Theodoric

we know is the one they took) is nearly six hundred miles. Assuming an average rate of travel of ten miles a day (which allows for inevitable delays and stopovers), they would accomplish this stretch in two months, arriving at the Ulca about the end of November. This would still give them time to push far enough up the valley of the Drava before wintering, to be able to cross the Julian Alps into Italy the following spring.

two hundred sections altogether

The wagon trains of American pioneers or Boers on the Great Trek set out not as amorphous mobs but as organized mobile communities made up of separate groupings, and operating under strict codes of discipline, with a hierarchy of command. It is fairly safe to assume that the emigration of the Ostrogoths (to which must be added Fredericus’ Rugians) must have been run on broadly similar lines. As no sources give any details, however, I’ve had to fall back on invention. How many did the Ostrogoths number? Again, no precise figures are available. Burns (in History of the Ostrogoths) suggests forty thousand, which seems far too low; Wolfram estimates one hundred thousand, a figure with which Moorhead agrees, while Richard Rudgley (in his fascinating Barbarians) suggests three hundred thousand. As a compromise, perhaps two hundred thousand would be a realistic total.

Chapter 17

To put on such a show of force

Exactly why the Gepids chose to offer battle remains a mystery. On the face of it, they had nothing to gain and everything to lose by taking on such a powerful nation. Wolfram (in his impressive and synthesizing History of the Goths) says, ‘Whether the Gepids were in league with Odovacar or whether they were doing this on their own is unknown.’ He goes on to wonder if Odovacar may perhaps have enlisted the Gepids as allies, but admits that this is only speculation. Jordanes claims that the Gepids were old enemies of the Ostrogoths — hardly in itself a valid reason for confronting them at a juncture when they were merely transients and not acting in the least aggressively. I can find no other source which offers an explanation for the Gepids’ conduct. Of course, all this uncertainty provides a splendid opportunity to devise a fictional reason, one which ties in with Thiudimund — concerning whom the records are largely (and conveniently!) blank. From the scanty information we do possess, we know that his claim to the throne was passed over (because he could offer, Wolfram says, ‘no evidence of his fitness for the kingship’) in favour of Theoderic’s; also that in 479, when leading a column assigned to him by Theoderic, he was outmanoeuvred by the Roman general Sabinianus, only escaping by abandoning his people — resulting in many being taken prisoner, and hundreds of wagons being lost. This allowed me, without distorting known historical fact, to present him as a jealous sibling who was also cowardly and incompetent. (All very useful for dramatic purposes.) As history is silent about him after 479, I was able neatly to kill him off in the battle at the Ulca, he having fulfilled his fictional raison d’etre.

you will lead the Forlorn Hope

Despite having a modern — well, early modern — ring, being chiefly associated with wars from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, the term ‘Forlorn Hope’ (from the Dutch verloren hoop, ‘lost troop’) doesn’t mean that the phenomenon itself is anachronistic in the context here. Ancient history abounds with examples of intrepid volunteers leading desperate sorties to carry a breach etc. (e.g., Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus was awarded the corona vallaris for heading a scaling- party over the walls of Carthage). With their reputation for reckless courage, acts of self-sacrificing valour by barbarians were doubtless even more common than those by Romans. But, as history was written by the Romans, such incidents were seldom recorded. An exception was made in the case of Theoderic at the battle of the Ulca. The Roman panegyrist Ennodius wrote (in Panegyricus dictus Theoderico) that he turned the tide of battle by heading a counter-attack ‘like a lion in the midst of a herd’, just when it seemed that the Gepids were gaining the upper hand. But of course on that occasion, Theoderic, acting in the capacity of Zeno’s vicegerent-to-be, was fighting on the ‘right’ side.

Chapter 18

the West’s finished

Except that it wasn’t. In the 530s, Justinian, the Eastern Emperor, began a long campaign to restore the Western half of the ‘One and Indivisible Empire’. His brilliant generals Belisarius and Narses succeeded in clearing Africa, Italy and southern Spain of Vandals, Ostrogoths and Visigoths respectively, so that by the end of his reign, in 565, the Roman Empire had almost regained the same dimensions it possessed just prior to Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul. A truly remarkable achievement, but one that was destined not to last. By the end of the century Germanic Lombards had taken over much of Italy, and in the next, Avars, along with militant Islam, were to reduce the empire to an Anatolian rump, with an archipelago of tiny imperial possessions alone surviving in the West. (The Eastern Empire survived, though in increasingly attenuated form, until 1453 when Constantinople finally fell to the Turks.) Although, in a physical sense, the Roman Empire may have passed away, it is astonishing how the idea of Rome has continued to grip the minds of rulers and statesmen: from Charlemagne crowned emperor in Rome in 800 to the failed attempt to create a European Constitution, whose aims were prematurely carved in Latin in splendid Trajanic capitals on a marble plaque in Rome.

chatting easily with the Franks

Sidonius Apollinaris wrote to Syagrius congratulating him on his ability to communicate with barbarians. ‘I am. . inexpresibly amazed,’ he commented, ‘that you have quickly acquired a knowledge of the German tongue with such ease. . The bent elders of the Germans are astounded at you when you translate letters, and they adopt you as umpire and arbitrator in their mutual dealings.’

Clovis. . inspiring respect

For most of the fifth century, the pre-eminent barbarian power in Gaul was the Visigoths, with Frankish influence west of the Rhine tenuous at best. Following the death of the great Euric in 484, that situation rapidly went into reverse. By the time of Clovis’s death in 511, the Franks had become the dominant power in Gaul — whose name in consequence changed to Frankia/Francia (France).

Chapter 19

the Forts of the Saxon Shore

To counter Saxon raids, an increasingly serious threat from the late third century on, a chain of ten massive forts was built from the Wash to the Isle of Wight, under the command of the Comes Litoris Saxonici, the Count of the Saxon shore, the second highest military post after the Dux Britanniae. When the usurper Constantine (self-styled III) withdrew the regular troops from Britain in 407, the limitanei continued to function, even after the collapse of the Western Empire in 476. The last of them, the Numerus Abulcorum stationed at Anderida (Pevensey), were finally wiped out by the Saxons in 491.

his headquarters near Castra Gyfel

Despite Ilchester’s obvious Roman ancestry, I’ve been unable to trace its Roman name. In the Domesday Book it’s Givelcestre, ‘Roman town on the Gifl’. Gifl, being an earlier name for the River Yeo on which the town stands, would have been a Brythonic appellation. In the same way that the Romans called Chester (on the River Dee) Castra Deva, I’ve guessed that they might have called Ilchester Castra Gyfel.

a magical landscape

The grassy chalk uplands of southern England (mainly in Surrey, Sussex and Thomas Hardy’s ‘Wessex’) are rich in man-made features dating from neolithic times to the Iron Age: ridgeways along the crests of the various downs, chalk-cut giants and horses, barrows, stone circles of which Avebury and Stonehenge are the most famous, hill-forts, and that amazing eminence Silbury Hill (alluded to by Myrddin in the text). A few of the above are, or may be, imposters. All the extant White Horses, bar the one at Uffington (probably first-century BC), are eighteenth- and nineteenth-century, though two others, now destroyed, are known to have existed anciently. The Long Man of Wilmington is presumed to be ancient, as is the famously priapic Cerne Abbas Giant — though there’s a theory that the latter is an eighteenth-century forgery by an aristocratic joker poking fun at antiquaries.

an extraordinary edifice

Known today as Cadbury Castle (officially South Cadbury hill-fort), this Iron Age hill-fort with late-fifth-century additions has long been held to be King Arthur’s Camelot. This theory is reinforced by ‘Camel’ place-names in the vicinity: West Camel and Queen’s Camel; while the second name-word re the nearby Chilton Cantelo becomes