Unfortunately, the respite proved fleeting, as another group of warriors arrived three years later. Genseric was the Arian ruler of the destructive Vandals. The Vandals approached Rome, and once again the saintly pope marched out. Leo’s mission was only partly successful this time, as Genseric decided to loot the city but not destroy it. The Vandals ravaged the city for fourteen days, carrying off enormous amounts of wealth and goods, including the famous menorah from the Temple of Jerusalem that Titus had brought to Rome after the conquest of Judea in the first century. Over the next several years, Leo worked tirelessly to restore and rebuild Rome, prioritizing the repair and construction of new churches. His pontificate was the most important of the century and one of the most momentous in all Church history. The saintly pope, the protector of Rome, eminent theologian, Doctor of the Church, and luminous Christian, passed to his eternal reward on November 10, 461.
The Collapse of the Western Roman Empire
Thirty-five years after the death of Pope Saint Leo the Great, the political environment in the western world changed dramatically. When General Orestes made his son, sixteen-year-old Romulus, emperor in 475, the young man took control of a Roman Empire vastly different from that established by Octavian Augustus in 27 B.C. Rome in the fifth century was a fatigued state, riven by political intrigue and controlled by an army whose core membership consisted of ethnically German warriors. Their commanders demanded increased recognition and authority from the Roman government for their services. In 476, Odoacer, a Roman auxiliary commander, demanded to rule a large portion of Italy and was rebuffed by General Orestes. Angered, Odoacer rebelled against Rome, killed Orestes, and overthrew the boy-emperor Romulus (commonly known as “Augustulus” or “little Augustus”). Odoacer declared himself King of Italy. Over time, central governing authority in Rome collapsed, and political power devolved to the local Germanic chieftains, the former commanders of Roman auxiliary troops.138 There were many causes for the collapse of the Empire in the west in the late fifth century, but the historical evidence does not support the popular myths that hordes of greedy, savage German barbarians invaded Roman territory and eventually conquered it in a bloody spasm of violence, or that the Empire became enfeebled by embracing the Faith.
In the early Empire, the army had been composed of Roman citizens who saw military service as a duty of citizenship. By the third century, the army was professionalized, drawing recruits not from ordinary citizenry but from slaves and poor freemen. Recruiting became so difficult that imperial bureaucrats developed the idea of offering the Germanic tribes entrance into the confines of the Empire in exchange for military service. Meanwhile, political and military policies sent the Empire into a cycle of civil wars as the legions pulled back from the frontier. By the fifth century, the Roman army in its vital components was staffed by ethnic Germans, who had been raised in the Empire and self-identified as Roman but were not beholden to the wealthy Roman nobility or the imperial bureaucracy.139
The change in the army reflected the overall change in Roman society. After five hundred years of rule, the Roman Empire started to buckle in exhaustion.140 Romans simply lost confidence in their society. It was this exhaustion and lack of confidence, not the Church or invading hordes of barbarians, that broke the Roman system:
Civilization requires confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, and confidence in one’s own mental powers. Vigor, energy, vitality: all the great civilizations — or civilizing epochs — have a weight of energy behind them. So if one asks why the civilization of Greece and Rome collapsed, the real answer is that it was exhausted.141
The ethnically German, yet Roman, local chieftains were forced to forge a new identity and social structure as a result of the Empire’s collapse. The Church, with her bishops and dioceses (organized according to the imperial governmental structure), was the only transnational organization in existence — and her unity in belief, practice, and way of life provided a glimmer of hope and light in the chaos caused by the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.142
Two Swords
Twenty years after Odoacer’s rebellion, Pope Saint Gelasius (r. 492–496) formulated a new political principle in the West known as the “Two Powers.” Gelasius wrote to the Eastern Emperor Anastasius I (r. 491–518), explaining: “There are two powers, august Emperor, by which this world is chiefly ruled, namely the sacred authority of the priests and the royal power. Of these, that of the priests is the more weighty, since they have to render an account for even the kings of men in the divine judgment.”143 Pope Saint Gelasius’s letter to the emperor was another development of the relationship between the ecclesial and civil authorities. Ambrose had advocated that the emperor, if Christian, was not above rebuke from the Church in certain matters, but Gelasius went further and argued that ecclesial power is higher and more important than civil power because the Church answers to God for the actions of men. This created a (mostly healthy) tension in the West between the Church and the civil political power, in contrast to the East, where the Church was subservient to the emperors’ policy of caesaro-papism.
The Germanic Tribes
The area once controlled by the Western Roman Empire was now governed by various Germanic tribes. The Goths were composed of the Visigoths, who settled in parts of Hispania, and southern and western Gaul; and the Ostrogoths, who lived in Italy. The Vandals were originally from southern Scandinavia but crossed the Rhine early in the fifth century. They migrated to Hispania soon thereafter and invaded North Africa. Under the leadership of Genseric, they sacked the city of Rome in 455. The Burgundians were also originally from Scandinavia, but had migrated to Poland and the Rhône valley in Gaul in the early fifth century. Their king, Chilperic II, received the title “general” from one of the last western emperors, Julius Nepos. Chilperic was Arian, but married Caretena, a Catholic. Their daughter, Clotilda, would play a vital role in Church history as the wife of Clovis, king of the Franks. The Franks, whose name derives from an old German word that meant “savage,”144 were comprised of a confederation of tribes that were mostly hostile to Rome. One tribe, known as the Salian Franks, invaded Roman Gaul in the fifth century and eventually ruled northern Gaul. They became Roman auxiliary troops, fighting for Rome against Attila and the Huns. Southern Gaul was controlled by the Gallo-Romans, a Catholic people with strong ties to Rome and Roman culture. Perhaps the most famous Gallo-Roman was Saint Gregory of Tours (538–594), who wrote the History of the Franks, an invaluable resource for the history of these peoples. The Franks were a pagan people completely indifferent to the Faith, yet they “would become, not only the champions of Catholicism, but the future saviors of classical civilization.”145
Most of these Germanic tribes (except the Franks and some Burgundians) were converted to Arianism by the missionary Ulfilas (311–383), the “Apostle to the Goths.” Ulfilas was an educated and intelligent man who had spent time in Constantinople. He was eventually ordained bishop by Eusebius of Nicomedia (the famed