The thirty years which followed the death of Justinian are covered by
 three reigns, those of Justinus II. [565-578], Tiberius Constantinus
 [578-582], and Maurice [582-602]. These three emperors were men of much
 the same character as the predecessors of Justinian; each of them was an
 experienced official of mature age, who was selected by the reigning
 emperor as his most worthy successor. Justinus was the favourite nephew of
 Justinian, and had served him for many years as Curopalates, or Master of
 the Palace. Tiberius Constantinus was "Count of the Excubiti," a high
 Court officer in the suite of Justinus: Maurice again served Tiberius as
 "Count of the Foederati," or chief of the Barbarian auxiliaries. They were
 all men of capacity, and strove to do their best for the empire:
 historians concur in praising the justice of Justinus, the liberality and
 humanity of Tiberius, the piety of Maurice. Yet under them the empire was
 steadily going down hill: the exhausting effects of the reign of Justinian
 were making themselves felt more and more, and at the end of the reign of
 Maurice a time of chaos and disaster was impending, which came to a head
 under his successor.
 
 The internal causes of the disaster of this time were the weakening of the
 empire by the great plague of 544 and still more by the grinding exactions
 of Justinian's financial system. Its external phenomena were invasions by
 new hordes from the north, combined with long and exhausting wars with
 Persia. The virtues of the emperors seem to have helped them little:
 Justin's justice made him feared rather than loved; Tiberius's liberality
 rendered him popular, but drained the treasury; Maurice, on the other
 hand, who was economical and endeavoured to fill the coffers which his
 predecessors had emptied, was therefore universally condemned as
 avaricious.
 
 The troubles on the frontier which vexed the last thirty years of the
 sixth century were due to three separate sets of enemies--the Lombards in
 Italy, the Slavs and Avars in the Balkan Peninsula, and the Persians in
 the East.
 
 The empire held undisputed possession of Italy for no more than fifteen
 years after the expulsion of the Ostrogoths in A.D. 553. Then a new enemy
 came in from the north, following the same path that had already served
 for the Visigoths of Alaric and the Ostrogoths of Theodoric. The
 new-comers were the race of the Lombards, who had hitherto dwelt in
 Hungary, on the Middle Danube, and had more frequently been found as
 friends than as foes of the Romans. But their warlike and ambitious King
 Alboin, having subdued all his nearer neighbours, began to covet the
 fertile plains of Italy, where he saw the emperors keeping a very
 inadequate garrison, now that the Ostrogoths were finally driven away. In
 A.D. 568 Alboin and his hordes crossed the Alps, bringing with them wife
 and child, and flocks and herds, while their old land on the Danube was
 abandoned to the Avars. The Lombards took possession of the flat country
 in the north of Italy, as far as the line of the Po, with very little
 difficulty. The region, we are told, was almost uninhabited owing to the
 combined effects of the great plague and the Ostrogothic war. In this once
 fertile and populous, but now deserted, lowland, the Lombards settled down
 in great numbers. There they have left their name as the permanent
 denomination of the plain of Lombardy. Only one city, the strong fortress
 of Pavia, held out against them for long; when it fell in 571, after a
 gallant defence of three years, Alboin made it his capital, instead of
 choosing one of the larger and more famous towns of Milan and Verona, the
 older centres of life in the land he had conquered. After subduing
 Lombardy the king pushed forward into Etruria, and overran the valley of
 the Arno. But in the midst of his wars he was cut off, if the legend tells
 us the truth, by the vengeance of his wife Queen Rosamund. She was the
 daughter of Cunimund, King of the Gepidae, whom Alboin had slain in battle.
 The fallen monarch's skull was, by the victor's orders, mounted in gold
 and fashioned into a cup. Long years after, amid the revelry of a drinking
 bout, Alboin had the ghastly cup filled with wine, and bade his wife bear
 it around to his chosen warriors. The queen obeyed, but vowed to revenge
 herself by her husband's death. By the sacrifice of her honour she bribed
 Alboin's armour-bearer to slay his master in his bed, and then fled with
 him to Constantinople [A.D. 573].
 
 But the death of Alboin did not put an end to the Lombard conquests in
 Italy. The kingdom, indeed, broke up for a time into several independent
 duchies, but the Lombard chiefs continued to win territory from the
 empire. Two of them founded the considerable duchies of Spoleto and
 Benevento, the one in Central, and the other in Southern Italy. These
 states survived as independent powers, but the rest of the Lombard
 territories were reunited by King Autharis, in 584, and he and his
 immediate successors completed the conquest of Northern Italy.
 
 Thus, during the reigns of Justin, Tiberius II., and Maurice, the greater
 part of Justinian's Italian conquests were lost, and formed once more into
 Teutonic states. The emperor retained only two large stretches of
 territory, the one in Central Italy, where he held a broad belt of land,
 extending right across the peninsula, from Ravenna and Ancona on the
 Adriatic, to Rome on the Tyrrhenian Sea; the other comprehending the
 extreme south of the land--the "toe" and "heel" of the Italian boot--and
 comprising the territory of Bruttium and the Calabrian towns of
 Taranto, Brindisi, and Otranto. Sardinia and Sicily were also left
 untouched by the Lombards, who never succeeded in building a fleet. The
 Roman territory which stretched across Central Italy cut the Lombards in
 two, the king ruling the main body of them in Tuscany and the valley of
 the Po; while the dukes of Spoleto and Benevento maintained an isolated
 existence in the south.
 
                               
 
  Cross Of Justinus II. (_From the Vatican._) (_From "L'Art Byzantin," Par
                     C. Bayet. Paris, Quantin, 1883._)
 
 
 This partition of Italy between the Lombards and the empire is worth
 remembering, from the fact that never again, till our own day, was the
 whole peninsula gathered into a single state. Not till 1870, when the
 kingdom of United Italy was completed by the conquest of Rome, did a time
 come when all the lands between the Alps and the Straits of Messina were
 governed by one ruler. Justinian had no successor till Victor Emmanuel.
 
 After the Lombard conquest the imperial dominions in Italy were
 administered by a governor, called the Exarch, who dwelt at Ravenna, the
 northernmost and strongest of the imperial fortresses. All the Italian
 provinces were nominally beneath his control, but, as a matter of fact, he
 was only treated with implicit obedience by those of his subordinates who
 dwelt in his own neighbourhood. He found it harder to enforce his orders
 at Naples and Reggio, or in the distant islands of Sicily and Sardinia.
 But it was the bishops of Rome who profited most by his absence: although
 a "duke," a military officer of some importance, dwelt at Rome, he was
 from the first overshadowed by his spiritual neighbour. Even during the
 days of the Ostrogoths the Roman bishops had acquired considerable
 importance, as being the chief official representatives of the Italians in
 dealings with their Teutonic masters. But they spoke with much more
 freedom and weight when they had to do, not with a King of Italy dwelling
 quite near them, but with a mere governor fettered by orders from distant
 Constantinople. Gregory the Great [590-604] was the first of the popes who
 began to assume an independent attitude and to treat the Exarch at Ravenna
 with scant ceremony. He was an able and energetic man, who could not bear
 to see Rome suffering for want of a ruler on the spot, and readily took
 upon himself civil functions, in spite of the protests of his nominal
 superior the Exarch. In 592, for example, he made a private truce for Rome
 with the Lombard Duke of Spoleto, though the latter was at war with the
 empire. The Emperor Maurice stormed at him as foolish and disobedient, but
 did not venture to depose him, being too much troubled with Persian and
 Avaric wars to send troops against Rome. On another occasion Gregory
 nominated a governor for Naples, instead of leaving the appointment to the
 Exarch. In 599 he acted as mediator between the Lombard king and the
 government at Ravenna, as if he had been a neutral and independent
 sovereign. Although he showed no wish to sever his connection with the
 Roman Empire, Gregory behaved as if he considered the emperor his suzerain
 rather than his immediate ruler. He would never give in on disputed
 points, issued orders which contradicted imperial rescripts, and
 maintained a bitter quarrel with successive patriarchs of Constantinople,
 who possessed the favour of Maurice. When the patriarch John the Faster
 took the title of "oecumenical bishop," Gregory wrote to Maurice to tell
 him that the presumption of John was a sure sign that the days of
 Antichrist were at hand, and to urge him to repress such pretensions by
 the force of the civil arm. This is one of the first signs of the approach
 of that mediaeval view of the papacy which imagined that it was the
 pontiff's duty to censure and advise kings and emperors on all possible
 topics and occasions. Gregory's immediate successors were not men of mark,
 or a breach with the empire might have been precipitated. The final
 disavowal of the supremacy of the Constantinopolitan monarch was to be
 still delayed for nearly two hundred years.
 
 The wars between the Exarchs of Ravenna and the Lombard kings were little
 influenced by interference from the East. The emperors during the last
 thirty years of the sixth century were far more engrossed with their
 Persian and Slavonic wars. Contests with the Great king of the East
 occupied no less than twenty years in the reigns of Justin II., Tiberius,
 and Maurice. War was declared in 572, and did not cease till 592. Like the
 struggle between Justinian and Chosroes I., thirty years before, it was
 wholly indecisive. There were more plundering raids than battles, and the
 frontier provinces of each empire were reduced to a dreadful state of
 desolation and depopulation: if the Persians pushed their ravages as far
 as the gates of Antioch, Roman generals penetrated deep into Media and
 Corduene, where the imperial banner had not been seen for two hundred
 years. The net result of the whole twenty years of strife was that each
 combatant had seriously weakened and distressed his rival, without
 obtaining any definite superiority over him. Forced to make peace by the
 pressure of a civil war, Chosroes II. gave back to Maurice the two
 frontier cities of Dara and Martyropolis, the sole trophies of twenty
 campaigns, and ceded him a slice of Armenian territory. But these trivial
 gains were far from compensating the empire for the fearful losses caused
 by dozens of Persian invasions.
 
 The Persian war was exhausting, but successful: on the northern frontier,
 however, the Roman army had been faring far worse, and serious losses of
 territory were beginning to take place. The enemies in this quarter were
 two new tribes, who appeared on the Danube after the Lombards had departed
 from it to commence their invasion of Italy. There were now no Teutons
 left on the northern frontier of the empire: of the incoming tribes, one
 was Tartar and the other Slavonic. The Avars were a nomadic race from
 Asia, wild horsemen of the Steppes, much like their predecessors the Huns.
 They had fled west to escape the Turks, who were at this time building up
 an empire in Central Asia, and betook themselves to the South Russian
 plains, not far from the mouth of the Danube. To cross the river and
 ravage Moesia was too tempting a prospect to be neglected, and ere long
 the Avaric cavalry were seen only too frequently along the Balkans and on
 the coast of the Black Sea. Their first raid into Roman territory fell
 into the year 562, just before the death of Justinian, and from that time
 forward they were always causing trouble. They were ready enough to make
 peace when money was paid them, but as they invariably broke the agreement
 when the money was spent, it was never long before they reappeared south
 of the Danube.
 
 But the Slavs were a far more serious danger to the empire than the Avars.
 The latter came only to plunder, the former--like the Germans two centuries
 before--came pressing into the provinces to win themselves a new home. The
 Romans knew at first of only two tribes of them, the Slovenes and Antae,
 but behind these there were others who were gradually to push their way to
 the south and make their presence known--Croats, Servians, and many more.
 The Slavs were the easternmost of the Aryan peoples of Europe, and by far
 the most backward. They had always lain behind the Germans, and it was
 only when the German barrier was removed by the migration of the Goths and
 Lombards that they came into touch with the empire. They were rude races,
 far behind the Teutons in civilization; they had hardly learnt as yet the
 simplest arts, knew nothing of defensive armour, and could only use for
 boats tree-trunks hollowed out by fire--like the Australian savages of
 to-day. They had not learnt to live under kings or chiefs, but dwelt in
 village communities, governed by the patriarchs of the several families.
 Their abodes were mud huts, and they cultivated no grain but millet. When
 they went to war they could send out thousands of spearmen and bowmen, but
 their wild bands were not very formidable in the open field. They could
 resist neither cavalry nor disciplined infantry, and were only formidable
 in woods and defiles, where they formed ambuscades and endeavoured to take
 their enemy by surprise, and overwhelm him by a sudden rush. We are
 assured that one of their favourite devices was to conceal themselves in
 ponds or rivers by lying down in the water for hours together, breathing
 through reeds, whose points were the only things visible above the
 surface. Thus a thousand men might be concealed, and nothing appear except
 a bed of rushes. This strange stratagem would seem incredible, if we had
 not on record one or two occasions on which it was actually practised.
 
 The Slavs had begun to make themselves felt early in the sixth century,
 but it was not till the death of Justinian that we hear of them as a
 pressing danger. But when the Lombards had passed away westward, they came
 down to the Danube and began to cross it in great numbers, in the
 endeavour to make permanent settlements on the Roman bank. The raids of
 the Slavs and the Avars were curiously complicated, for the king, or
 Chagan, of the Tartar tribe had made vassals of many of his Slavonic
 neighbours. They, on the other hand, sometimes acted in obedience to him,
 but more frequently tried to escape from his power by pushing forward into
 Roman territory. Hence it comes that we often find Slav and Avar leagued
 together, but at other times find them acting separately, or even in
 opposition to each other. A more chaotic series of campaigns it is hard to
 conceive.
 
 Down to this time the inland of the Balkan peninsula had been inhabited by
 Thracian and Illyrian provincials, of whom the majority spoke the Latin
 tongue, though a few still preserved their ancient barbaric idiom.
 They formed the only large body of subjects of the empire outside Italy,
 who still spoke the old ruling language, and as they were about a quarter
 of its population, they did much to preserve its Roman character, and to
 prevent it from becoming Greek or Asiatic. Their pride in their Latin
 tongue was very marked: Justinian, born in the heart of the district, was
 fond of laying special stress on the fact that Latin was his native
 language.
 
 On this Latinized Thraco-Illyrian population the invasion of the Slavs and
 Avars fell with unexampled severity. The Goths had afflicted them before,
 but they, at least, had been Christian and semi-civilized, while the
 new-comers were in the lowest grade of savagery. It is not too much to say
 that between 570 and 600 the old population was almost exterminated over
 the greater part of the country north of the Balkans--the modern Servia and
 Bulgaria--and very sadly cut down even in the more sheltered Macedonian and
 Thracian provinces. The Latin-speaking provincials almost disappeared: the
 only remnants of them were the Dalmatian islanders and the "Vlachs" or
 Wallachians who are found in later times scattered in small bodies among
 the Slavs who had swept over the whole country-side. The effect of the
 invasion is well described by the contemporary chronicler, John of
 Ephesus--
 
 "The year 581 was famous for the invasion of the accursed people called
 Slavonians, who overran Greece and the country by Thessalonica, and all
 Thrace, and captured the cities and took many forts, and devastated and
 burnt, and reduced the people to slavery, and made themselves masters of
 the whole country, and settled in it, by main force, and dwelt in it as
 though it had been their own. Four years have now elapsed, and still they
 live at their ease in the land, and spread themselves far and wide, as far
 as God permits them, and ravage and burn and take captive, and still they
 encamp and dwell there."
 
 The open country was swept bare by the Slavs: the towns resisted better,
 for neither Slav nor Avar was skilled in siege operations. Relying upon
 the fortified towns as his base the great general Priscus, whom Maurice
 placed in command, was able to keep his ground along the Danube, and to
 perform many gallant exploits. He even crossed the river and attacked the
 Slavs and Avars in their own homes beyond it; but it was to no effect that
 he burnt their villages and slew off their warriors. He could not protect
 the unarmed population in the open country within the Roman boundary, and
 the girdle of fortresses along the Danube soon covered nothing but a
 wasted region, sparsely inhabited by Slavs. The limit of Roman population
 had fallen back to the line of the Balkans, and even to the south of it,
 and the Slavs were ever slipping across the Danube in larger and larger
 numbers, despite the garrisons along the river which were still kept up
 from Singidunum [Belgrade] to Dorostolum [Silistria].
 
 The misfortunes of the Avaric and Slavonic war were the cause of the fall
 of the Emperor Maurice. He had won some unpopularity by his manifest
 inability to stem the tide of the barbarian invasion, and more by an act
 of callousness, of which he was guilty in 599. The Chagan of the Avars had
 captured 15,000 prisoners, and offered to release them for a large ransom.
 Maurice--whose treasury was empty--refused to comply, and the Chagan
 massacred the wretched captives. But the immediate cause of the emperor's
 fall was his way of dealing with the army. He was unpopular with the
 soldiery, though an old soldier himself, and did not possess their respect
 or confidence. Yet he was an officer of some merit and had written a long
 military treatise called the "Strategicon," which was the official
 handbook of the imperial armies for three hundred years.
 
 Maurice sealed his fate when, in 602, he issued orders for the
 discontented army of the Danube to winter north of the river, in the waste
 marshes of the Slavs. The troops refused to obey the order, and chased
 away their generals. Then electing as their captain an obscure centurion,
 named Phocas, they marched on Constantinople.
 
 Maurice armed the city factions, the "Blues" and "Greens," and strove to
 defend himself. But when he saw that no one would fight for him, he fled
 across the Bosphorus with his wife and children, to seek refuge in the
 Asiatic provinces, where he was less unpopular than in Europe. Soon he was
 pursued by orders of Phocas, whom the army had now saluted as emperor, and
 caught at Chalcedon. The cruel usurper had him executed along with all his
 five sons, the youngest a child of only three years of age. Maurice died
 with a courage and piety that moved even his enemies, exclaiming with his
 last breath, "Thou art just, O Lord, and just are thy judgments!"