war with the two Theodorics-the sons of Theodemir and Triarius-which began in the year following his restoration.

Theodoric.

The Ostrogoths had never gone westward, like their kinsmen the Visigoths. They had lingered on the Danube, first as members of the vast empire of Attila the Hun, then as occupying Pannonia in their own right. But, in the reign of Leo I., they had moved across the Save into the territory of the Eastern Emperors, and had permanently established themselves in Moesia. There they had settled down and made terms with the Constantinopolitan Government. But they were most unruly vassals, and, even in full time of peace, could never be trusted to refrain from raids into Thrace and Macedonia. The main body of their tribe now acknowledged as its chief Theodoric the son of Theodemir, the representative Early life of of the heaven-born race of the Amals, the kings of the Goths from time immemorial. Theodoric was now a young man of twenty-three, stirring and ambitious, who had already won a great military reputation by victories over the Bulgarians, the Sarmatians, and other tribes who dwelt across the Danube. He had spent ten years of his boyhood as a hostage at Constantinople, where he had learnt only too well the weak as well as the strong points of the East-Roman Empire. His after-life showed that he had there imbibed a deep respect for Roman law, order, and administrative unity; but he had also come to entertain a contempt for the timid Zeno, and a conviction that his bold tribesmen were more than a match for the motley mercenary army of the emperor, of which so large a proportion was still composed of Goths and other Teutons, who could not be trusted to fight with a good heart against their Ostrogothic kinsmen.

But Theodoric the Amal was not the only chief of his race in the Balkan peninsula. He had a namesake, Theodoric the son of Triarius, better known as Theodoric the One-eyed, who had long served as a mercenary captain in the imperial army, and had headed the Teutonic auxiliaries in the camp of the usurper Basiliscus. When Basiliscus fell, Theodoric the One

eyed collected the wrecks of the rebel forces, strengthened them with broken bands of various races, many of whom were Ostrogoths, and kept the field against Zeno. He retired into the Balkans, and occasionally descended to ravage the Thracian plains; but meanwhile he sent an embassy to Zeno, offering to submit if he were given the title of magister militum, which he had held under Basiliscus, and taken with all his army into the imperial pay.

Zeno indignantly refused to entertain such terms, and resolved to take in hand the destruction of the rebel. He sent an Asiatic army into Thrace to beset the son of Triarius from the south, and bade his warlike vassal the The two son of Theodemir to attack his namesake from the Theodorics.

north, on the Moesian side. The younger Theodoric tagerly consented, for he grudged to see any other Gothic chief than himself powerful in the peninsula, and looked down on the son of Triarius as a low-born upstart, because he did not come like himself from the royal blood of the Amals.1

The campaign against Theodoric the One-eyed turned out disastrously for the imperial forces. The Roman army in the south missed the track of the rebel, whether by accident or design, while Theodoric the Amal with his forces got entangled in the defiles of the Balkans, and surrounded by the army of his rival. He had been promised the co-operation of the army of Thrace, but no Romans appeared, and his projects began to look dark. His one-eyed rival, riding to within earshot of his camp, taunted him with his folly in listening to the orders and promises of the emperor. 'Madman,' he cried, 'betrayer of your own race, do you not see that the Roman plan is always to destroy Goths by Goths? Whichever of us falls, they, not we, will be the stronger. They never will give you real help, but send you out against me to perish here

1 By his name (Triarius) the father of Theodoric the One-eyed must have been a Roman or a Romanised Goth, but the One-eyed had himself married a wife who was close akin to Theodoric the Amal, for his son Recitach is called the Amal's cousin.

Revolt of

of serving his suspicious and ungrateful master, and joined in the revolt. He and Leontius seized Antioch, where the latter was proclaimed emperor, and got possesLeontius, 483. sion of Cappadocia, Cilicia, and north Syria. It is said that they designed to re-establish paganism, a project which seems absolutely incredible in the very end of the fifth century, when the heathen were no more than a forlorn remnant scattered among a zealous Christian population. The empress-dowager Verina, who was living in exile in Cappadocia, joined herself to them, and adopted Leontius as her son. But the rebels took more practical measures to support their cause when they applied for aid to Odoacer the king in Italy, and to the Persian monarch Balas. Both promised aid, but, before they could send it, Zeno had put the rebellion down. He induced his late enemy Theodoric to join his army, and the Goths and Isaurians combined easily got the better of Leontius. Syria submitted, and the rebel emperor and Illus, after a long and desperate defence in a castle in Cappadocia, were taken and slain.1

Zeno enjoyed comparative peace after Leontius' rebellion had been crushed, and was still more fortunate when, in 488, he induced Theodoric the Amal to move his Ostrogoths out of Moesia and go forth to conquer Italy. How Theodoric fared in Italy we have already related. His departure was of enormous benefit to the empire, and, for the first time since his accession, Zeno was now able to exercise a real authority over his European provinces. They were left to him in a most fearful state of desolation: ten years of war, ranging over the whole tract south of the Danube and north of Mount Olympus, had reduced the land to a wilderness. Whole districts were stripped bare of their inhabitants, and great gaps of waste territory were inviting new enemies to enter the Balkan peninsula, and occupy the deserted country-side.

1 This fort-it was called Castellum Papirii-is said to have held out for the incredibly long period of four years after all the rest of the rebellious districts had been subdued, and only to have fallen by treachery.

North of the Balkans the whole provincial population seems to have been well-nigh exterminated. When the Ostrogoths abandoned the country there was nothing left

State of the

between the mountains and the Danube but a Balkan few military posts and their garrisons, nor was peninsula. the country replenished with inhabitants till the Slavs spread over the land in the succeeding age. Illyria and Macedonia had not fared so badly, but the net result of the century of Gothic occupation in the Balkan peninsula had been to thin down to a fearful extent the Latin-speaking population of the Eastern Empire. All the inland of Thrace, Moesia, and Illyricum had hitherto employed the Latin tongue: with the thinning out of its inhabitants the empire became far more Asiatic and Greek than it had before been.

When the Ostrogoths migrated to Italy, the empire acquired a new set of neighbours on its northern frontier, the nomad Ugrian horde of the Bulgarians on the lower Danube, and the Teutonic tribes of the Gepidae, Heruli, and Lombards on the middle Danube and the Theiss and Save. Contrary to what might have been expected, none of these races pushed past the barrier of Roman forts along the river to occupy Moesia. They vexed the empire with nothing worse than occasional raids, and did not come to settle within its limits.

Zeno's ecclesiastical policy demands a word of notice. He was himself orthodox, but not fanatical: the Church being at the moment grievously divided by the Monophysite schism, to which the Churches of Egypt and Palestine had attached themselves, he thought it would be possible and expedient to lure the heretics back within the fold by slightly modifying the Catholic statement of doctrine. In 482, though he was in the midst of his struggle with Theodoric the Amal, he found time to draft his 'Henoticon,' or Edict of Comprehension. The Monophysites held that there was but one nature in our Lord, as opposed to the orthodox view, that both the human and the divine element were fully present in His person.

Rebellions in Isauria, 492-496.

and organised a rebellion in their native hills. A second Longinus, who had been magister militum in Thrace, put himself at the head of the insurrection, which lingered on for five years (491-496), but was never a serious danger to the empire. The rebels were beaten whenever they ventured into the plains, and only maintained themselves so long by the aid of the mountain-castles with which their rugged land was studded. In 496 their last fastnesses were stormed, and their chief, the ex-magister, taken and executed. Anastasius punished the communities which had been most obstinate in the rebellion by transferring them. to Thrace, and settling them on the wasted lands under the Balkans, where he trusted that these fearless mountaineers would prove an efficient guard to keep the passes against the barbarians from beyond the Danube.

The Asiatic provinces of the empire had no further troubles till 502, when a war broke out between Anastasius and Kobad king of Persia. The Mesopotamian frontier had been singularly quiet for the last century; there had been no serious war with the great Oriental monarchy to the East since Julian's unfortunate expedition in 362. The same age which had seen the Teutonic migrations in Europe had been marked in inner Asia by a great stirring of the Huns and other Turanian tribes beyond the Caspian, and while the Roman emperors had been busy on the Danube, the Sassanian kings had been hard at work defending the frontier of the Oxus. In a respite from his Eastern troubles Kobad made some demands for money on Anastasius, which the emperor refused, and war soon followed. It began with several disasters for the Romans, and Amida, the chief fortress of Mesopotamia, was stormed in 503. Nisibis fell later in the same year, and when

War with
Persia,

503-505.

Anastasius sent reinforcements to the East he appointed so many generals with independent authority that the whole Roman army could never be united, and the commanders allowed themselves to be taken in detail and defeated in succession.

In 504, however,