Conquest of the Roman Empire
The Decline of the Roman Empire, actually the Fall or Conquest of the Roman Empire beginning with the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, is a historical term of periodization for the end of the Western Roman Empire. Edward Gibbon, in his famous study The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), was the first to use this terminology. Alarich (Alaric I), King of the Visigoths, conquered Rome for the first time from 24 to 27 August 410. In June 455, Vandals and Alans under King Gaiseric captured the city. Theodoric the Great would become King of Italy as the successor of Odoacer in 493. Finally Totila, King of the Ostrogoths, captured Rome in 546. The "Germanic Wars" ended in 596, Western Europe was under Germanic rule.
History
The traditional date of the fall of the Roman Empire is 4 September 476, when Romulus Augustus, the last Emperor of the Western Roman Empire was deposed by Odoacer. Modern historians question the relevance of this date, as the Ostrogoths who succeeded considered themselves as upholders of the direct line of Roman traditions, and noting, as Gibbon did, that the Eastern Roman Empire continued until the Fall of Constantinople in 29 May 1453.
Some other notable dates are the Battle of Adrianople in 378, the death of Theodosius I in 395 (the last time the Roman Empire was politically unified), the crossing of the Rhine in 406 by Germanic tribes after the withdrawal of the legions in order to defend Italy against Alaric I, the death of Stilicho in 408, followed by the disintegration of the western legions, the death of Justinian I, the last Roman Emperor who tried to reconquer the west, in 565, and the coming of Islam after 632. Many scholars maintain that rather than a "fall", the changes can more accurately be described as a complex transformation. Over time many theories have been proposed on why the Empire fell, or whether indeed it fell at all.
In 488, Emperor Zeno of the Byzantine Empire sent Theodoric's Ostrogoths (still settled in Pannonia) to conquer Italy, which they do in 493. The whole tribe settled there afterwards. In 500, Rome‘s population has declined to less than 100,000 people.
Goths
Once they had broken loose from Hun control, the Germanic Ostrogoth moved slowly toward northern Italy. Their leader was Theoderic, one of the most talented leaders of all the Germanic peoples. He had spent ten years in Constantinople as a hostage, knew both Latin and Greek, and had developed a profound admiration for the ancient civilization he had been forcibly acquainted with. He had not, however, lost his tribal skills, for after conquering most of northern Italy , he demonstrated his ability with the broad-sword by slicing in two his rival for control of Italy and his ruthlessness by exterminating the rival's family. Theodoric then showed constructive statesmanship. From 493 till his death in 526, he governed Italy and large parts of the Balkans as the regent of the emperor in Constantinople and as King of the Goths, establishing both in title and in actuality a successful policy of ethnic coexistence. The Goths took one-third of the land and houses and all military duties.[1] The Romans kept the rest, and devoted themselves to peaceful pursuits.
Gothic law applied to Goths, Roman law to Romans. Intermarriage[2] was forbidden, Germanics kept their blood pure, just like Tacitus reported in his Germania. Although Theodoric was an Arian Christian, he tolerated the Catholic religion and even the Jewish and other faiths. "Religion is not something we can command," he said. "No one can be forced into a faith against his will." He showed great concern for Roman culture. He restored monuments that had fallen into ruin, including the Coliseum in Rome , where circuses were still presented. But it was at the capital of Ravenna that the Ostrogothic king showed the heights of civilization that could be achieved with the fusion of Germanic and Roman skills.[3]
Ravenna had been made the capital of the western part of the Roman Empire because of its excellent harbor and because it was protected by wide marshes. It was a city of islands, canals, bridges, and causeways, looking across lagoons to the Adriatic Sea . Here Theodoric found that the Roman artists had brought to perfection one of the most demanding and uncompromising of all artistic forms, the art of mosaic; and it was for this achievement that his Ravenna would be principally remembered. In mosaic the artist must set enormous numbers of tiny bits of marble, enamel, glass, and colored stone into damp cement. He cannot produce those subtleties of expression possible in an oil painting, but must seek an overall effect usually visible only from a distance. But in return he is able to use the play of light not only upon the many different angles of the tiny mosaic stones but within the mosaic itself.
In Ravenna, the artists were developing new materials for this art, applying gold leaf to glass cubes and covering them again with a thin film of glass, using metallic oxides to produce variations of color, or employing mother of pearl to produce just the right effect of creamy perfection. In the windows, they often used thick sheets of alabaster, so that the entering light already had a soft opacity before playing upon the planes of yellow marble and the complexity of the mosaic surface. In Ravenna, they constructed buildings as though they were galleries meant to display mosaics, with bare walls designed to permit the artist to create the largest, most complex compositions yet attempted in that exacting form of art. One last advantage is still evident today; the process is almost permanent. Unlike frescoes, which fade fairly rapidly, many of the mosaics in Ravenna have required no restoration, and shine as brightly today as in the sixth century.
The building that turned Theodoric to the use of mosaic for his churches and palaces was the tiny mausoleum of Gaila Placidia, probably the tomb of an emperor's daughter who had been married to a Visigothic prince. The architecture was simple, a cross of unadorned brick with very small windows. Its mosaics however are the loveliest possible introduction to the art that was the glory of Ravenna and later of Constantinople itself. The mosaic over the entrance to the mausoleum represents the good shepherd, a kindly protector, not feeding his sheep but patting them benevolently on the nose. He is dressed in a stunning robe with red piping and deep blue stripes that could appear unchanged at a present-day fashion show. In the center of the tiny chapel, one turns to look upward to the dome, the Dome of Heaven, lit up by almost eight hundred golden stars; these become smaller as the dome rises, increasing the sensation of the swirling distance wherein a gold cross symbolizes Redemption.
Theodoric called on the skilled mosaic artisans to decorate one of the most beautiful basilicas in Europe, Sant' Apollinare Nuovo. The church consists of a central aisle, with a narrow nave on each side separated by a line of columns, with a small semicircular apse at the east end. As one steps inside the central nave one at once feels the rushing, forward motion built up by the long line of columns surmounted by the figures in the mosaics above. On each side are twelve columns of Greek marble, topped by delicately carved capitals. The mosaic carries on the forward motion of the pillars. On the north side is a procession of twenty-two virgin martyrs, preceded by a very lifelike group of the three Wise Men bringing gifts to the Madonna and the child Jesus. Again the clothes are amazingly modem. The three kings seem to be wearing stretch pants decorated with the most imaginative designs in orange and deep vermilion. Indeed, King Caspar seems to be wearing a pair of leopard-skin tights. We are a long way from the impersonality of Greek sculpture, and the three men, one brown-bearded, one white-bearded, and one clean-shaven, are hardly idealized pictures of piety. On the opposite side of the church, above a line of twenty-two male martyrs, there is a whole panoply of scenes, each one worth looking at in detail. Perhaps most moving of all is the scene of the paralytic being lowered on ropes from a roofless building to be healed by Christ below.
Theodoric died in 526.The Visigoths, the Ostrogoths, and the Vandals, who were largely responsible for the conquest of the Roman Empire in the West, left little lasting trace and returned to their sacred Germania north of the Alps. Other Germanic lords would become the new rulers of Rom. The dominant Franks and the Anglo-Saxons, however, were to become the principal creators of medieval civilization and are considered the fathers of modern-day Europe.
Holy Roman Empire
In 800, Charlemagne, King of the Franks, was crowned emperor by Pope Leo III and founded the Holy Roman Empire later known as the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation ruled by the Roman-German Emperors until 1806.
See also
Further reading
- Felix Dahn: Ein Kampf um Rom (PDF-Dateien: All four volumes, 1888; 47. Auflage, 1906: Band 1, Band 2)
References
- ↑ Germanic Tribes: Goths
- ↑ Theodoric led the Ostrogothic invasion of Italy (supported by elements of the Rugii). During the course of four years of fighting, the invasion swept away Odoacer's Post-Imperial Romano-Gothic kingdom. In its place Theodoric created an Ostrogothic kingdom which held much of Italy until Byzantium began a re-conquest of the western empire in southern Italy. Despite the fact that the invasion had been devised by Emperor Zeno, the Ostrogoths ruled independently, and Theodoric and Zeno addressed each other as equals. Overtures to Byzantium were only made by some Ostrogoth leaders after Theodoric's death. A Roman consul was given nominal authority, and the two peoples lived together amicably, with Roman culture greatly influencing the barbarians. The Goths took one third of the land while the Romans retained the rest. Each side observed their own laws and intermarriage between Roman and Goth was forbidden. One area in which they didn't agree was in Christianity. The Ostrogoths were confirmed Arians, something that the Catholics of the Roman Church found hard to stomach. Not all the Ostrogoths pursued this path into Italy and eventual Italianisation. A branch known as the Tauric Ostrogoths ventured further eastwards, ending up in Crimea by the end of the fifth century. They settled in the region and established an Eastern Germanic Gothic principality which was later known as Doros. Additionally, some elements of the Gothic peoples in southern Germany formed part of the Bavarii confederation at the start of the sixth century.
- ↑ According to Romans, everyone who was not a Roman citizen was a barbarian, sometimes classified as such value-free, but often for "uncivilised people". The Greeks also used the term barbarian for all non-Greek-speaking people. The Ancient Greek name βάρβαρος (bárbaros) or "barbarian" was an antonym for πολίτης (politēs), "citizen" (from πόλις – polis, "city"). Plato rejected the Greek–barbarian dichotomy as a logical absurdity on just such grounds: dividing the world into Greeks and non-Greeks told one nothing about the second group. Yet Plato used the term barbarian frequently in his seventh letter. With the Romans it became a common term to refer to all foreigners among Romans after Augustus age (as, among the Greeks, after the Persian wars, the Persians), including the Germanic peoples, Persians, Gauls, Phoenicians and Carthaginians.
