself yield to the spell of the
Roman name, and do homage to the enduring majesty of their
legitimate sovereign[36].
Yet the severed limbs of the Empire forgot by
Lingering influences
degrees their original unity. As in the breaking up of
of Rome.
the old society, which we trace from the sixth to the
eighth century, rudeness and ignorance grew apace, as language and
manners were changed by the infiltration of Teutonic settlers, as men's
thoughts and hopes and interests were narrowed by isolation from
their fellows, as the organization of the Roman province and the
Germanic tribe alike dissolved into a chaos whence the new order
began to shape itself, dimly and doubtfully as yet, the memory of the
old Empire, its symmetry, its sway, its civilization, must needs wane
and fade. It might have perished altogether but for the two enduring
witnesses Rome had left—her Church and her Law. The barbarians had
at first associated Christianity with the Romans from
Religion.
whom they learned it: the Romans had used it as
their only bulwark against oppression. The hierarchy
were the natural leaders of the people, and the necessary councillors of
the king. Their power grew with the extinction of civil government and
the spread of superstition; and when the Frank found it too valuable to
be abandoned to the vanquished people, he insensibly acquired the
feelings and policy of the order he entered.
As the Empire fell to pieces, and the new kingdoms which the
conquerors had founded themselves began to dissolve, the Church
clung more closely to her unity of faith and discipline, the common
bond of all Christian men. That unity must have a centre, that centre
was Rome. A succession of able and zealous pontiffs extended her
influence (the sanctity and the writings of Gregory the Great were
famous through all the West): never occupied by
Jurisprudence.
barbarians, she retained her peculiar character and
customs, and laid the foundations of a power over
men's souls more durable than that which she had lost over their
bodies[37]. Only second in importance to this influence was that which
was exercised by the permanence of the old law, and of its creature
the municipality. The barbarian invaders retained the customs of their
ancestors, characteristic memorials of a rude people, as we see them in
the Salic law or in the ordinances of Ina and Alfred. But the subject
population and the clergy continued to be governed by that elaborate
system which the genius and labour of many generations had raised to
be the most lasting monument of Roman greatness.
The civil law had maintained itself in Spain and Southern Gaul, nor was
it utterly forgotten even in the North, in Britain, on the borders of
Germany. Revised editions of the Theodosian code were issued by the
Visigothic and Burgundian princes. For some centuries it was the
patrimony of the subject population everywhere, and in Aquitaine and
Italy has outlived feudalism. The presumption in later times was that all
men were to be judged by it who could not be proved to be subject to
some other[38]. Its phrases, its forms, its courts, its subtlety and
precision, all recalled the strong and refined society which had
produced it. Other motives, as well as those of kindness to their
subjects, made the new kings favour it; for it exalted their prerogative,
and the submission enjoined by it on one class of their subjects soon
came to be demanded from the other, by their own laws the equals of
the prince. Considering attentively how many of the old institutions
continued to subsist, and studying the feelings of that time, as they are
faintly preserved in its scanty records, it seems hardly too much to say
that in the eighth century the Roman Empire still existed in the West:
existed in men's minds as a power weakened, delegated, suspended,
but not destroyed.
It is easy for those who read the history of an age in the light of those
that followed it, to perceive that in this men erred; that the tendency of
events was wholly different; that society had entered on a new phase,
wherein every change did more to localize authority and strengthen the
aristocratic principle at the expense of the despotic. We can see that
other forms of life, more full of promise for the distant future, had
already begun to shew themselves: they—with no type of power or
beauty, but that which had filled the imagination of their forefathers,
and now loomed on them grander than ever through the mist of
centuries—mistook, as it has been said of Rienzi in later days,
memories for hopes, and sighed only for the renewal of its strength.
Events were at hand by which these hopes seemed destined to be
gratified.
CHAPTER IV.

RESTORATION OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE.

It was towards Rome as their ecclesiastical capital that the thoughts


and hopes of the men of the sixth and seventh centuries were
constantly directed. Yet not from Rome, feeble and corrupt, nor on the
exhausted soil of Italy, was the deliverer to arise. Just when, as we
may suppose, the vision of a renewal of imperial authority in the
Western provinces was beginning to vanish away, there appeared in
the furthest corner of Europe, sprung of a race but lately brought
within the pale of civilization, a line of chieftains devoted to the service
of the Holy See, and among them one whose power, good fortune, and
heroic character pointed him out as worthy of a dignity to which
doctrine and tradition had attached a sanctity almost divine.
Of the new monarchies that had risen on the ruins of
The Franks.
Rome, that of the Franks was by far the greatest. In
the third century they appear, with Saxons,
Alemanni, and Thuringians, as one of the greatest German tribe
leagues. The Sicambri (for it seems probable that this famous race was
a chief source of the Frankish nation) had now laid aside their former
hostility to Rome, and her future representatives were thenceforth,
with few intervals, her faithful allies. Many of their chiefs rose to high
place: Malarich receives from Jovian the charge of the Western
provinces; Bauto and Mellobaudes figure in the days of Theodosius and
his sons; Meroveus (if Meroveus be a real name) fights under Aetius
against Attila in the great battle of Chalons; his countrymen endeavour
in vain to save Gaul from the Suevi and Burgundians. Not till the
Empire was evidently helpless did they claim a share of the booty; then
Clovis, or Chlodovech, chief of the Salian tribe, leaving his kindred the
Ripuarians in their seats on the lower Rhine, advances from Flanders to
wrest Gaul from the barbarian nations which had entered it some sixty
years before. Few conquerors have had a career of
A.D. 486.
more unbroken success. By the defeat of the Roman
governor Syagrius he was left master of the northern
provinces: the Burgundian kingdom in the valley of the Rhone was in
no long time reduced to dependence: last of all, the Visigothic power
was overthrown in one great battle, and Aquitaine added to the
dominions of Clovis. Nor were the Frankish arms less prosperous on the
other side of the Rhine. The victory of Tolbiac led to the submission of
the Alemanni: their allies the Bavarians followed, and when the
Thuringian power had been broken by Theodorich I (son of Clovis), the
Frankish league embraced all the tribes of western and southern
Germany. The state thus formed, stretching from the Bay of Biscay to
the Inn and the Ems, was of course in no sense a French, that is to
say, a Gallic monarchy. Nor, although the widest and strongest empire
that had yet been founded by a Teutonic race, was it, under the
Merovingian kings, a united kingdom at all, but rather a congeries of
principalities, held together by the predominance of a single nation and
a single family, who ruled in Gaul as masters over a subject race, and
in Germany exercised a sort of hegemony among kindred and scarcely
inferior tribes. But towards the middle of the eighth century a change
began. Under the rule of Pipin of Herstal and his son Charles Martel,
mayors of the palace to the last feeble Merovingians, the Austrasian
Franks in the lower Rhineland became acknowledged heads of the
nation, and were able, while establishing a firmer government at home,
to direct its whole strength in projects of foreign ambition. The form
those projects took arose from a circumstance which has not yet been
mentioned. It was not solely or even chiefly to their own valour that
the Franks owed their past greatness and the yet loftier future which
awaited them, it was to the friendship of the clergy and the favour of
the Apostolic See. The other Teutonic nations, Goths, Vandals,
Burgundians, Suevians, Lombards, had been most of them converted
by Arian missionaries who proceeded from the Roman Empire during
the short period when Arian doctrines were in the ascendant. The
Franks, who were among the latest converts, were Catholics from the
first, and gladly accepted the clergy as their teachers and allies. Thus it
was that while the hostility of their orthodox subjects destroyed the
Vandal kingdom in Africa and the Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy, the
eager sympathy of the priesthood enabled the Franks to vanquish their
Burgundian and Visigothic enemies, and made it comparatively easy for
them to blend with the Roman population in the provinces. They had
done good service against the Saracens of Spain; they had aided the
English Boniface in his mission to the heathen of Germany[39]; and at
length, as the most powerful among Catholic nations, they attracted
the eyes of the ecclesiastical head of the West, now sorely bested by
domestic foes.
Since the invasion of Alboin, Italy had groaned under
Italy: the Lombards.
a complication of evils. The Lombards who had
entered along with that chief in A.D. 568 had settled
in considerable numbers in the valley of the Po, and founded the
duchies of Spoleto and Benevento, leaving the rest of the country to be
governed by the exarch of Ravenna as viceroy of the Eastern crown.
This subjection was, however, little better than nominal. Although too
few to occupy the whole peninsula, the invaders were yet strong
enough to harass every part of it by inroads which met with no
resistance from a population unused to arms, and without the spirit to
use them in self-defence. More cruel and repulsive, if we may believe
the evidence of their enemies, than any other of the Northern tribes,
the Lombards were certainly singular in their aversion to the clergy,
never admitting them to the national councils. Tormented by their
repeated attacks, Rome sought help in vain from Byzantium, whose
forces, scarce able to repel from their walls the Avars and Saracens,
could give no support to the distant exarch of Ravenna. The Popes
were the Emperor's subjects; they awaited his
The Popes.
confirmation, like other bishops; they had more than
once been the victims of his anger[40]. But as the
city became more accustomed in independence, and the Pope rose to a
predominance, real if not yet legal, his tone grew bolder than that of
the Eastern patriarchs. In the controversies that had raged in the
Church, he had had the wisdom or good fortune to espouse (though
not always from the first) the orthodox side: it was now by another
quarrel of religion that his deliverance from an unwelcome yoke was
accomplished[41].
The Emperor Leo, born among the Isaurian
Iconoclastic
controversy.
mountains, where a purer faith may yet have
lingered, and stung by the Mohammedan taunt of
idolatry, determined to abolish the worship of images, which seemed
fast obscuring the more spiritual part of Christianity. An attempt
sufficient to cause tumults among the submissive Greeks, excited in
Italy a fiercer commotion. The populace rose with one heart in defence
of what had become to them more than a symbol: the exarch was
slain: the Pope, though unwilling to sever himself from the lawful head
and protector of the Church, must yet excommunicate the prince whom
he could not reclaim from so hateful a heresy. Liudprand, king of the
Lombards, improved his opportunity: falling on the exarchate as the
champion of images, on Rome as the minister of the Greek Emperor, he
overran the one, and all but succeeded in capturing the other. The
Pope escaped for the moment, but saw his peril; placed between a
heretic and a robber, he turned his gaze beyond the Alps, to a Catholic
chief who had just achieved a signal deliverance for Christendom on
the field of Poitiers. Gregory II had already opened communications
with Charles Martel, mayor of the palace, and virtual ruler of the
Frankish realm[42]. As the crisis becomes more
The Popes appeal to
the Franks. pressing, Gregory III finds in the same quarter his
only hope, and appeals to him, in urgent letters, to
haste to the succour of Holy Church[43]. Some accounts add that
Charles was offered, in the name of the Roman people, the office of
consul and patrician. It is at least certain that here begins the
connection of the old imperial seat with the rising German power: here
first the pontiff leads a political movement, and shakes off the ties that
bound him to his legitimate sovereign. Charles died before he could
obey the call; but his son Pipin (surnamed the Short) made good use of
the new friendship with Rome. He was the third of his family who had
ruled the Franks with a monarch's full power: it seemed time to abolish
the pageant of Merovingian royalty; yet a departure from the ancient
line might shock the feelings of the people. A course was taken whose
dangers no one then foresaw: the Holy See, now for the first time
invoked as an international power, pronounced the deposition of
Childeric, and gave to the royal office of his successor Pipin a sanctity
hitherto unknown; adding to the old Frankish election, which consisted
in raising the chief on a shield amid the clash of arms, the Roman
diadem and the Hebrew rite of anointing. The compact between the
chair of Peter and the Teutonic throne was hardly sealed, when the
latter was summoned to discharge its share of the duties. Twice did
Aistulf the Lombard assail Rome, twice did Pipin descend to the rescue:
the second time at the bidding of a letter written in the name of St.
Peter himself[44]. Aistulf could make no resistance;
Pipin patrician of
the Romans, A.D. and the Frank bestowed on the Papal chair all that
754. belonged to the exarchate in North Italy, receiving as
the meed of his services the title of Patrician[45].
As a foreshadowing of the higher dignity that was to
Import of this title.
follow, this title requires a passing notice. Introduced
by Constantine at a time when its original meaning
had been long forgotten, it was designed to be, and for awhile
remained, the name not of an office but of a rank, the highest after
those of emperor and consul. As such, it was usually conferred upon
provincial governors of the first class, and in time also upon barbarian
potentates whose vanity the Roman court might wish to flatter. Thus
Odoacer, Theodoric, the Burgundian king Sigismund, Clovis himself, had
all received it from the Eastern emperor; so too in still later times it
was given to Saracenic and Bulgarian princes[46]. In the sixth and
seventh centuries an invariable practice seems to have attached it to
the Byzantine viceroys of Italy, and thus, as we may conjecture, a
natural confusion of ideas had made men take it to be, in some sense,
an official title, conveying an extensive though undefined authority, and
implying in particular the duty of overseeing the Church and promoting
her temporal interests. It was doubtless with such a meaning that the
Romans and their bishop bestowed it upon the Frankish kings, acting
quite without legal right, for it could emanate from the emperor alone,
but choosing it as the title which bound its possessor to render to the
Church support and defence against her Lombard foes. Hence the
phrase is always 'Patricius Romanorum;' not, as in former times,
'Patricius' alone: hence it is usually associated with the terms 'defensor'
and 'protector.' And since 'defence' implies a corresponding measure of
obedience on the part of those who profit by it, there must have been
conceded to the new patrician more or less of the positive authority in
Rome, although not such as to extinguish the supremacy of the
Emperor.
So long indeed as the Franks were separated by a
Extinction of the
hostile kingdom from their new allies, this control
Lombard kingdom
by Charles king of remained little better than nominal. But when on
the Franks. Pipin's death the restless Lombards again took up
arms and menaced the possessions of the Church,
A.D. 774. Pipin's son Charles or Charlemagne swept down like
a whirlwind from the Alps at the call of Pope Hadrian,
seized king Desiderius in his capital, assumed himself the Lombard
crown, and made northern Italy thenceforward an integral part of the
Frankish empire. Proceeding to Rome at the head of his victorious
army, the first of a long line of Teutonic kings who were to find her love
more deadly than her hate, he was received by Hadrian with
distinguished honours, and welcomed by the people as their leader and
deliverer. Yet even then, whether out of policy or from that sentiment
of reverence to which his ambitious mind did not refuse to bow, he was
moderate in claims of jurisdiction, he yielded to the pontiff the place of
honour in processions, and renewed, although in the guise of a lord
and conqueror, the gift of the Exarchate and Pentapolis, which Pipin
had made to the Roman Church twenty years before.
It is with a strange sense, half of sadness, half of
Charles and
amusement, that in watching the progress of this
Hadrian.
grand historical drama, we recognise the meaner
motives by which its chief actors were influenced. The Frankish king
and the Roman pontiff were for the time the two most powerful forces
that urged the movement of the world, leading it on by swift steps to a
mighty crisis of its fate, themselves guided, as it might well seem, by
the purest zeal for its spiritual welfare. Their words and acts, their
whole character and bearing in the sight of expectant Christendom,
were worthy of men destined to leave an indelible impress on their own
and many succeeding ages. Nevertheless in them too appears the
undercurrent of vulgar human desires and passions. The lofty and
fervent mind of Charles was not free from the stirrings of personal
ambition: yet these may be excused, if not defended, as almost
inseparable from an intense and restless genius, which, be it never so
unselfish in its ends, must in pursuing them fix upon everything its
grasp and raise out of everything its monument. The policy of the
Popes was prompted by motives less noble. Ever since the extinction of
the Western Empire had emancipated the ecclesiastical potentate from
secular control, the first and most abiding object of his schemes and
prayers had been the acquisition of territorial wealth in the
neighbourhood of his capital. He had indeed a sort of justification—for
Rome, a city with neither trade nor industry, was crowded with poor,
for whom it devolved on the bishop to provide. Yet the pursuit was one
which could not fail to pervert the purposes of the Popes and give a
sinister character to all they did. It was this fear for the lands of the
Church far more than for religion or the safety of the city—neither of
which were really endangered by the Lombard attacks—that had
prompted their passionate appeals to Charles Martel and Pipin; it was
now the well-grounded hope of having these possessions confirmed
and extended by Pipin's greater son that made the Roman ecclesiastics
so forward in his cause. And it was the same lust after worldly wealth
and pomp, mingled with the dawning prospect of an independent
principality, that now began to seduce them into a long course of guile
and intrigue. For this is probably the very time, although the exact date
cannot be established, to which must be assigned the extraordinary
forgery of the Donation of Constantine, whereby it was pretended that
power over Italy and the whole West had been granted by the first
Christian Emperor to Pope Sylvester and his successors in the Chair of
the Apostle.
For the next twenty-four years Italy remained quiet.
Accession of Pope
Leo III, A.D. 796.
The government of Rome was carried on in the name
of the Patrician Charles, although it does not appear
that he sent thither any official representative; while at the same time
both the city and the exarchate continued to admit the nominal
supremacy of the Eastern Emperor, employing the years of his reign to
date documents. In A.D. 796, Leo the Third succeeded Pope Hadrian,
and signalized his devotion to the Frankish throne by sending to
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