THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY I 150
The Failure of the National Gothic State
10-5. The Failure of the National Gothic State
For this reason peace only lasted for a year, which was spent in settling internal affairs. The most important event under Euric's government at this time is the publication of a Code of Law which was intended to settle the legal relations of the Goths, both amongst themselves and with the Romans who had come under the Gothic dominion.
The deposition of the last West-Roman Emperor, Romulus, by the leader of the mercenaries, Odovacar (Sept. 476), gave the king a welcome reason for renewing hostilities, as he looked upon the treaty made with the Empire as dissolved. A Gothic army crossed the Rhone and obtained final possession of the whole of southern Provence as far as the Maritime Alps, together with the cities of Aries and Marseilles, after a victorious battle against the Burgundians, who had ruled over this district under Roman suzerainty. But when Euric also marched a body of troops into Italy it suffered defeat from the officers of Odovacar.
Consequently a treaty was concluded by the East-Roman Emperor Zeno and the king of the Burgundians whereby the newly conquered territory in Gaul (between the Rhone and the Alps south of the Durance) was surrendered by Odovacar to the Goths, while Euric evidently pledged himself to undertake no further hostilities against Italy (c. 477).
Euric was incessantly harassed by the difficulties of defending this mighty conquest from foes without and within. In particular, very frequent cause for interference was given by the conduct of the Catholic clergy, who openly shewed their disloyalty, and in the Vandal kingdom did not shrink from the most treacherous actions. Yet they seem only in rare instances to have been answered by violence and cruelty. The Saxon pirates who, according to old custom, infested the coast of Gaul were vigorously punished by a fleet sent out against them. In the same way it seems that an invasion of the Salian Franks was warded off successfully. It is not strange that, owing to the prestige of the Visigoth power, Euric's help was repeatedly requested by other peoples, as by the Heruli, Warni, and Tulingi who, settled in the Netherlands, found themselves threatened by the overwhelming might of the Franks and owed to the intervention of the Gothic king the maintenance of their political existence. The poet Sidonius Apollinaris has left behind a vivid description of the way in which, at that time, the representatives of the most diverse nations pressed round Euric at the Visigoth Court, even the Persians are said to have formed an alliance with him against the Eastern Empire. It seems that envoys from the Roman population of Italy also appeared at Toulouse to ask the king to expel Odovacar, whose rule was only reluctantly endured by the Italians.
We do not know if Euric intended gratifying this last request, in any case he was prevented from executing any such designs through death, which overtook him in Aries in December 484. Under his son Alaric II the Visigoth power fell from its height. To be sure, the beginning of the decline originated at a time further back. Ataulf's political programme, as already observed, had originally contemplated the establishment of a national Gothic State in the place of the Roman Empire. Yet not one of the Visigoth rulers, in spite of honest purpose, could accomplish this task. It is to their credit that they succeeded at last, after severe fighting, in freeing themselves from the suzerainty of the Emperor and obtaining political autonomy, but the State which thus resulted resembled a Germanic National State no more than it did a Roman Imperium, and it could not contain the seeds of life because it was in a great measure dependent on foreign obsolescent institutions.
The Goths had entered the world of Roman civilisation too suddenly to be able either to resist or to absorb the foreign influences which pressed on them from all sides. It was fortunate for the progress of Romanisation that the Goths, cut off from the rest of the German world, could not draw thence fresh strength to recuperate their nationality or to replace their losses, and moreover that through the immense extension of the kingdom under Euric the numerical proportion between the Roman and Gothic population had altered very much in favour of the former. So under the circumstances it was a certainty that the Gothic kingdom in Gaul must succumb to the rising and politically creative power of the Franks. Neither the personality of Alaric, who was little fitted for ruling, nor the antagonism between Catholicism and Arianism caused the downfall, they only hastened it.
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