The Story of Mankind [45]
at last was at the mercy of every ambitious highway robber
who could gather a few followers.
In the year 402 the Emperor fled to Ravenna, which was
a sea-port and strongly fortified, and there, in the year 475,
Odoacer, commander of a regiment of the German mercenaries,
who wanted the farms of Italy to be divided among themselves,
gently but effectively pushed Romulus Augustulus, the
last of the emperors who ruled the western division, from his
throne, and proclaimed himself Patriarch or ruler of Rome.
The eastern Emperor, who was very busy with his own affairs,
recognised him, and for ten years Odoacer ruled what was
left of the western provinces.
A few years later, Theodoric, King of the East Goths,
invaded the newly formed Patriciat, took Ravenna, murdered
Odoacer at his own dinner table, and established a Gothic
Kingdom amidst the ruins of the western part of the Empire.
This Patriciate state did not last long. In the sixth century a
motley crowd of Longobards and Saxons and Slavs and Avars
invaded Italy, destroyed the Gothic kingdom, and established
a new state of which Pavia became the capital.
Then at last the imperial city sank into a state of utter
neglect and despair. The ancient palaces had been plundered
time and again. The schools had been burned down. The
teachers had been starved to death. The rich people had been
thrown out of their villas which were now inhabited by evil-
smelling and hairy barbarians. The roads had fallen into
decay. The old bridges were gone and commerce had come
to a standstill. Civilisation--the product of thousands of years
of patient labor on the part of Egyptians and Babylonians and
Greeks and Romans, which had lifted man high above the
most daring dreams of his earliest ancestors, threatened to
perish from the western continent.
It is true that in the far east, Constantinople continued to
be the centre of an Empire for another thousand years. But
it hardly counted as a part of the European continent. Its
interests lay in the east. It began to forget its western origin.
Gradually the Roman language was given up for the Greek.
The Roman alphabet was discarded and Roman law was written
in Greek characters and explained by Greek judges. The
Emperor became an Asiatic despot, worshipped as the god-like
kings of Thebes had been worshipped in the valley of the
Nile, three thousand years before. When missionaries of the
Byzantine church looked for fresh fields of activity, they went
eastward and carried the civilisation of Byzantium into the
vast wilderness of Russia.
As for the west, it was left to the mercies of the Barbarians.
For twelve generations, murder, war, arson, plundering were
the order of the day. One thing--and one thing alone--saved
Europe from complete destruction, from a return to the days
of cave-men and the hyena.
This was the church--the flock of humble men and women
who for many centuries had confessed themselves the followers
of Jesus, the carpenter of Nazareth, who had been
killed that the mighty Roman Empire might be saved the
trouble of a street-riot in a little city somewhere along the
Syrian frontier.
RISE OF THE CHURCH
HOW ROME BECAME THE CENTRE OF THE
CHRISTIAN WORLD
THE average intelligent Roman who lived under the Empire
had taken very little interest in the gods of his fathers.
A few times a year he went to the temple, but merely as a
matter of custom. He looked on patiently when the people
celebrated a religious festival with a solemn procession. But he
regarded the worship of Jupiter and Minerva and Neptune as
something rather childish, a survival from the crude days of
the early republic and not a fit subject of study for a man
who had mastered the works of the Stoics and the Epicureans
and the other great philosophers of Athens.
This attitude made the Roman a very tolerant man. The
government