heavier than that of Alaric, in proportion as the Vandal was cruel where
the Ostrogoth was generous. Alaric would have fought for Rome as Stilicho
fought, had he continued to be commanded by that Theodosius who made him a
Roman general; but Genseric was the vilest in soul of all the Teuton
invaders, and for fifty years, during the utter prostration of Roman power,
he infested all the shores of the Mediterranean with the savagery
afterwards shown by Saracen and Algerine.

This second plundering of Rome was no isolated event. It was only the sign
of that utter impotence into which Roman power in the West had fallen. The
city of Rome was the trophy of Caesarean government during five hundred
years--from Julius, the most royal, to Valentinian, the most abject of
emperors. And now its temporal greatness was lost for ever. It ceased to be
the imperial city, but by the same stroke became from the secular a
spiritual capital. The Pope, freed from the western Caesar,[4] gave to the
Caesarean city its second and greater life: a life of another kind
generating also an empire of another sort. The raid of Genseric in the year
455 is the first of three hundred years of warfare carried on from the time
of the Vandal through the time of the Lombard, under the neglect and
oppression of the Byzantine, until, in the year 755, Astolphus, the last,
and perhaps the worst, of an evil brood, laid waste the campagna, and
besieged the city. St. Leo, in his double embassy to Attila and Genseric,
was an unconscious prophet of the time to come, a visible picture of three
hundred years as singular in their conflict and their issue as those other
three hundred which had their close in the Nicene Council. During all those
ages the Pope is never secure in his own city. He sees the trophy of
Caesarean empire slowly perish away. The capital of the world ceases to be
even the capital of a province. The eastern emperor, who still called
himself emperor of the Romans, omitted for many generations even to visit
the city which he had subjected to an impotent but malignant official,
termed an Exarch, who guarded himself by the marshes of Ravenna, but left
Rome to the inroads of the Lombards. The last emperor who deigned to visit
the old capital of his empire came to it only to tear from it the last
relic of imperial magnificence. But then Jerusalem had fallen into the
hands of the infidel, and Christian pilgrims, since they could no longer
visit the sepulchre