THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY I 224
An Arian conspiracy against the Catholic Empire
14-18. An Arian conspiracy against the Catholic Empire
It is perhaps the positions held by Aegidius and Marcellinus in Gaul and Dalmatia which, shew most clearly the ruin of the Empire. The flagging brain ceases to control the limbs and members of the State; the Roman scheme of an organised world community falls into fragments.
Marcellinus, one of the young men trained by Aetius, had been promoted to the office of magister militiae in Dalmatia. On the murder of Aetius, he had refused obedience to Valentinian III; but on the succession of Majorian, who was also one of Aetius's men, he resumed his allegiance to the Empire, and was given the task of defending Sicily. The fall of Majorian drove him once more into rebellion, and though he was forced to leave Sicily, owing to the intrigues of Ricimer among his troops, he maintained himself as the independent ruler of Dalmatia. In the great expedition of 468 he joined with the Eastern and Western Emperors as a practically independent sovereign, and though he was assassinated in the course of the expedition, possibly at the instigation of Ricimer, he seems to have left his nephew, Nepos, the future Emperor, to succeed to his position.
A pagan, and a friend of philosophers, with whom he held high converse in his Dalmatian palace, Marcellinus stands, alike in his character and in his political position, as one of the most interesting figures of his age. His contemporary, Aegidius, is a man of more ordinary type. A lieutenant of Majorian, he had been created magister militum per Gallias; and on the death of his master, he had assumed an independent position in central Gaul, with the aid of the Salian Franks, who, in revolt against their own king, had, if Gregory of Tours may be trusted, accepted him for their chief. In 463 he had defeated the Visigoths in a battle near Orleans, and put himself into touch with Gaiseric for a combined attack on Italy; but in 464 he died. His power descended to his son Syagrius, who maintained his independence as the Roman King of Soissons until he was overthrown by Clovis in 486. Parallel in some ways to the position of Marcellinus and Aegidius is the beneficent theocracy which St Severinus established about the same time in Noricum, a masterless province unprotected by Rome, and harassed by the raids of the Rugii from the north of the river. The Saint mediated for his people with the Rugian kings Flaccitheus and his successor Feletheus; he used his influence among the provincials of Noricum to secure the regular payment of tithes for the use of the poor; in famine and flood he helped his flock, and kept the lamp of Christianity alight in a dark land.
The death of the nominal Emperor, Severus, in 465, made little difference in the history of the West. For two years after his death the West had no emperor of its own, and the whole Empire was nominally united under Leo I. Ricimer was content to prolong an interregnum, which left him sole ruler; Gaiseric was still pressing for the succession of Olybrius; and Leo was at once unwilling to create an emperor who was likely to be a vassal of Gaiseric, and anxious to maintain the peace which existed between the Vandals and the Eastern Empire. Accordingly he delayed the creation of a successor to Severus until Gaiseric, in 467, impatient of the delay, delivered an attack on the Peloponnesus.
Leo now felt himself free to act: he listened to the prayers of the Roman Senate, and appointed as Emperor Anthemius, a son-in-law of the Emperor Marcian, and a man of large experience, who had held the highest offices of the Eastern Empire. The gift of Anthemius's daughter in marriage was intended to conciliate the support of Ricimer; and East and West, thus united together on a firm basis, were to deliver a final and crushing attack on the Vandals, and to punish Gaiseric for the reign of terror he had exercised in the West ever since 461.
In April 467, Anthemius came to Italy, escorted by Count Marcellinus and an army. By 468 a great armada had been collected, to be launched against Carthage. The expenses were enormous: one office supplied 47,000 pounds of gold, another 17,000 pounds of gold and 700,000 pounds of silver; and this vast sum, which seems incredibly large, was furnished partly from the proceeds of confiscations, and partly by the Emperor Anthemius. A triple attack was projected. On the side of the East Basiliscus was to command the armada, and to deliver an attack on Carthage, while Heraclius marched by land through Tripoli to deliver a simultaneous attack on the flank of the Vandals. On the side of the West Marcellinus, conciliated by the Eastern Emperor, who was not unwilling to see Dalmatia in the hands of a ruler practically independent of the West, commanded a force which was destined to operate in Sardinia and Sicily.
Once more, however, Gaiseric defeated his foes, as in 442 and 461, and once more treachery, perhaps instigated by the subtle Vandal, proved the ruin of an expedition against Carthage. The Alan Aspar, magister militum per Orientem, frowned on an expedition which might render his master independent of his support; and already dubious of his ascendancy, he seems to have procured the nomination of Basiliscus, an incapable procrastinator, in order to ruin the success of the expedition. Ricimer, generalissimo of the West, was in a very similar position: he feared the success of the expedition, because it might consolidate the power of Anthemius, and he hated with a personal hatred the Count Marcellinus, who commanded the Western forces.
The inevitable result followed. Basiliscus was amused by Gaiseric with negotiations, and not unwillingly delayed, until Gaiseric sent fire-ships among his armada, and destroyed the bulk of his ships; while Marcellinus, after recovering Sardinia, was killed in Sicily by an assassin, in whom it is impossible not to suspect an agent of Ricimer. The success gained by Heraclius, who had won Tripoli and was marching on Carthage, was neutralised; the destruction of Basiliscus's fleet and the assassination of Marcellinus involved the complete failure of the expedition. When one remembers that Aspar, Ricimer, and Gaiseric were all Arians, one almost wonders if the whole story does not indicate an Arian conspiracy against the Catholic Empire; but political exigencies are sufficient to explain the issue, and the real fact would appear to be, that the two generalissimos of East and West were content to purchase their own security at the cost of the Empire they served.
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