n: Colour Plate THE MAUSOLEUM OF THEODORIC]

But this was not to be. The work of Theodoric, a useful work as we
shall see, was serving quite another purpose than that of establishing
a new Gothic kingdom. As for him and his government, they were utterly
to pass away and by reason of the religion they professed.

The first blow at the endurance and security of the Ostrogothic
hegemony was the conversion of Clovis to Catholicism in 496. This
changed the political relations, not only of every state in Gaul, but
of every state in Europe, and enormously to the disadvantage of the
Arians. The second was the reconciliation, in 519, of the pope and the
emperor, which rightly understood was the death warrant of the Gothic
kingdom. Had the Goths been Catholic, either that reconciliation would
not have taken place, or it would have been without ill results for
them. As it was it was fatal, though not all at once.

The Arian heresy, if we are to understand it aright, must be
recognised as an orientalism having much in common with Judaism and
the later Mahometanism. It denied several of the statements of the
Nicene Creed, those monoliths upon which the new Europe was to be
founded. It maintained that the Father and the Son are distinct
Beings; that the Son though divine is not equal to the Father; that
the Son had a state of existence previous to His appearance upon
earth, but is not from Eternity; that Christ Jesus was not really man
but a divine being in a case of flesh. Already against it the future
frowned dark and enormous as the Alps.

Such was the heresy at the root of the Ostrogothic kingdom, and it is
significant that the cause of the first open alienation between
Theodoric and the Catholics of Italy was concerned with the Jews. It
seems that the Jews, whom Theodoric had always protected, had, during
his absence from Ravenna, mocked the Christian rite of baptism and
made sport of it by throwing one another into one of the two muddy
rivers of that city, and also by some blasphemous foolishness aimed at
the Mass. The Catholic population had naturally retaliated by burning
all the Jewish synagogues to the ground. Theodoric, like all the
Gothic Arians, sided with the Jews and fined the Catholic citizens of
Ravenna, publicly flogging those who could not pay, in order that the
synagogues might be rebuilt. Such was the first open breach between
the king and the Romans, who now began to remind themselves that there
was an Augus