 section 10 Europe and the faith this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Europe and the Faith by Hiller Baloch section 10 chapter 2 concluded. Saint Ignatius talking about the origin and present character of the Catholic Church is exactly in the position in the matter of dates of a man of our time talking about the rise and present character of the socialists or of the rise and present character of Leopold's Kingdom of Belgium of United Italy the modern he is talking of what is virtually his own time well there comes after this considerable body of contemporary documentary evidence evidence contemporary that is with the very spring and rising of the church and proceeding from its first founders a gap which is somewhat more than the long lifetime of a man this gap is with difficulty bridged the vast mass of its documentary evidence as of course perished as has the vast mass of all ancient writing the little preserved is mainly preserved in quotations and fragments but after this gap from somewhat before the year 200 we come to the beginning of a regular series and a series increasing of volume of documentary evidence not I repeat of evidence to the truth of supernatural doctrines but of evidence to what these doctrines and their accompanying ritual and organization were evidence to the way in which the church was constituted to the way in which she regarded her mission to the things she thought important to the practice of her rights that is why I've taken the early third century as the moment in which we can first take a full historical view of the Catholic Church in being and this picture is full of evidence to the state of the church in its origins three generations before I say again it is all important for the reader who desires the true historical picture to seize the sequence of the dates with which we are dealing their relation to the length of human life and therefore to the society to which they relate it is all important because the false history which has had its own way for so many years is based upon two full suggestions of the first magnitude the first is the suggestion that the period between the crucifixion and the full church of the third century was one in which vast changes could proceed unobserved and vast perversions of the original ideas be rapidly developed the second is that the space of time during which those changes are supposed to have taken place was sufficient to account for them it is only because those days are remote from ours that such suggestions can be made if we put ourselves by an effort of the imagination into the surroundings of that period we can soon discover how false these suggestions are the period was not one favorable to the interruption of record it was one of a very high culture the proportion of curious intellectual and skeptical men which that society contained was perhaps greater than in any other period with which we are acquainted it was certainly greater than it is today those times were certainly less susceptible to mere novel assertion than are the crowds of our great cities under the influence of the modern press it was a period astonishingly alive lethargy and decay had not yet touched the world of the empire it built red traveled discussed and above all criticized with an enormous energy in general it was no period during which alien fashions could rise within such a community as the church without their opponents being immediately able to combat them by an appeal to the evidence of the immediate past the world in which the church arose was one and that world was intensely vivid anyone in that world who saw such an institution as a episcopacy for instance or such a doctrine as the divinity of Christ to be a novel corruption of the originals could have and would have protested at once it was a world of ample record and continual communication granted such a world let us take the second point and see what was the distance in mere time between this early third century of which I speak and what is called the apostolic period that is the generation which could still remember the origins of the church in Jerusalem and the preaching of the gospel in greece Italian and perhaps African cities we are often told that changes gradually crept in that the imperceptible effect of time did this or that let us see how these vague phrases stand the test of confrontation with actual dates let us stand in the year 200 to 210 consider a man that advanced in years well read and traveled and present in those first years of the third century at the celebration of the Eucharist there were many such men who if they had been able to do so would have reproved novelties and denounced perverted tradition that none did so is a sufficient proof that the main lines of Catholic government and practice had developed unbroken and unwarped from at least his own childhood but an old man who so witnessed the Constitution of the church and its practices as I have described them in the year 200 would correspond to that generation of old people whom we have with us today the old people who were born in the late 20s or 30s of the 19th century the old people who can just remember the English reform bill and who were almost grown up during the troubles of 1848 and the establishment of the second empire in Paris the old people in the United States who can remember as children the election of Van Buren to the office of president the old people whose birth was not far removed from the death of Thomas Jefferson and who were grown men and women when gold was first discovered in California well pursuing that parallel consider next the persecution under Negro it was the great event to which the Christians would refer as a date in the early history of the church it took place in apostolic times yet affected men who though aged could easily remember Judea in the years connected with our Lord's mission and his passion Saint Peter lived to witness in that persecution to the faith Saint John survived it it came not 40 years later than the day of Pentecost but the persecution under Negro was to an old man such as I have supposed assisting at the Eucharist in the early part of the 3rd century no further off than the declaration of independence is from the old people of our generation an old man in the year 200 could certainly remember many who had themselves been witnesses of the apostolic aid just as an old man today remembers well men who saw the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars the old people who had surrounded his childhood would be to Saint Paul Saint Peter and Saint John what the old people who survived say to 1845 would have been to Jefferson to Lafayette or to the younger pit they could have seen and talked to that first generation of the church as the corresponding people surviving in the early 19th century could have seen and talked with the founders of the United States it is quite impossible to imagine that the Eucharistic sacrifice the right of initiation baptism in the name of the Trinity the establishment of an Episcopacy the fierce defensive unity and orthodoxy and all those main lines of Catholicism which we find to be the very essence of the church in the early 3rd century could have risen without protest they cannot have come from innocent natural uncivilized perversion of an original so very recent and so open to every form of examination that there should have been discussion as to the definition and meaning of undecided doctrines is natural and fits with both dates and with the atmosphere of the period and the character of the subject but that a whole scheme of Christian government and doctrine should have been developed in contradiction of Christian origins and yet without protest in a period so brilliantly living full of such rapid intercommunication and above all so brief is quite impossible that is what history has to say of the early church in the Roman Empire the Gospels the Acts the canonical epistles and those of Clement and Ignatius may tell a true or a false story their authors may have written under an illusion or from a conscious self-deception or they may have been supremely true and immutably sincere but they are contemporary a man may respect their divine origin or he may despise their claims to instruct the human race but that the Christian body from its beginning was not Christianity but a church and that church was identically one with what was already called long before the 3rd century the Catholic church is simply plain history as plain and as straightforward as the history let us say of municipal institutions in contemporary gall it is history indefinitely better proved and therefore indefinitely more certain than let us say modern guesswork on imaginary to tonic institutions before the 8th century or the still more imaginary Aryan origins of the European race or any other of the pseudo scientific hypotheses which still try to pass for historical truth footnote the moratorium fragment is older than the 3rd century and Saint Ignatius who also uses the word Catholic was as near to the time of the Gospels as I am to the Crimean War so much for the Catholic Church in the early 3rd century when first we have a mass of evidence upon it it is a highly disciplined powerful rowing body and Tent on unity ruled by bishops having for its central doctrine the incarnation of God in an historical person Jesus Christ and for its central right a mystery the transformation of bread and wine by priests into the body and blood which the faithful consume this state within the states by the year 200 already had affected the Empire in the next generation it permeated the Empire it was already transforming European civilization by the year 200 the thing was done as the Empire declined the Catholic Church caught and preserved it what was the process of that decline to answer such a question we have next to observe three developments that followed the great increase of barbarian hired soldiery within the Empire the weakening of the central power as compared with the local power of the small and increasingly rich class of great land owners the rise of the Catholic Church from an admitted position and soon a predominating position to complete mastery over all society all these three phenomena developed together they occupied about 200 years roughly from the year 300 to the year 500 when they had run their course the Western Empire was no longer governed as one society from one Imperial Center the chance heads of certain auxiliary forces in the Roman army drawn from barbaric recruitment had established themselves in the various provinces and were calling themselves Kings the Catholic Church was everywhere the religion of the great majority it had everywhere alliance with and often the use of the official machinery of government and taxation which continued unbroken it had become far beyond all the other organisms in the Roman state the central and typical organism which gave the European world its note this process is commonly called the fall of the Roman Empire what was that fall what really happened in this great transformation the end of section 10 the end of chapter 2 section 11 Europe and the faith this is a Libra Vox recording all Libra Vox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit Libra Vox org you're up and the faith by Hilaire Baloch section 11 chapter 3 what was the fall of the Roman Empire that state of society which I have just described the ordered and united society of the Roman Empire passed into another and very different state of society the society of what are called the Dark Ages from these again wrote after another 600 years of adventures and perils the great harvest of medieval civilization hardly had the Roman Empire turned in its maturity to accept the fruit of its long development I mean the Catholic Church when it began to grow old and was clearly about to suffer some great transition but that transition which threatened to be death proved in the issue not death at all but a mixture of vision and change the close succession of fruit and decay in society is what one expects from the analogy of all living things at the close of the cycle it is death that should come a plant just after it is most fruitful falls quickly so one might imagine should the long story of the Mediterranean civilization have proceeded when it was at its final and most complete stage one would expect some final and complete religion which should satisfy its long search and solve its ancient riddles but after such a discovery after the fruit of such a maturity had fully developed one would expect an end now it has been the singular fortune of our European civilization that an end did not come this solution was in some strange way checked death was a verdict and the more closely one looks into the unique history of that salvation the salvation of all that could be saved in a most ancient and fatigued society the more one sees that this salvation was affected by no agency save that of the Catholic Church everything else after say 250 AD the empty fashionable philosophies the barbarians filling the army the current passions and the current despair made for nothing but ruin there is no parallel to this survival in all the history of mankind every other great civilization has after many centuries of development either fallen into a fixed and sterile sameness or died and disappeared there is nothing left of Egypt there is nothing left of Assyria the eastern civilizations remain but remain immovable or if they change can only vulgarly copy external models but the civilization of Europe the civilization that is of Rome and the Empire had a third fortune differing both from death and from sterility it survived to a resurrection its essential seeds were preserved for a second spring for five or six hundred years men carved less well wrote verse less well let roads fall slowly into ruin lost or rather coarsened the machinery of government forgot or neglected much in letters and in the arts and in the sciences but there was preserved right through that long period not only so much of letters and of the arts as would suffice to bridge the great gulf between the 5th century and the 11th but also so much of what was really vital in the mind of Europe as would permit that mind to blossom again after its repose and the agency I repeat which affected this conservation of the seeds was the Catholic Church it is impossible to understand this truth indeed it is impossible to make any sense at all of European history if we accept that story of the decline which is currently put forward in anti-Catholic academies and which has seemed sufficient to anti-Catholic historians their version is briefly this the Roman Empire becoming corrupt and more vicious through the spread of luxury and through a sort of naive weakness to be discovered in the very blood of the Mediterranean was at last invaded and overwhelmed by young and vigorous tribes of Germans these brought with them all the strength of those native virtues which later rejected the unity of Christendom and began the modern Protestant societies which are already nearly atheist and very soon will be holy so a generic term has been invented by these modern and false historians whose version I am here giving the vigorous young uncorrupt and virtuous tribes which are imagined to have broken through the boundaries of the afeet Empire and to have rejuvenated it are grouped together as to tonic a German strain very strong numerically superior also to what was left of Roman civilization in viral power is said to have come in and to have taken over the handling of affairs one great body of these Germans the Franks are said to have taken over gall another the Goths in their various branches Italy and Spain but most complete most fruitful and most satisfactory of all they tell us was the eruption of these vigorous and healthy pagans into the outlying province of Britain which they wholly conquered exterminating its original inhabitants and colonizing it was their superior stock it was inevitable the anti-Catholic historian proceeds to admit that the presence of uncultured though superior men should accelerate the decline of arts in the society which they thus conquered it is further to be deplored that their simpler and native virtues were contaminated by the arts of the Roman clergy and that in some measure the official religion of Rome captured their noble souls for that official religion permitted the poison of the Roman decline to affect all the European mind even the German mind for many centuries but at the same time this evil effect was counterbalanced by the ineradicable strength and virtues of the northern barbaric blood this sacred to tonic blood it was which brought into Western Europe the subtlety of romantic conceptions the true lyric touch in poetry the deep reverence which was till recently the note of their religion the love of adventure in which the old civilization was lacking and a vast respect for women at the same time their warrior spirit evolved the great structure of feudalism the chivalric model and the whole military ideal of medieval civilization is it to be wondered at that when great new areas of knowledge were opened up in the later 15th century by suddenly expanded travel by printing press and by an unexpected advance in physical science the emancipation of the European mind should have brought this pure and barbaric stock to its own again in proportion as to tonic blood was strong in that proportion was the hierarchy of the Catholic church and the hold upon men of Catholic tradition shaken in the early 16th century and before that century had closed the manly stirrup of north Germany Holland Scandinavia and England had developed the Protestant civilization of society advancing healthy and already the master of all rivals destined soon to be if not already supreme such is not an exaggerated summary of what the anti-Catholic school of history gave us from German and from English universities with the partial aid of anti-Catholic academic forces within Catholic countries during the first two thirds of the 19th century there went with this strange way of rewriting history a flood of wild hypotheses presented as fact thus parliaments to lately admired were imagined and therefore stated to be to tonic non Roman therefore non-Catholic in origin the gradual decline of slavery was attributed to the same miraculous powers in the northern vegans and in general what everything was good in itself or was constant with modern ideas was referred back to this original source of good in the business of Europe the German tribes meanwhile the religious hatred these false historians had of civilization that is of Roman tradition in the church showed itself in a hundred other ways the conquest of Spain by the Mohammedans was represented by them as the victory of a superior people over a degraded and contemptible one the recon quest of Spain by our race over the asiatics as a disaster its final triumph an instrument the inquisition which saves Spain from a Moorish ravage was made out of monstrosity every revolt however obscure against the unity of European civilization in the Middle Ages notably the worst revolt of all the Albaniansian was presented as a worthy uplifting of the human mind against conditions of bondage most remarkable of all the actual daily life of Catholic Europe the habit way of thought and manner of men during the period of unity from say the eighth century to the fifteenth was simply omitted at the moment when history was struggling to become a scientific study this school of self-pleasing fairytales held the field when at last history did become a true scientific study this school collapsed but it yet retains as an inheritance from its old hegemony a singular power in the lower and more popular forms of historical writing and where the English language has spoken it is even today almost the only view of European development which the general student can attain it will be noted at the outset that the whole of the fantastic picture which this old and now discredited theory represented is based upon a certain conception of what happened at the breakdown of the Roman Empire unless these barbaric German tribes did come in and administrate unless they really were very considerable in number unless their character in truth was what this school postulated it to be vigorous young virtuous and all the rest of it unless there did indeed take place a struggle between this imaginary great German nation and the Mediterranean civilization in which the former one and ruled as conquerors over subject peoples unless these primary axioms have some historical truth in them the theory which is deduced from them as no historical value whatsoever a man may have a preference as a Protestant or merely as an inhabitant of North Germany or Scandinavia for the type of man who originally lived his degraded life outside the Roman Empire he may as an anti-Catholic of any kind hope that civilization was decadent through Catholicism at the end of the United Roman Empire and it may please him to imagine that the coincidence of what was originally barbaric with what is now Protestant German Europe is a proof of the former's original prowess nay he may even desire that the non-Catholic and non-traditional type in our civilization shall attain to supremacy which it certainly has not yet reached footnote I write that phrase before the breakup of Prussia and at the moment when Prussia was still the idol of Oxford but the whole thing is only a pleasant or unpleasant dream something to imagine and not something to discover unless we have a solid historical foundation for the theory to wit the destruction of the Roman Empire in the way which and by the men whom the theory presupposes the validity of the whole scheme depends upon our answer to the question what was the fall of the Roman Empire the end of section eleven section twelve Europe and the faith this is a Libra Vox recording all Libra Vox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit Libra Vox dot org Europe and the faith by Hilary section twelve chapter three continued if it was a conquest such as we have just seen postulated and a conquest actuated by the motives of men so described then this old anti-Catholic school though it could not maintain its exaggerations though for instance it could not connect representative institutions with the German barbarians would yet be substantially true now the moment documents began to be seriously examined and compared the moment modern research began to approach some sort of finality and the study of that period wherein the united Roman Empire of the west was replaced by sundry local kingdoms students of history then forward and in proportion to their impartiality became more and more convinced that the whole of this anti-Catholic attitude reposed upon nothing more than assertion there was no conquest of a feat Mediterranean peoples by vigorous barbarians the vast number of barbarians who lived as slaves within the empire the far smaller number who were pressed or hired into the military service of the empire the still smaller number which entered the empire as marauders during the weakness of the central government towards the end were not the sort of which this anti-Catholic theory mistaking its desires for realities presupposed the barbarians were not Germans a term difficult to define they were a very mixed stocks which if we go by speech a bad guide to race were some of them Germanic some slobs some even Mongol some Berber some of the old unnamed races the picks for instance and the dark man of the extreme north and west they had no conspicuous respect for women of the sort which should produce the chivalric ideal they were not free societies but slave owning societies they did not desire attempt or even dream the destruction of the imperial power that misfortune which was gradual and never complete in so far as it came about at all came about in spite of the barbarians and not by their conscious effort they were not numerous on the contrary they were but handfuls of men even when they appeared as successful pillagers and raiders over the frontiers when they came in large numbers they were wiped out they did not introduce any new institutions or any new ideas again you do not find in that capital change from the old civilization to the dark ages that the rise of legend and of the romantic and adventurous spirit the sowing of the modern seed coincides with places where the great masses of barbaric slaves are settled or where the fewer barbaric pillagers or the regular barbaric soldiers in the roman army pass romance appears hundreds of years later and it appears more immediately and earliest in connection with precisely those districts in which the passage of the few teutonic slavonic and other barbarians had been least felt there is no link between barbaric society and the feudalism of the middle ages there is no trace of such a link there is on the contrary a very definite and clearly marked historical sequence between roman civilization and the feudal system attested by innumerable documents which once read and compared in their order leave no sort of doubt that feudalism and the medieval civilization repose on purely roman origins in a word the gradual cessation of central imperial rule in western europe the failure of the power and habit of one united organization seated in rome to color define and administrate the lives of men was an internal revolution it did not come from without it was not a change from within it was nothing remotely resembling an external still less a barbaric conquest from without all that happened was that roman civilization having grown very old failed to maintain that vigorous and universal method of local government subordinated to the capital which it had for four or five hundred years supported the machinery of taxation gradually weakened the whole of central bureaucratic action weakened the greater men in each locality began to acquire a sort of independence and sundry soldiers benefited by the slow and enormous change occupied the local palaces as they were called of roman administrations secured such revenues as the remains of roman taxation could give them and conversely had thrust upon them so much of the duty of government as the decline of civilization could still maintain that is what happened and that is all that happened as an historical phenomena it is what i have called it enormous it most vividly struck the imagination of men the tremors and the occasional local cataclysms which were the symptoms of this change of base from the old high civilization to their dark ages singularly impressed the numerous and prolific writers of the time their terrors their astonishment their speculations as to the result have come down to us highly emphasized we feel after all those centuries the shock which was produced on the literary world of the day by l eric sack of rome or by the march of the roman augury troops called visigoths through gall into spain or by the appearance of the mixed horde called after their leaders vandals in front of hippo in africa but what we do not feel what we do not obtain from the contemporary documents what was a mere figment of the academic brain in the generation now just passing away is that anti-catholic and anti-civilized bias which would represent the ancient civilization as conquered by men of another and of a better stock who have since developed a supreme type of modern civilization and whose contrast with the catholic world and the catholic tradition is that once applauded as the principle of life in europe and emphasized as the fundamental fact in european history the reader will not be content with the mere affirmation though the affirmation is based upon all that is worth counting in modern scholarship he will ask what then did really happen after all allurek did sack rome the kings of the francs were belgian chieftains probably speaking at first flemish as well as latin those of the burgundians were probably men who spoke that hodgepodge of original barbaric Celtic and roman words later called teutonic dialects as well as latin the military officers called from the original recruitment of their commands goths both eastern and western were in the same case even that mixed mass of slov berber escaped slaves and the rest which from original leaders was called in north africa vandal probably had some considerable german nucleus the false history has got superficial ground to work upon many families whose origins came from what is now german speaking central europe ruled in local government during the transition and distinct those small tribes mainly german in speech survived for a short time in the empire like all falsehood the falsehood of the teutonic theory could not live without an element of truth to distort and it is the business of anyone who is writing true history even in so short an essay as this to show what that ground was and how it has been misrepresented in order to understand what happened we must first of all clearly represent to ourselves the fact that the structure upon which our united civilization had its first five centuries reposed was the roman army by which i do not mean that the number of soldiers was very large compared with the civilian population but that the organ which was vital in the state the thing that really counted the institution upon which men's minds turned and which they thought of as the foundation of all was the military institution the original city state of the Mediterranean broke down a little before the beginning of our era when as always ultimately happens in a complex civilization of many millions self-government had broken down and when it was necessary after the desperate faction fights which that breakdown had produced to establish a strong center of authority the obvious and as it were necessary person to exercise that authority in a state constituted as was the roman state was the commander-in-chief of the army all that the word emperor the latin word imperator means is a commander-in-chief it was the army which made an unmade emperors it was the army which designed and ordered and even helped to construct the great roads of the empire it was in connection with the needs of the army that those roles were traced it was the army which secured very easily for peace was popular the civil order of the vast organism it was the army especially which guarded its frontiers against the uncivilized world without upon the edge of the sahara and of the arabian desert upon the edge of the scotch mountains upon the edge of the poor wild lands between the brine and the elb on those frontiers the garrisons made a sort of wall within which wealth and right living could accumulate outside which small and impoverished bodies of men destitute of the arts notably of writing save in so far as they rudely copied the romans or were permeated by adventurous roman commerce lived under conditions which in the kelty kills we can partially appreciate from the analogy of ancient gall and from the tenacious legends but of which in the germanist slavonic sand planes marshes and woods we know hardly anything at all now this main instrument the roman army the instrument remembered which not only preserved civic functions but actually created the master of all civic functions the government went through three very clear stages of change in the first four centuries of the christian era up to the year ad 400 or so and it is the transformation of the roman army during the first four centuries which explains the otherwise inexplicable change in the society afterwards in the fifth and sixth centuries that is from 400 to 600 ad the turn from the full civilization of rome to the beginning of the dark ages in its first stage during the early empire just as the catholic church was founded and was beginning to grow the roman army was still theoretically an army of true roman citizens footnote a soldier was still technically a citizen up to the very end the conception of a soldier as a citizen the impossibility for instance of his being a slave was in the very bones of roman thought even when the soldiers were almost entirely recruited from barbarians that is from slave stock the soldiers themselves were free citizens always as a matter of fact the army was already principally professional and it was being recruited even in this first stage very largely from the territories rome had conquered thus we have caesar raising a gallic legion almost contemporaneous with his conquest of gall but for a long time after well into the christian era the army was conceived of in men's minds as a sort of universal institution rooted in the citizenship which men were still proud to claim throughout the empire and which belonged only to a minority of its inhabitants for the majority were slaves in the second phase which corresponds with the beginning of a decline in the letters and the arts which carries us through the welter of civil wars in the third century and which introduces the remodeled empire at their close the army was becoming purely professional and at same time drawn from whatever was least fortunate in roman society the recruitment of it was treated much after the fashion of attacks the great landed proprietors who by a parallel development in the decline were becoming the chief economic feature in the roman state were summoned to send a certain number of recruits from their estates slaves would often be glad to go for hard as were the conditions of military service it gave them civic freedom certain honors a certain pay and a future for their children the poorer freed men would also go at the command of their lord though only of course a certain proportion for the conscription was very light compared with modern systems and was made lighter by reenlistment long service absence of reserves and the use of veterans the end of section 12 section 13 europe and the faith this is a libra vox recording all libra vox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit libra vox.org europe and the faith by hilaire bellach section 13 chapter 3 continued during this second stage while the army was becoming less and less civic and more and more profession for the destitute and the unfortunate the unpopularity and the ignorance of military service among the rest of the population was increasing the average citizen grew more and more divorced from the army and knew less and less of its conditions he came to regard it partly as a necessary police force or a defense of his frontiers partly as a nuisance to him at home he also came to regard it as something with which he had nothing to do it lived a life separate from himself it governed through the power of the empire its chief it depended on and also supported or remade the imperial court but it was external at the close of the empire to general society recruiting was meanwhile becoming difficult and the habit grew up of offering the hungry tribes outside the pale of the empire the advantage of residence within it on condition that they should serve as roman soldiers the conception of territories within empire which were affiliated and allied to it rather than absorbed by it was a very ancient one that concept had lost reality so far as the old territories that it once affected were concerned but it paved the way for the parallel idea of troops affiliated and allied to the roman army part of that army in discipline and organization yet possessed of considerable freedom within their own divisions here we have not only a constant and increasing use of barbaric troops drafted into the regular corps but also whole bodies which were more and more frequently accepted and blocked and under their local leader as auxiliaries to the roman forces some such bodies appeared to have been settled upon land on the frontiers two others were given similar grants at very great distances from the frontiers thus we have a small body of german barbarians settled at renais in britney and again within the legions who were all technically of roman citizenship and in theory recruited from the full civilization of brome the barbarian who happened to find himself within that civilization tended more than did his non-barbarian fellow citizen or fellow slave to accept military service he would nearly always be poorer he would unless his experience of civilization was a long one feel the hardship of military service less and in this second phase while the army was becoming more sedentary more attached that is to particular garrisons more permanent more and hereditary thing handed on from father to son and distinguished by the large element of what we call married quarters it was also becoming more and more an army of men whom whether as auxiliaries or as true roman soldiers were in blood descent and to some extent in manners and less in language barbarians there were negroes there were probably Celts there were slobs mongols of the steppes more numerous germans and so forth in the third stage which is the stage that saw the great convulsion of the fifth century the army though not yet holy barbaric had already become in its most vital part barbaric it took its orders of course holy from the roman state but great groups within it were only partly even latin speaking or greek speaking and were certainly regarded both by themselves and by their roman masters as non- roman in manners and in blood it must most clearly be emphasized that not only no such thought as an attack upon the empire entered the heads of these soldiers but that the very idea of it would have been inconceivable to them had you proposed they would not even have known what you meant that a particular section of the army should fight against a particular claimant to the empire and therefore and necessarily in favor of some other claimant they thought naturally enough but to talk of an attack upon the empire itself would have seemed to them like talking of an attack upon bread and meat air water and fire the empire was the whole method and meaning of their lives at intervals the high and wealthy civilization of the roman empire was of course subjected to attempted pillage by small and hungry robber bands without its boundaries but that had nothing to do with the barbaric recruitment of the roman army save when such bands were caught and incorporated the army was always ready at a moment's order to cut such foreign raiders to pieces and always did so successfully the portion of the army chosen to repel cut up and sell into slavery a marauding band of slobs or germans or Celts always had Celts or slobs or germans present in large numbers among its own soldierry but no tie of blood interfered with the business to consider such a thing would have been inconceivable to the opponents on either side the distinction was not between speech and speech still less between vague racial customs it was a distinction between the imperial service on one side against the outer unrecognized savage on the other as the machinery of government grew weak through old age and as the recruitment of the army from barbarians and the large proportional auxiliary regular forces began to weaken that basis of the whole state the tendency of pillaging bands to break in past the frontiers into the cultivated lands and the wealth of the cities grew greater and greater but it never occurred to them to attack the empire as such all they wanted was permission to enjoy the life which was led within it and to abandon the wretched conditions to which they were compelled outside its boundaries sometimes they were transformed from pillagers to soldiers by an offer extended by the roman authorities more often they snatched a raid when there was for the moment no good garrison in their neighborhood then a roman force would march against them and if they were not quick at getting away would cut them to pieces but with the progress of the central decline the attacks of these small bands on the frontiers became more frequent frontier towns came to regard such attacks as permanent peril and to defend themselves against them little groups of raiders would sometimes traverse great distances from end to end and whether in the form of pirates from the sea or of war bands on land the ceaseless attempts to enjoy or loot but principally to enjoy the conditions that civilization offered grew more and more persistent it must not be imagined of course that civilization had not occasionally to suffer then as it had to suffer at intervals for a thousand years past the attacks of really large and organized barbaric armies footnote for instance a century and a half before the breakdown of central government the goths a barbaric group largely german had broken in and ravaged in a worse fashion than their successors in the fifth century thus in the year 404 driven by the pressure of an eastern invasion upon their own forests a vast barbaric host under one radigaceous pushed into italy the men bearing arms alone were estimated in a time well used to soldiery and to such estimates at 200 000 but those 200 000 were wiped out the barbarians were always wiped out when they attempted to come in as conquerors stilico a typical figure for he was himself of barbarian descent yet in the regular roman service cut to pieces one portion of them the rest surrendered and were sold off and scattered as slaves immediately afterwards you have a violent quarrel between various soldiers who desired to capture the imperial power the story is fragmentary and somewhat confused now one usurper is blamed and now another but the fact common to all is that with the direct object of usurping power a roman general calls in barbarian bands of pillagers all sorts of small groups frank's suvians vandals to cross the rine in the gul not as barbarian conquerors but as allies to help in a civil war the succeeding generation has left a sample evidence of the results it presents us with documents that do not give a picture of a ruined province by any means only of a province which has been traversed in certain directions by the march of barbarian robber bands who afterwards disappeared largely in fighting among themselves we have later the very much more serious business of the mongol atilla and his huns leading the great outer mass of germans and sloths into the empire on an enormous raid in the middle of the fifth century fifty years after the destruction of ranigaceous these asiatics leading more numerous other barbaric dependence of theirs from the germany and the eastern slavonic lands penetrated for two brief moments into northern italy and eastern gall the end of that business infinitely graver though it was than the raids that came before it is just what one might have expected the regular and auxiliary disciplined forces of the empire destroy the barbarian power near shalons and the last and worst of the invasions is wiped out as thoroughly as had been all the others in general the barbaric eruptions into the empire failed holy as soon as imperial troops could be brought up to oppose them what then were the supposed barbaric successes what was the real nature of the action of allurek for instance and his sack of rome and how later do we find local kings in the palace of the roman governors the real nature of the action of men like allurek is utterly different from the imaginary picture with which the old picturesque popular history recently provided us that false history gives us the impression of a barbarian chieftain gathering his clan to a victorious assault on rome consider the truth upon allurek and contrast it with this imaginary picture allurek was a young noble of gothic blood but from birth a roman at 18 years of age he was put by the court in command of a small roman auxiliary force originally recruited from the goths he was as much a roman officer as incapable of thinking of himself in any other terms than those of the roman army as any other one of his colleagues about his throne he had his commission from the emperor theodosius and when theodosius marched into gall against the usuper eugenius he counted allurek's division as among the most faithful of his army it so happened moreover that those few original auxiliaries mainly goths by race were nearly all destroyed in the campaign allurek survived the remnant of his division was recruited we know not how but probably from all kinds of sources to its old strength it was still called gothic though now of the most mixed origin and it was still commanded by himself in his character of a roman general allurek after this service to the emperor was rewarded by further military dignities in the roman military hierarchy he was ambitious of military titles and of important command as are all soldiers though still under 20 years of age and only a commander of exiliaries he asks for the title of magister militum with the dignity which accompanied that highest of military posts the emperor refuses it one of the ministers thereupon begins to plot with allurek and suggest to him that he might gather other auxiliary troops under his command and make things uncomfortable for his superiors allurek rebels marches through the balkan peninsula into thessaly and greece and down the peloponnesus the regulars march against him according to some accounts and beat him back into albania there ends his first adventure it is exactly like that of 100 other roman generals in the past and so are his further adventures he remains in albania at the head of his forces and makes peace with the government still enjoying a regular commission from the emperor next he tries a new adventure to surface ambition in italy but his army is broken to pieces at polentia by the armies in italy under a general by the way esbar barric in mere descent as was allurek but like allurek holy roman in training and ideas the whole thing is a civil war between various branches of the roman service and it is motivated like all the roman civil wars for hundreds of years before by the ambitions of generals the end of section 13 section 14 europe and the faith this is a libra vox recording all libra vox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit libravox.org europe and the faith by hilaer bellach section 14 chapter 3 concluded allurek does not lose his commission even after his second adventure he begins to intrigue between the western and eastern heads of the roman empire the great invasion under rada gaseous interrupts this civil war that invasion was for allurek of course as for any other roman officer an invasion of barbaric enemies that these enemies should be called by this or that barbaric name is quite indifferent to him they come from outside the empire and are therefore in his eyes cattle he helps to destroy them and destroy they are promptly and thoroughly when the brief invasion was over allurek had the opportunity to renew the civil wars within the empire and asked for certain arrears of pay that were due to him stillico the great rival general himself by the way of andal in descent admitted allurek's right to arrears of pay but just at that moment there occurred an obscure palace intrigue which was based like all the real movements of the time on differences of religion not of race stillico suspected of attempting to restore paganism is killed in the general confusion certain of the families of the auxiliaries garrisoned in idli are massacred by the non-military population as allurek is a general in partial rebellion against the imperial authority these auxiliaries join him the total number of allurek's man was at this moment very small they were perhaps 30 000 there was no trace of nationality about them they were simply a body of discontented soldiers they had not come from across the frontier they were not invaders they were part of the long-established and regular garrisons of the empire and for that matter many garrisons and troops of equally barbaric origin sided with the regular authorities in the quarrel allurek marches on rome with this disaffected roman army claiming that he has been defrauded of his duet salary and leaning upon the popularity of the dead stillico whose murder he says he will avenge his 30 000 claim the barbarian slaves within the city and certain sums of money which had been the pretext and motive of his rebellion as a result of this action the emperor promises allurek his regular salary as the general and a district which he may not only command but plant with his few followers even in the height of his success allurek again demands the thing which was nearest his heart the supreme and entirely roman title of magister militum the highest post in the hierarchy of military advancement but the emperor again refuses to give that allurek again marches on rome a roman officer followed by a rebellious roman army he forces the senate to make atlas nominal emperor of the west and atlas to give him the desired title his very craving for which is most significant of the roman character of the whole business allurek then quarrels with his puppet deprives him of the insignia of the empire and sends them to onorius quarrels again with onorius reenters rome and pillages it marches to southern italy dies and his small army is dismembered there is the story of allurek as it appears from documents and as it was in reality there is the truth underlying the false picture in which most educated men were recently provided by the anti roman bias of recent history certainly the story of allurek's discontent with his salary and the terms of his commission his raiding marches his plunder of the capital shows how vastly different was the beginning of the fixed century from the society of 300 years before it is symptomatic of the change and it could only have been possible at a moment when central government was at last breaking down but it is utterly different in motive and in social character from the vague customary conception of a vast barbarian invasion led by german warlord pouring over the alps and taking roman society and its capital by storm it has no relation to such a picture if all this be true of the dramatic adventure of allurek which has so profoundly affected the imagination of mankind it is still true of the other contemporary events which false history might twist into a conquest of the empire by the barbarian there was no such conquest all that happened was an internal transformation of roman society in which the chief functions of the local government fell to the heads of the local auxiliary forces in the roman army as these auxiliary forces were now mainly barbaric so were the personalities of the new local governors i've only dealt with a particular case of allurek because it is the most familiar and the most generally distorted a test as it were of my theme but what is true of him is true of all other auxiliaries in the armies even of the probably slavonic vandals these did frankly loot a province north africa and they alone of the auxiliary troops did revolt against the imperial system and defy it for a century but the vandals themselves were already before their adventure a part of the imperial forces they were but a nucleus for a mixed host made up of all the varied elements of rebellion present in the country and their experiment in separation went down and last forever before the imperial armies meanwhile the north african society on which the rebels lived and which with their various recruits moors escaped slaves criminals they maladministered and half ruined what was and remained roman in the case of local italian government the case is quite clear there was never any question of invasion or conquest odo agar held a regular roman commission he was a roman soldier the adorix supplanted him by leave of and actually under orders from the emperor the last and greatest example the most permanent gall tells the same story the burgundians are auxiliaries regularly planted after imploring the aid of the emperor and permission to settle clovis the belgian flimming fights no imperial army his forebears were roman officials his little band of perhaps eight thousand men was victorious in a small and private civil war which made him master in the north over other rival generals he defended the empire against the eastern barbaric german tribes he rejoiced in the title of console and patrician there was no destruction of roman society there was no breach of continuity in the main institutions of what was now the western christian world there was no considerable ad mixture in these local civil wars of german slav or outer Celtic blood no appreciable addition at least to the large amount of such blood which through the numerous soldiers and much more numerous slaves had already been incorporated with the population of the roman world but in the course of this transformation in the fifth and sixth centuries local government did fall into the hands of those who happened to command the main local forces of the roman army and these were by dissent barbarian because the army had become barbarian in its recruitment why local government gradually succeeded the old centralized imperial government and how in consequence there slowly grew up the modern nations we will next examine the end of section 14 the end of chapter three section 15 europe and the faith this is a libra vox recording all libra vox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit libravox.org europe and the faith by hill air veloc section 15 chapter four the beginning of the nations european civilization which the catholic church has made and makes is by that influence still one its unity now as for 300 years past is suffering from the grievous and ugly wound of the reformation the earlier wounds have been healed that modern wound we hope may still be healed we hope so because the alternative is death at any rate unity wounded or unwounded is still the mark of prismdom that unity today falls into national groups those of the west in particular are highly differentiated gall or france as we now call it is a separate thing yiberian or spanish peninsula though divided into five particular and three main regions each with its language of which one portugal is politically independent of the rest is another the old european and roman district of north africa is but partially reoccupied by european civilization italy has quite recently appeared as another united national group the roman province of england has south of the border formed one united nation for a longer period than any of the others to england scotland has been added how did these modern nations arise in the transformation of the roman empire from its old simple pagan condition to one complex christian civilization how came there to be also nations exterior to the empire old nations like ireland new nations like poland we must be able to answer this question if we are to understand not only that european civilization has been continuous that is one in time as well as one in spirit and in place but also if we are to know why and how that continuity was preserved for one we are and will be all europeans the moment something threatens our common morals from within we face it however totally we have forgotten what it is to feel a threat from without but it may come we are already familiar with the old popular and false explanation of the rise of the european nations this explanation tells us that great numbers of vigorous barbarians entered the roman empire conquered it established themselves as masters and parceled out its various provinces we have seen that such a picture is fantastic and when it is accepted destroys a man's historic sense of europe we have seen that the barbarians who burst through the defense of civilization at various times from before the beginnings of recorded history through the pagan period prefacing our lord's birth during the height of the empire proper in the third century again in the fourth and the fifth never had the power to affect that civilization seriously and therefore were invariably conquered and easily absorbed it was the natural course of things this should be so i say in the natural course of things dreadful as the eruption of barbarian into civilized places must always be even on a small scale the conquest of civilization by barbarians is always and necessarily impossible barbarians may have the weight to destroy the civilization they enter and in so doing to destroy themselves with it but it is inconceivable that they should impose their view and manner upon civilized men now to impose one's view and manner to give laws is to conquer moreover save under the most exceptional conditions the civilized army with its training discipline and scientific traditions of war can always ultimately have the better of a horde in the case of the roman empire the armies of civilization did as a fact always have the better of the barbarian hordes marius had the better of the barbarians a hundred years before our lord was born though their horde was not broken until it had suffered the loss of 200 000 dead 500 years later the roman armies had the better of another similar horde of barbarians the host of ratigaceous in their rush upon idli and here again the vast multitude lost some 200 000 killed or sold into slavery we have seen how the roman generals alluric and others destroyed them but we may have also seen that within the roman army itself certain auxiliary troops which may have preserved to some slight extent traces of their original tribal character and probably preserved for generation or so a mixture of roman speech camp slang and the original barbaric tongues assumed greater and greater importance in the roman army toward the end of the imperial period that is toward the end of the fourth and in the beginning of the fifth centuries say 350 to 450 we have seen why these auxiliary forces continue to increase in importance within the roman army and we have seen how it was only as roman soldiers and as part of the regular forces of civilization that they had that importance or that their officers and generals acting as roman officers and generals could play the part they did the heads of these auxiliary forces were invariably men trained as romans they knew of no life saved that civilized life which the empire enjoyed they regarded themselves as soldiers and politicians of the state in which not against which they warred they acted holy within the framework of roman things the auxiliaries had no memory or tradition of a barbaric life beyond the empire though their stock in some parts sprang from it they had no liking for barbarianism and no living communication with it the auxiliary soldiers and their generals lived and thought entirely within those imperial boundaries which guarded paved roads a regular and stately architecture great and populous cities the vine the olive the roman law and the bishoprics of the catholic church outside was a wilderness with which they had nothing to do armed with this knowledge which puts an end to any fantastic theory of barbarian conquest let us set out to explain that state of affairs which a man born say a hundred years after the last of the mere raids into the empire was destroyed under radigaceous would have observed in the middle age sedonius a pulmonaris the famous bishop of clermont ferrand lived and wrote his classical work at such a date after allerix roman adventure and radigaceous defeat that the life of a man would span the distance between them it was a matter of nearly 70 years between those events and his maturity a grandson of his would correspond to such a spectator as we are imagining a grandson of that generation might be born before the year 500 such a man would have stood towards radigaceous raid the last futile eruption of the barbarian much as men old today in england stand to the indian mutiny and the crimian war to the second napoleon in france to the civil war in the united states had a grandson of sedonius traveled in idly spain and gall in his later years this is what he would have seen in all the great towns roman life was going on as it had always gone on so far as externals were concerned the same latin speech now somewhat degraded the same dress the same division into a minority of free men a mass of slaves and a few very rich masters round whom not only the slaves but the mass of the free men also were grouped as dependents in every city again he would have found a bishop of the catholic church a member of that hierarchy which acknowledged its center and headship to be at rome everywhere religion and especially the settlement of divisions and doubts in religion would have been the main popular preoccupation and everywhere save in northern gall he would have perceived small groups of men wealthy connected with government often bearing barbaric names and sometimes perhaps still partly acquainted with barbaric tongues now these few men were as a rule of a special set in religion they were called arians heretics who differed in a religion from the mass of their fellow citizens very much as the minority of protestants in an irish country today differ from the great mass of their catholic fellows and that was a point of capital importance the little provincial courts were headed by men who though christian with the mass of the sacraments and all the christian things were yet out of communion with the bulk of their officials and all their taxpayers they had inherited that odd position from an accident in the imperial history at the moment when their grandfathers had received baptism the imperial court had supported this heresy they had come therefore by family tradition to regard their separate sac with its attempt to rationalize the doctrine of the incarnation as a swagger they thought it an odd title to eminence and this little vanity had two effects it cut them off from the mass of their fellow citizens in the empire it made their tenure of power uncertain and destined to disappear very soon at the hands of men in sympathy with the great catholic body the troops led by the local governors of northern france we shall return to this matter of arianism but just let us follow the state of society as our grandson of sudonius would have seen it at the beginning of the dark ages the armed forces he might have met upon the roads as he traveled would have been rare their accoutrements their discipline their words of command were still though in a degraded form those of the old roman army there had been no breach in the traditions of that army or in its corporate life many of the bodies he met would still have borne the old imperial insignia the money which he handled and with which he paid his bills at the ins was stamped with the effigy of the reigning emperor epizantium or one of his predecessors just as the traveler in a distant british colony today though that province is virtually independent will handle coins stamped with the effigies of english kings but though the coin was entirely imperial he would upon a passport or a receipt for toll and many other official documents he handled often sees side by side with and subordinate to the imperial name the name of the chief of the local government this phrase leads me to a feature in the surrounding society which we must not exaggerate but which made it very different from that united and truly imperial form of government which had covered all civilization 200 to 100 years before the descendants of those officers who from 200 to 100 years before had only commanded regular or auxiliary forces in the roman army were now seated as almost independent local administrators in the capitals of the roman provinces they still thought of themselves in 550 say as mere provincial powers within the one great empire of rome but there was now no positive central power remaining in rome to control them the central power was far off in constantanople it was universally accepted but it made no attempt to act let us suppose our traveler to be concerned in some commerce which brought him to the centers of local government throughout the western empire let him to visit Paris Toledo Ravenna Arles he has let us say successfully negotiated some business in spain which has necessitated his obtaining official documents he must that is coming to touch with officials and with the actual government in spain 200 years before he would have seen the officials of and got his papers from a government directly dependent on rome the name of the emperor alone would have appeared on all the papers and his effigy on the seals now in the sixth century the papers are made out in the old official way and of course in latin all the public forces are still roman all the civilization has still the same unaltered roman character has anything changed at all let us see the end of section 15 section 16 europe and the faith this is a libra vox recording all libra vox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit libravox.org europe and the faith by hill air bellach section 16 chapter 4 continued to get his papers in the capital he will be directed to the pletium this word does not mean palace when we say palace today we mean the house in which lives the real or nominal ruler of a monarchial state we talk of buckingham palace st. james palace or the palace in madrid and so on but the original word palatium had a very different meaning in late roman society it signified the official seat of government and in particular the center from which the ritz for imperial taxation were issued and to which the proceeds of the taxation were paid the name was originally taken from the palatine hills in rome on which the caesars had their private house as the mask of private citizenship was gradually thrown off by the invaders 600 to 500 years before and as the commanders in chief of the roman army became more and more true and absolute sovereigns their house became more and more the official center of the empire the term palatium thus became consecrated to a particular use when the center of imperial power was transferred to Byzantium the word palatium followed it and at last it was applied to local centers as well as to the imperial city in the laws of the empire then in its dignities and honors in the whole of its official life the palatium means the machine of government local or imperial such a traveler as we have imagined in the middle of the sixth century comes then to that spanish palatium from which throughout the five centuries of imperial rule the spanish peninsula had been locally governed what would he find he would find to begin with a great staff of clerks and officials of exactly the same sort as had always inhabited the place drawing up the same sort of documents as they had drawn up for generations using certain fixed formula and doing everything in the latin tongue no local dialect was yet of the least importance but he would also find that the building was used for acts of authority and that these acts were formed in the name of a certain person who was no longer the old roman governor it was this local person's name rather than the emperors which usually or at any rate more and more frequently appeared on the documents let us look closely at this new person seated in authority over spain and at his council for from such men as he and from the districts they ruled the nations of our time and their royal families were to spring the first thing that would be noticed on entering the presence of this person who governs Spain would be that he still had all the insignia and manners of roman government he sat upon a formal throne as the emperor's delegate had sat the provincial delegate of the emperor on official occasions he would wear the official roman garments the orb and the scepter were already his symbols we may presume as they had been those of the emperor and the emperor's local subordinates before him but in two points this central official differed from the old local governor whom he exactly succeeded and upon whose machinery of taxation he relied for power these two points were first that he was surrounded by a very powerful and somewhat jealous body of great men secondly that he did not habitually give himself an imperial roman title but was called Rex let's consider these points separately as to the first point the emperor in Byzantium and before that in Rome or at Ravenna worked as even absolute power must work through a multitude of men he was surrounded by high dignitaries and there were devolved from him a whole hierarchy of officials with the most important of whom he continually consulted but the emperor had not been officially and regularly bound in with such council his formula of administration were personal formula now and then he mentioned his great officials but he only mentioned them if he chose this new local person who had been very gradually and almost unconsciously substituted for the old roman governors the rex was on the contrary a part of his own council and all his formula of administration mentioned the council as his co-adjectures and assessors in administration this was necessary above all a most important point in anything that regarded the public funds it must not be imagined for a moment that the rex issued laws or edicts or what was much more common and much more vital levied taxation under the dominion of or subject to the consent of these great men about him on the contrary he spoke as absolutely as ever the imperial governors had done in the past and indeed he could not do otherwise because the whole machinery had inherited presupposed absolute power but some things were already said to be done with these great men and it is of capital importance that we should note this word with the phrases of the official documents from that time run more and more in one of half a dozen regular formulas all of which are based upon this idea of the council and are in general such words as these so and so rex ordered and commanded with his chief man that so and so should be done as to the second point we note the change of title the authority of the palladium is a rex not a legate or a governor nor a man sent from the emperor nor a man directly and necessarily nominated by him but a rex now what is the meaning of that word rex it is usually translated by our word king but it does not here mean anything like what our word king means when we apply it today or as we have applied it for many centuries it does not mean the ruler of a large independent territory it means a combination of two things when it is used to name these local rulers in the later roman empire it means one the chieftain of an auxiliary group of soldiers who holds an imperial commission and it means two that man acting as a local governor centuries and centuries before indeed a thousand years before the word rex had meant the chieftain of the little town and petty surrounding district of roam or some similar neighborhood and small state it had in the latin language always retained some such connotation the word rex was often used in latin literature as we use the word king in english to describe the head of a state great or small but as applied to the local rulers of the fifth century in western europe it was not so used it meant as i have said a chieftain or chief officer of auxiliaries a rex was not then in spain or engol a king in our modern sense of the word he was only the military head of a particular armed force he was originally the commander hereditary or chosen or nominated by the emperor of an auxiliary force serving as part of the roman army later when these troops originally recruited perhaps from some one barbaric district changed by slow degrees into a body half police half noble their original name would extend to the whole local army the rex of say betavian auxiliaries the commander of the betavian core would probably be a man of betavian blood with hereditary position and would still be called rex betavorium afterwards when the recruiting was mixed he still kept that title and later still when the beta v as such had disappeared his fixed title would remain there was no similarity possible between the word rex and the word imperator any more than there is between the words miners union or trade conference and the word england there was of course no sort of equality a roman general in the early part of the process planning a battle would think of a rex as we think of a divisionary general he might say i shall put my regulars here in the center my auxiliaries huns or goths or francs or whatnot i shall put here send for the rex and i will give him his orders a rex in this sense was a subject and often an unimportant subject of the imperator or emperor the imperator being as we remember the commander in chief of the roman army upon which institution the roman state or empire or civilization had depended for so many centuries when the roman army began to add to itself auxiliary troops drilled of course after the roman fashion and forming one body with the roman forces but contracted for in bulk as it were the chieftains of these barbaric and often small bodies were called in the official language regis thus allaric a roman officer and nothing more was the rex of his officially appointed auxiliary force and since the nucleus of that force had once been a small body of goths and since allaric held his position as an officer of that auxiliary force because he had once been by inheritance achieved another goths the word rex was attached to his imperial commission in the roman army and there was added to it in the name of that particular barbaric tribe with which his command had originally been connected he was rex of the roman auxiliary troops called goths the rex in spain was rex kotorum not rex hispanic that was altogether a later idea the rex in northern france was not rex galley he was rex francorum in each case he was the rex of the particular auxiliary troop from which his ancestors sometimes generations before had originally drawn their imperial commission and their right to be officers in the roman army thus you will have the rex francorum or king of the francs so styled in the palletium at paris as late as say 700 ad not because anybody of francs still survived as a separate corps they had been but a couple of regiments or so footnote we have documentary record the greater part of the francis auxiliaries under clovis were baptized with their general they came to 4000 men 200 years before and had long disappeared but because the original title had derived from a roman auxiliary force of francs in other words the old roman local legislative taxing power the reality of which lay in the old surviving roman machinery of a hierarchy of officials with their titles writs etc was vested in the hands of a man called rex that is commander of such and such an auxiliary force commander of the francs for instance or commander of the gods he still commanded in the year 550 a not very large military force on which local government depended and in this little army the barbarians were still probably predominant because as we have seen towards the end of the empire the stuff of the army had become barbaric and was also as certainly very mixed indeed many a slave or broken roman freedmen would enlist for it had privileges and advantages of great value footnote hence the legis or codes especially regulating the status of these roman troops and called in documents the laws of the gods or burgundians as the case may be there is a trace of old barbaric customs in some of these sometimes of an exclusive rule of marriage but the mass of them are obviously roman privileges no one cared in the least whether the members of the armed forces which sustained society were roman gaelic italian or german and racial origin they were of all races and origins very shortly after say by 600 at latest the army had become a universal rough levy of all sorts and kinds and the restriction of race was forgotten save in a few customs still clinging by hereditary right to certain families and called their laws again there was no conception of rebellion against the empire in the mind of a rex all these reggies without exception held their military office and power originally by a commission from the empire all of them derive their authority from men who had been regularly established as imperial functionaries when the central power of the empire had as a fact broken down the rex as a fact administered the whole machinery without control the end of section 16 section 17 europe and the faith this is a libra vox recording all libra vox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit libra vox.org europe and the faith by hilare bellach section 17 chapter 4 continued but no rex ever tried to emancipate himself from the empire or warred for independence against the empire the rex the local man undertook all government simply because the old government above him the central government had failed no rex ever called himself a local imperator or dreamed of calling himself so and that is the most significant thing and all the transition between the full civilization of the old empire and the dark ages the original roman armies invaded gall spain the western germanies and hungary fought to conquer to absorb to be masters of and makers of the land they seized no local governor of the later transition no rex of vandal goth hun frank or berber or more troop ever dreamt of such a thing he might fight another local rex to get part of his taxing power or his treasure he might take part in the great religious quarrels as in africa and act tyrannically against the dissident majority but to fight against the empire as such or to attempt conquest and rule over a subject population would have meant nothing to him in theory the empire was still under one control there then you have the picture of what held the levers of the machine of government during a period of its degradation and transformation which followed the breakdown of central authority clovis in the north of france the burgundian chieftain at arleys theodoric in italy a thanigild later at toleto in spain were all of the men who had stepped into shoes of an unbroken local roman administration who worked entirely by it and whose machinery of administration wherever they went was called by the roman and official name of palletium their families were originally a barbaric stock they had for their small armed forces a military institution descended and derived from the roman auxiliary forces often especially in the early years of their power they spoke a mixed and partly barbaric tongue footnote the barbaric dialects outside the empire were already largely latinized through commerce with the empire and by its influence and of course what we call teutonic languages are in reality half roman long before we get our first full document in the eighth and ninth centuries more easily than pure latin but every one of them was a soldier of the declining empire and regarded himself as a part of it not as even conceivably an enemy of it when we appreciate this we can understand how insignificant were those changes of frontier which makes so great a show in historical atlases the rags of such and such an auxiliary force dies and divides his kingdom between two sons what does that mean not that a nation with its customs and whole form of administration was suddenly divided into two still less that there has been what today we call annexation or partition of states it simply means that the honor and advantage of administration are divided between the two heirs who take the one area and the other over which to gather taxes and to receive personal profit it must always be remembered that the personal privileges so received was very small in comparison with the total revenue to be administrated and that the vast mass of public work is carried on by the judiciary the officers of the treasury and so forth continued to be quite impersonal and fundamentally imperial this governmental world of clerks and civil service lived its own life and was only in theory dependent upon the wrecks and the wrecks was no more than the successor of the chief local roman official for no our popular historical atlases render a very bad service to education by their way of coloring these districts as though they were separate modern nations the real divisions right up to the full tide of feudalism was christian and pagan and within the former eastern and western greek and latin the racks by the way called himself always by some definite inferior roman titles such as vill illustre as an englishman today might be called sir charles so-and-so or lord so-and-so never anything more and often as in the case of clovis he not only accepted directly from the roman emperor a particular office but observed the old popular roman customs such as largesse and procession upon his induction into that office now why did not this man this wrecks in idly or gall or spain simply remain in the position of local roman governor one would imagine if one did not know more about that society that he should have done this the small auxiliary forces of which he had been chieftain rapidly merged into the body of the empire as had the infinitely larger mass of slaves and colonists a woolly barbarian in origin for century after century before that time the body of civilization was one and we wonder at first why its moral unity did not continue to be represented by a central monarch though the civilization continued to decline its form should one would think have remained unchanged and the theoretic attachment of each of these subordinates to the roman emperor at constantan opal should have endured indefinitely as a fact the memory of the old central authority of the emperor was gradually forgotten the wrecks and his local government as he got weaker also got more isolated he came to coining his own money to treating directly as a completely independent ruler at last the idea of kings and kingdoms took shape in men's minds why the reason that the nature of authority very slowly change and that the last links with the roman empire of the east that is with the supreme head at constantan opal gradually dissolved in the west so that the modern nation arose around these local governments of the regis is to be found in that novel feature the standing council of great men around the wrecks with whom everything is done this standing council expresses three forces which between them were transforming society those three forces were first certain vague underlying national feelings older than the empire gallic britannic iberian secondly the economic force of the great roman landowners and lastly the living organization of the catholic church on the economic or material side of society the great landowners were the reality of that time we have no statistics to go upon but the facts of the time and the nature of its institutions are quite as cogent as detailed statistics in spain engal in idly as in africa economic power had concentrated in the hands of exceedingly few men a few hundred men and women a few dozen corporations especially the episcopal seas had come to own most of the land on which these millions and millions lived and with the land most of the implements and of the slaves as to the descent of these great landowners none asked or cared by the middle of the sixth century only a minority perhaps were still of unmixed blood but quite certainly none were purely barbaric lands waste or confiscated through the decline of population or the effect of interminable wars and the plagues lay in the power of the palladium which granted them out again strictly under the eye of the council of great men to new holders the few who had come in as original followers and dependents of the chieftain of the auxiliary forces benefited largely but the thing that really concerns the story of civilization is not the origin of these immensely rich owners which was mixed nor their sense of race which simply did not exist but the fact that they were so few it explains both what happened and what was to happen that a handful of men for they were no more than a handful should thus be in control of the economic destinies of mankind the result of centuries of roman development in that direction is the key to all the material decline of the empire it should furnish us if we were wise with an object lesson for our own politics today the decline of the imperial power was mainly due to this extraordinary concentration of economic power in the hands of a few it was these few great roman landowners who in every local government endowed each of the new administrators each new wrecks with a tradition of imperial power not a little of the dread that went with the old imperial name and the armed force which it connoted everywhere the wrecks had to reckon with the strength of highly concentrated wealth this was the first element in that standing council of great men which was the mark of the time in every locality and wore down the old official imperial absolute local power there was however as i have said another and much more important element in the council of great men beside the chief landowners it consisted of the hierarchy of the catholic church every roman city of that time had a principal personage in it who knew its life better than anybody else and who had more than anyone else power over its morals and ideas and who in many cases actually administered its affairs that person was the bishop throughout western europe at that moment men's interest and preoccupation was not race nor even material prosperity but religion the great duel between paganism and the catholic church was now decided after two hard centuries of struggle in favor of the latter the catholic church from a small but definite and very tenacious organization within the empire and on the whole antagonistic to it had risen first to be the only group of men which knew its own mind ad 200 next to the official religion ad 300 and finally to be the cohesive political principle of the great majority of human beings ad 400 the modern man can distinctly appreciate the phenomena if for creed he will read capital and for the faith industrial civilization for just as today men principally care for great fortunes and in pursuit of them go indifferently from country to country and sink as unimportant compared with such an object the other businesses of our time so the men of the fifth and six centuries were intent upon the unity and exactitude of religion that the religion to which the empire was now converted the religion of the catholic church should triumph was their one preoccupation for this they exile themselves for this they would and did run great risks as minor to this they sank all other things the catholic hierarchy with its enormous power at that moment civil and economic as well as religious was not the creator of such a spirit it was only its leader and in connection with that intense preoccupation of men's minds two factors already appeared in the fourth century and are increasingly active through the fifth and sixth the first is the desire that the living church should be as free as possible hence the catholic church and its ministers everywhere welcome the growth of local as against centralized power they do so unconsciously but nonetheless strongly the second factor is arianism to which I now return the end of section 17 section 18 you're up and the faith this is a libra vox recording all libra vox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit libravox.org you're up and the faith by hill air bellock section 18 chapter 4 concluded arianism which both in its material success and in the length of its duration as well as in its concept of religion and the character of its demise is singularly parallel to the Protestant movement of recent centuries had sprung up as the official and fashionable court heresy opposed to the orthodoxy of the church the emperor's court did indeed at last after many variations abandon it but a tradition survived till long after and in many places that arianism stood for the wealthy and respectable in life moreover those barbarians who had taken service as auxiliaries in the roman armies the greater part the goss for instance as the generic term went though that term had no longer any national meaning had received their baptism into civilized europe from arian sources and this in the old time of the fourth century when arianism was the thing just as we see in 18th century ireland settlers and immigrants accepting Protestantism as gentlemanly or progressive some there are so provincial as to still feel thus so the wrecks in spain and the wrecks in italy had a family tradition they and the descendants of their original companions were of what had been the court and upper class way of thinking they were arians and proud of it the number of these powerful heretics in the little local courts was smaller but their irritant effect was great it was the one great quarrel and problem of the time no one troubled about race but everybody was at white heat upon the final form of the church the populace felt it in their bones that if arianism conquered europe was lost for arianism lacked vision it was essentially a hesitation to accept the incarnation and therefore it would have bred sooner or later a denial of the sacrament and at length it would have relapsed as Protestantism has into nothingness such a decline of imagination and of will would have been fatal to society materially decadent had arianism triumphed the ages society of europe would have perished now it so happened that one of these local administrators or governors who were rapidly becoming independent and who were surrounded by a powerful court one only was not arian that one was the rex phancorium or chieftain of the little barbaric auxiliary force of francs which had been drawn into the roman system from belgium and the banks of the lower rye this body at the time when the transformation took place between the old imperial system and the beginnings of the nations had its headquarters in the roman town of tornay a lad whose roman name was cladovicus and whom his parents probably called by some such sound as clodovic they had no written language succeeded his father a roman officer footnote he was presumably head of auxiliaries his tomb has been found it is holy roman in the generalship of this small body of troops at the end of the fifth century unlike the other auxiliary generals he was a pagan when with other forces of the roman army he had repelled one of the last of the barbaric invaders close to the frontier at the roman town of tolby elkham and succeeded to the power of local administration in northern gall he could not but assimilate himself with the civilization wherein he was mixed and he and most of his small command were baptized he had already married a christian wife the daughter of the burgundian rex but in any case such a conclusion was inevitable the important historical point is not that he was baptized for an auxiliary general to be baptized was by the end of the 15th century as much a matter of course as for an oriental trader from bombay who has become an english lord or baronet in london in our time to ware trousers and a coat the important thing is that he was received and baptized by catholics and not by arian's in the midst of that enormous struggle cladovicus known in history as clovis came from a remote corner of civilization his men were untouched by the worldly attraction of arianism they had no tradition that it was the thing or smart to adopt the old court heresy which was offensive to the poorer mass of europeans when therefore this rex francorium was settled in paris about the year 500 and was beginning to administer local government in northern gall the weight of his influence was strong with the popular feeling and against the arian regis in italy and spain the new armed forces of the rex francorum a general levy continuing the old roma tradition settling things once and for all by battle carried orthodox catholic administration all over gall they turned the arian rex out of toulouse they occupied the valley of the rome for a moment it seemed as though they would support the catholic populace against the arian officials in italy itself at any rate their championship of popular and general religion against the irritant small administrative arian bodies in the palladium of this region and of that was a very strong lever which the people and the bishops at their head could not but use in favor of the rex francorums independent power it was therefore indirectly a very strong lever for breaking up the now 500 to 600 decayed and almost forgotten administrative unity of the roman world under such forces the power of the bishop in each town and district the growing independence of the few and immensely rich great landowners the occupation of the palladium and its official machinery by the chieftains of the old auxiliary forces western europe slowly very slowly shifted its political base for three generations the mince continued to strike monday under the effigy of the emperor the new local rulers never took or dreamed of taking the imperial title the roads were still kept up the roman tradition in the arts of life though corsund was never lost in cooking dress architecture law and the rest all the world was roman but the visible unity of the western or latin empire not only lacked a civilian and military center but gradually lost all need for such a center towards the year 600 though our civilization was still one as it had always been from the british channel to the desert of sahara and even though missionaries extended its effect a few miles eastward of the old roman frontier beyond the rine men no longer thought of that civilization as a highly defined area within which they could always find the civilian authority of one organ men no longer spoke of our europe as the republic or common wheel it was already beginning to become a mass of small and often overlapping divisions the things that are older than and lie beneath all exact political institutions the popular legends the popular feelings for locality and countryside were rising everywhere the great landowners were appearing as semi independent rulers each on his own estates though the many estates of one man were often widely separated the daily speech of men was already becoming divided into an infinity of jargons some of these dialects were of latin origin some as in the germany's and scandinavia mixed original teutonic and latin some as in britain were Celtic some as in the pyrenees basque in north africa we may presume the indigenous tongue of the berbers resumed its way punic also may have survived in certain towns and villages there footnote we have no evidence that it survived in the fifth century but men paid no attention to the origin of such diversities the common unity that survived was expressed in the fixed latin tongue the tongue of the church and the church now everywhere supreme in the decay of arianism and of paganism alike was the principle of life throughout all this great area of the west so it was in gall and with a little belt and x2 gall that had risen in the germany's to the east of the rine so with nearly all idli and delmatia in what today we call switzerland and a part of what today we call bavaria and baton so with what today we call spain and portugal and so after local adventures of a parallel sort followed by a reconquest against arians by imperial officers and armies with northern africa and with a strip vandalusia but one part of one province did suffer a limited and local but sharp change on one frontier belt narrow but long came something much more nearly resembling a true barbaric success and the results thereof than anything which the continent could show there was here a real breach of continuity with roman things this exceptional strip was the eastern coast belt of the province of britain and we have next to ask what happened in britain when the rest of the empire was being transformed after the breakdown of central imperial power unless we can answer that question we shall fail to possess a true picture of the continuity of europe and of the early perils in spite of which that continuity has survived i turned therefore next to answer the question what happened in britain the end of section 18 the end of chapter four