Maurice and Heraclius

In four years Tiberius was dead, and a younger, better general, Maurice, replaced him. In this Maurice and his two successors, Phocas and Heraclius, you saw the Byzantine empire at its best. These men were good officers, knew the difference between victory and defeat, and knew how to avoid disaster. Maurice and Heraclius (both, as it happens, Armenians by origin) have good reputations with moderns, whereas Phocas is reviled as a butcher. For he was leading troops in the Balkans when Maurice overplayed his hand and ordered them to remain on frontier post through the cold winter. The troops revolted and Phocas seized the throne and murdered Maurice. If we put aside our fastidiousness and affection for Maurice, the three men were of a piece. Maurice came from Cappadocia, deep in Asia Minor, and reigned for twenty years, from 582 to 602; Phocas lasted eight years; and Heraclius, the improbable Armenian from Carthage, survived for thirty-one years on the throne.

Approve of Maurice

Historians like and approve of Maurice: “He is described as intelligent and self-possessed, reserved in manner, and living a life of moderation and restraint; he maintained his dignity but displayed kindness to others and was free from pride and arrogance. . . . He enjoyed poetry and history. . . . Described as rich, kindly and charitable. . . . Said to have summoned his family to Constantinople and enriched them.”8 If he was a typical Roman of his age, no less typical was Comentiolus, an officer from Thrace who first appears in 583 on an embassy to the khan of the Avars. In the next year we see him as the commander of forces attempting to drive the Slavs from Thrace, and for the following five years he is active in the Balkans. He then turns up in 589 in the Byzantine outpost in Spain, where a Latin inscription records his work strengthening the fortifications at Carthago Nova. He next appears fighting on the Persian front, supporting Khusro II’s claim to regain the Persian throne as a shah friendly to Byzantium. Another four years pass and we see him fighting the Avars again in Thrace. Loyal to his emperor, Maurice, he fought in defense of Constantinople against Phocas’s coup, and was executed when the coup succeeded.

Badon Mount

People like Ambrosius Aurelianus were as often usurpers of authority as they were loyalist generals, and the barbarians they fought were as often the official federate troops of the emperor as they were irresponsible invaders. If we knew all the circumstances behind the battle of Badon Mount that Gildas tells us about, we might once again have great difficulty deciding just who was fighting for and who was fighting against the traditions and legitimacy of the Roman world.

The revival of Britain after the departure of Rome was long in coming, and had to do with the growth and flourishing of the border peoples, including the Angles, Saxons, and others who came in dribs and drabs to Britain across the North Sea. Christianity had found various homes in Britain in the centuries before Roman power dissolved, and it hung on for dear life.4 In the eighth century the Venerable Bede from his monastery in northern England tells a stirring story of lapse in the face of barbarian hostility and then dramatic reconversion by Augustine of Canterbury, sent out by Pope Gregory the Great. Bede minimizes the presence, persistence, and diversity of the Christian communities Augustine found surviving there, but his story is so good that it dominated medieval and modern awareness. A more complicated, less barbarian story is closer to the truth.

So consider a young man from a Christian family in western Britain in the years just after the Romans abandoned the island. His father and grandfather were clergy in this age before lifelong clerical celibacy, and life went on with or without a Roman empire to think of. The young man was kidnapped by pirates and sent into slavery in Ireland, where he tells how he found true religion while herding pigs. In due time he ran away to sea and made his way, through various adventures, across Gaul, which he makes sound like a far more desolate wasteland than it ever could have been.

Britain with my kinfolk

And after a few years I was again in Britain with my kinfolk, and they welcomed me as a son, and asked me, in faith, that after the great tribulations I had endured I should not go away from them. But in a vision in the night, I saw a man whose name was Victoricus, and it seemed he was coming from Ireland with countless letters. He gave me one of them, and I read the beginning: “The Voice of the Irish,” it said, and as I was reading it, I seemed to hear the voices of the people near the wood of Focluth, which is close to the western sea there, and they were crying out in one voice: “We beg you, holy young man, to come and walk among us again.” And my heart was so moved with compuncation that I could not read any further, and so I awakened. I give God my thanks, because after many years, He sent me to them, as they had cried out for personal tours bulgaria.

This man was Patrick, that is, Patricius, “patrician,” a name left behind by the Romans. He undoubtedly traveled afoot through Ireland, mainly in the north, preaching, converting, and dealing with the local potentates. Did he really convert Conall Gulbain, a son of the nearly legendary Niall of the Nine Hostages and founder of the O’Donnell clan? The story that he did so was, for many centuries, important quite without regard to whether the event really happened or not. Just in the last decade, research has brought legend perilously back to life with the suggestion that a high proportion of Irish people can trace their genetic descent back to a single male figure of the mid-fifth century, a point of origin that coincides neatly with the legends of Niall, Conall, and their like.

If Patrick did not convert all of Ireland to Christianity, he nevertheless came at a moment when the Christian wave was breaking across the island, planting monasteries formed in the Gaulish tradition, monasteries that dominated the landscape, which would have no cities or real villages for centuries to come. The Ireland that claimed him was otherwise little touched by the tendrils of Mediterranean civilization and remained eco¬nomically backward until the 1990s, but it already had a complex social structure, a distinctive culture, and an impressive learned class—the more impressive for flourishing in a society entirely without cities.

Catalaunian Fields in northern Gau

This dance of forces across northern Gaul ended in July 451 on the Catalaunian Fields in northern Gaul. In the sixth century this was already incorrectly considered one of the great battles of the western world, and historians imagined an impeccable Latin oration for Attila as he suitably roused his troops at the outset of battle:

After victories over such great nations, after bringing the world to its knees if only you would stop to receive it, I would think it foolish to try to sharpen your spirits with words as if you were novices. Let the new general or the untried army try such things. It is not right for me to say anything trite here, nor should you have to listen to such.24

The massed armies—probably indistinguishable from one another to the observer25—clashed that day and the Huns came off second best, retreating across the Rhine.

The next year, weakened by defeat and perhaps also by disease among his people, Attila confined himself to raiding north of the Po River in Italy, returning again to his cross-Danube haunts for the winter. There he died suddenly. Gaudy rumor assigned his death to a wedding night, barbaric excess, and a resulting hemorrhage—or was it a knife wielded by his new wife?—but we have no reason to take any such stories at face value. Attila was gone, and so was the threat he represented. The Huns did not disappear, and those bearing similar names and some relationship to the diverse groups that had assembled under Attila would crop up long after; but in that moment, the greatest force outside the empire that had both supported and threatened it crumbled. Aetius had prevailed, by some mixture of luck, stubbornness, and valor.

 The Roman government

He was not trusted or loved. The Roman government had come to depend entirely on the leadership of men like him—men who saved them, but whom they repeatedly hunted down and murdered. Stilicho had been killed in 408 at his emperor’s order, and perhaps thousands of other “barbarians”—good, assimilated Romans in every respect—were slain at the same time. Aetius faced worse balkan tours 2023. His emperor, whom he had served and saved for two decades, turned on him and in 454 in Ravenna, when Aetius was making a report on the state of the army’s finances, Valentinian murdered him with his own hand—and the help of a few burly soldiers who held the victim for the coup de grace. Six months later, allies of Aetius murdered Valentinian. They had been put up to it by other members of the court; the good order of Rome was preserved. The dignified senator Petronius Maximus, qualified by his distinguished rank and family and nothing else, became the emperor. He lasted all of two months. Three weeks later, in June 455, the Vandals reached Rome, sacked the city, and carried away (allegedly) precious treasures that Emperor Titus had looted from the Temple of Jerusalem almost 400 years earlier; they also took along an empress and two princesses.

The Romans’ murders of Stilicho and Aetius were eerily similar. An imperial regime under pressure gave command to a general who straddled the border dividing Roman from barbarian. Over a few years, the general succeeded in calming a chaotic situation. He used his judgment and diplomacy to negotiate effectively with other generals who could be dangerous. The progress was palpable and of great value, and at the point of greatest success, the ineffective, traditionalist, and uncomprehrending emperor became anxious, jealous, and optimistic—in short, he lost touch with reality—and engineered the murder of the general, who had been the making of him. What becomes of the emperor in such a case is of no interest, but the goals of calm and prosperity that were before in reach now receded dramatically from view. The most powerful force working against the Roman empire on such occasions was the ambition, the patriotism, and the stupidity of the empire’s leaders themselves.