CHAP. XLV. His memory was embalmed by the public affliction; but the most sincere grief evaporates in the tumult of a new reign, and the eyes and acclamations of mankind were The reign speedily directed to the rising sun. The emperor Maurice derived his origin from ancient Rome; 29 but his immediate parents were settled at Arabissus in Cappadocia, and their singular felicity preserved them alive to behold and partake the fortune of their august son. The youth of Maurice was spent in the profession of arms; Tiberius promoted him to the command of a new and favourite legion of twelve thousand confederates; his valour and conduct were signalized in the Persian war; and he returned to Constantinople to accept, as his just reward, the inheritance of the empire. Maurice ascended the throne at the mature age of forty-three years; and he reigned above twenty years over the East and over himself; 30 expelling from his mind the wild democracy of passions, and establishing (according to the quaint expression of Evagrius) a perfect aristocracy of reason and virtue. Some suspicion will degrade the testimony of a subject, though he protests that his secret praise should never reach the ear of his sovereign,31 and some failings seem to place the character of Maurice below the purer merit of his predecessor. His cold and reserved demeanour might be imputed to arrogance; his justice was not always exempt from cruelty, nor his clemency from weakness; and his rigid economy too often exposed him to the reproach of avarice. But the rational wishes of an absolute monarch must tend to the happiness of his people; 29 It is therefore singular enough that Paul (1. iii. c. 15), should distinguish him as the first Greek emperor...primus ex Græcorum genere in Imperio constitutus. His immediate predecessors had indeed been born in the Latin provinces of Europe; and a various reading, in Græcorum Imperio, would apply the expression to the empire rather than the prince. 30 Consult, for the charac er and reign of Maurice, the fifth and sixth bocks of Evagrius, particularly 1. vi. c. 1; the eight books of his prolix and florid history by Theophylace Siocatta. Theophanes, p. 213, &c Zonaras, tom. i. I. xiv. p 73. Cedrenus, p. 394. 31 Αυτοκρατωρ οντως γενόμενος την μεν οχλοκραείαν των παθών εκ της οικείας εξενηλατησε ψυχης αριςοκρατειαν δε εν τοις εαυτό dozioμois naтasnjaμevos. Evagrius com cd his history in the twelfth year of Maurice; and he had been so wisely indiscreet, that the emperor knew and rewarded his favourable opinion. (1. vi. c. 24). of Mau- A. D. 582, A. D. 602, Nov. 27. CHAP. Distress of Maurice was endowed with sense and courage to promote that happiness, and his administration was directed by the principles and example of Tiberius. The pusillanimity of the Greeks had introduced so complete a separation between the offices of king and of general, that a private soldier who had deserved and obtained the purple, seldom or never appeared at the head of his armies. Yet the emperor Maurice enjoyed the glory of restoring the Persian monarch to his throne: his lieutenants waged a doubtful war against the Avars of the Danube, and he cast an eye of pity, of ineffectual pity, on the abject and distressful state of his Italian provinces. From Italy the emperors were incessantly tormented by tales of misery and demands of succour, which extorted the humiliating confession of their own weakness. The expiring dignity of Rome was only marked by the freedom and energy of her complaints: "If you are in"capable," she said, " of delivering us from the sword of "the Lombards, save us at least from the calamity of "famine." Tiberius forgave the reproach, and relieved the distress: a supply of corn was transported from Egypt to the Tyber; and the Roman people, invoking the name, not of Camillus, but of St. Peter, repulsed the Barbarians from their walls. But the relief was accidental, the danger was perpetual and pressing; and the clergy and senate, collecting the remains of their ancient opulence, a sum of three thousand pounds of gold, dispatched the patrician Pamphronius to lay their gifts and their complaints at the foot of the Byzantine throne. The attention of the court, and the forces of the East, were diverted by the Persian war: but the justice of Tiberius applied the subsidy to the defence of the city; and he dismissed the patrician with his best advice, either to bribe the Lombard chiefs, or to purchase the aid of the kings of France. Notwithstanding this weak invention, Italy was still afflicted, Rome was again besieged, and the suburb of Classe, only three miles from Ravenna, was pillaged and occupied by the troops of a simple duke of Spoleto. Maurice gave audience to a second deputation of priests and senators; the duties and the menaces of reli gion were forcibly urged in the letters of the Roman pontiff; and his nuncio, the deacon Gregory, was alike qualified to solicit the powers either of heaven or of the earth. The emperor adopted, with stronger effect, the measures of his predecessor: some formidable chiefs were persuaded to embrace the friendship of the Romans; and one of them, a mild and faithful Barbarian, lived and died in the service of the exarch; the passes of the Alps were delivered to the Franks; and the pope encouraged them to violate, without scruple, their oaths and engagements to the misbelievers. Childebert, the great-grandson of Clovis, was persuaded to invade Italy by the payment of fifty thousand pieces; but as he had viewed with delight some Byzantine coin of the weight of one pound of gold, the king of Austrasia might stipulate, that the gift should be rendered more worthy of his acceptance, by a proper mixture of these respectable medals. The dukes of the Lombards had provoked by frequent inroads their powerful neighbours of Gaul. As soon as they were apprehensive of a just retaliation, they renounced their feeble and disorderly independence: the advantages of regal government, union, secrecy, and vigour, were unanimously confessed: and Autharis, the son of Clepho, had already attained the strength and reputation of a warrior. Under the standard of their new king, the conquerors of Italy withstood three successive invasions, one of which was led by Childebert himself, the last of the Merovingian race who descended from the Alps. The first expedition was defeated by the jealous animosity of the Franks and Alemanni. In the second they were vanquished in a bloody battle, with more loss and dishonour than they had sustained since the foundation of their monarchy. Impatient for revenge, they returned a third time with accumulated force, and Autharis yielded to the fury of the torrent. The troops and treasures of the Lombards were distributed in the walled towns between the Alps and the Apennine. A nation, less sensible of danger, than of fatigue and delay, soon murmured against the folly of their twenty commanders; and the hot vapours of an Italian sun infected with disease those tramontane bodies 3 F VOL. V. CHAP. XLV. Autharis, king of the Lombards, A. D. 584...590. CHAP. The exarchate of which had already suffered the vicissitudes of intem- During a period of two hundred years, Italy was unRavenna. equally divided between the kingdom of the Lombards and the exarchate of Ravenna. The offices and professions, which the jealousy of Constantine had separated, were united by the indulgence of Justinian: and eighteen successive exarchs were invested, in the decline of the empire, with the full remains of civil, of military, and even of ecclesiastical power. Their immediate jurisdiction, which was afterwards consecrated as the patrimony of St. Peter, extended over the modern Romagna, the marshes or vallies of Ferrara and Commachio,34 five 32 The Columna Rhegina, in the narrowest part of the Faro of Messina, one hundred stadia from Rhegium itself, is frequently mentioned in ancient geopraphy. Cluver. Ital. Antiq. tom. ii. p. 1295. Lucas Holstein. Annotat. ad Cluver. p. 301. Wesseling, Itinerar. p. 106. 33 The Greek historians afford some faint hints of the wars of Italy (Menander, in Excerpt. Legat. p. 124. 126. Theophylact. I. iii. c. 4). The Latins are more satisfactory; and especially Paul Warnefrid (1. iii. c. 13.... 34), who had read the more ancient histories of Secundus and Gregory of Tours. Baronius produces some letters of the popes, &c.; and the times are measured by the accurate scale of Pagi and Muratori. 34 The papal advocates, Zacagni and Fontanini, might justly claim the valley or morass of Cominachio as a part of the exarchate. But the am maritime cities from Rimini to Ancona, and a second, inland Pentapolis, between the Adriatic coast and the hills of the Apennine. Three subordinate provinces, of Rome, of Venice, and of Naples, which were divided by hostile lands from the palace of Ravenna, acknowledged, both in peace and war, the supremacy of the exarch. The dutchy of Rome appears to have included the Tuscan, Sabine, and Latian conquests, of the first four hundred years of the city, and the limits may be distinctly traced along the coast, from Civita Vecchia, to Terracina, and with the course of the Tyber from Ameria and Narni to the port of Ostia. The numerous islands from Grado to Chiozza, composed the infant dominion of Venice; but the more accessible towns on the continent were overthrown by the Lombards, who beheld with impotent fury a new capital rising from the waves. The power of the dukes of Naples was circumscribed by the bay and the adjacent isles, by the hostile territory of Capua, and by the Roman colony of Amalphi,35 whose industrious citizens, by the invention of the mariner's compass, have unveiled the face of the globe. The three islands of Sardinia, Corsica, and Sicily, still adhered to the empire; and the acquisition of the farther Calabria removed the landmark of Autharis from the shore of Rhegium to the isthmus of Consentia. In Sardinia, the savage mountaineers preserved the liberty and religion of their ancestors; but the husbandmen of Sicily were chained to their rich and cultivated soil. Rome was oppressed by the iron sceptre of the exarchs, and a Greek, perhaps an eunuch, insulted with impunity the ruins of the Capitol. But Naples soon acquired the privilege of electing her own dukes:36 the independence of Amalphi was the fruit of commerce; and the voluntary attachment of Venice was finally ennobled by an equal alliance with the eastern empire. On the map of Italy, the measure of the exarchate occupies a very in bition of including Modena, Reggio, Parma, and Placentia, has darkened a geographical question somewhat doubtful and obscure. Even Muratori, as the servant of the house of Este, is not free from partiality and prejudice. 35 See Brencmann, Dissert. 1ma de Republica Amalphitanâ, p. 1...42. ad calcem Hist. Pandect. Florent. 36 Gregor. Magn. I. i. epist. 23, 25, 26, 27. CHAP. XLV. |