THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY I 222
The Revolt against a Gallic Emperor
14-16. The Revolt against a Gallic Emperor
The next Emperor, Avitus, came from Gaul. Here Thorismud, the new king of the Visigoths, who had succeeded to his crown on the Mauriac plain, had been killed by his brothers in 453, for pursuing a policy contrary to Roman peace. Theodoric II, his successor, owing his succession to a Roman party, was naturally friendly to Rome.
He had learned Latin from Avitus, a Gallo-Roman noble, and he shewed his Latin sympathies by renewing the old foediis of the Visigoths with Rome, and by sending an army to Spain to repress the Bagaudae in the interest and under the authority of the Empire. Avitus, who had been despatched to Gaul during the brief reign of Maximus as master of the troops of the diocese, came to Toulouse in the course of his mission, during the summer of 455; and here, on the death of Maximus, he was induced to assume the imperial title. The new Emperor represented an alliance of the Gallo-Roman nobility with the Visigothic kingdom; and the fruits of his accession rapidly appeared, when Theodoric, in the course of 456, acting under an imperial commission, invaded and conquered the Suevic kingdom in Spain, which had shewn itself of late inimical to the Empire, and had taken advantage of the troubles of 455 to pursue a policy of expansion into the Roman territory in the northeast of the peninsula.
But Avitus, strong as was his position in Gaul and Spain, failed to conciliate the support of Rome. He was indeed recognised by the Senate, when first he came to Rome, at the end of 455; and he was adopted by the Eastern Emperor, Marcian, as his colleague in the government of the Empire. But difficulties soon arose. One of his first acts had been the despatch of an embassy to Gaiseric, who seems to have annexed the province of Tripolitana and reoccupied the Mauretanias during the course of 455. Avitus demanded the observance of the treaty of 435, and sent into Sicily an army under Ricimer the Sueve to support his demand, Gaiseric at once replied by launching his fleet against Italy; but Ricimer, in 456, was able to win a considerable victory over the Vandal fleet near Corsica.
The victory might seem to consolidate the position of Avitus; but Ricimer determined to use his newly won influence against his master, and he found a body of discontent in Rome to support his plans. Avitus had come to Rome with a body of Gothic troops; but famine had compelled him to dismiss his allies, and in order to provide them with pay before they departed he had been forced to strip the bronze from the roofs of public buildings. In this way he succeeded at once in finally alienating the Romans, who had always disliked an emperor imposed upon them by Gaul, and in leaving himself defenceless; and when Ricimer revolted, and the Senate, in conjunction with Ricimer, passed upon him the sentence of deposition, he was forced to fly to Gaul.
Returning with an insufficient army, in the autumn of 456, he was defeated by Ricimer near Piacenza; and his short reign was ended by his compulsory consecration to the office of bishop, and shortly afterwards by his death. It is curious to notice that the two things which seemed most in his favour had proved his undoing. The Gothic invasion of Spain, successful as it was, had left him without the aid of the Gothic king at the critical moment; while Ricimer's victory over the Vandals had only impelled the victor to attempt the destruction of his master.
Ricimer, now virtual ruler of the West, was a man of pure German blood — the son of a Suevic noble by a Visigothic mother, the sister of Wallia. Magister militum, he is the successor of Stilicho and Aetius; but unlike his predecessors, he has nothing Roman in his composition and little that is Roman in his policy. Stilicho and Aetius had wished to be first in the State, but they had also wished to serve the Theodosian house; Ricimer was a jealous barbarian, erecting puppet after puppet, but unable to tolerate even the rule of his puppets. His power rested nakedly on the sword and the barbarian mercenaries of his race; and one only wonders why he tolerated the survival of an emperor in Italy throughout his life, and did not anticipate Odovacar in making a kingdom of his own instead. It may be that his early training among the Visigoths, and his subsequent service under Aetius, had given him the Roman tincture which Odovacar lacked; in any case his policy towards the Vandals and the Visigoths shews something of a Roman motive.
For some months after the disappearance of Avitus there was an interregnum. Ricimer apparently took no steps to fill the vacancy; and Marcian, the Eastern Emperor, was on his death-bed. At last Leo, who had eventually succeeded to Marcian by the grace of Aspar, the master of the troops in the East, elevated Ricimer to the dignity of patricius (457), and named Majorian, who had fought by Hicimer's side in the struggle of 456, as magister militum in his stead. A few months afterwards the election of the Senate and the consent of the army united to make Majorian emperor.
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