Whatever they called themselves, Alaric’s followers needed at least some rudimentary sense of solidarity in the years to come. Some people in antiquity didn’t need much to be content. A little farm, a view of the sea, and a steady income would do. “I want to glide in my little boat by the shore of a peaceful coast,” one Roman of the sixth century said, and “to gather little fishes from the pools.” He intended the image to be a metaphor for the life of the mind. The lesson was that wisdom came with every moment of studied concentration, just like casting a fly. But such tranquility was a dream others never attained.
Late that year, as the Goths departed the mainland for Carthage, a storm broke and capsized several of their hired ships. Many died at sea. Captains ordered the rest back to land, where they were told that Africa would have to wait. As the fall turned to winter, Alaric, among those still waiting for passage, suddenly died.
Oly says Alaric died of “sickness,” Jordanes that his passing was “untimely.” Without any body to exhume, every written report naturally demands a healthy degree of suspicion. Some scientists have proposed malaria caused by Plasmodium falciparum as the likely killer, based on knowledge of the boggy climate in southern Italy, which could have fostered the parasitic disease. But the same Greek word Oly used for “sickness,” nosos, evoked a range of ailments, and not all of them the purview of antiquity’s medical professionals.
According to the archaic Greek poet Hesiod, nosos was an “affliction” that pecked at a tormented soul. People who obsessed about their wounded honor were said to suffer from it, the moody playwright Sophocles noted, like a “disease.” Nosos was the “madness” that came from loving something or someone too much, Euripides explained. Given that Alaric suffered from all three of these ailments—personal anguish, hurt pride, and an unfailing love for his people—it might be better to say that he died from “complications.”
That winter, Jordanes said, the Goths mourned Alaric “with utmost affection.” Late in the year in ancient Cosentia, now Cosenza, a small town in the Calabrian region of southern Italy, they buried him in an unusual rite. Gothic leaders ordered several enslaved men to dam the waters of the Busento, so that Alaric’s body could be laid in the riverbed, where it would be covered with mud and enveloped by the rushing stream. It was a custom known from Dacia, although no Goth after Alaric is ever said to have requested it. The passing of their highly respected leader left the Goths rudderless. They had experienced long periods of migration, starvation, and poverty in the years since hitching their fortunes to Alaric’s ideals. Men had died in battle to secure a better future for their families, one that never came. Women and children struggled every day to survive, but no one could go on like this indefinitely.
During the recent conflicts, Emperor Honorius’s half sister, Galla, had joined the Gothic march, a remarkable turn of events so unbelievable to Romans they claimed she had been captured. Perhaps she went of her own volition, her own moral commitments inspiring her to ally against her brother’s causes. The possibility of sexual violence against a woman in wartime also lurks disturbingly beneath the surface of the Roman and Gothic presentation of events. Whether by choice or force, by 414, Theodosius’s only surviving daughter had wed Alaric’s brother-in-law, Athaulf, in an extravagant ceremony at a villa in Narbonne, near the Mediterranean coast in Roman Gaul. The fortyish-year-old Goth, who only four years earlier had tried to convince Alaric “to obliterate the name of Rome” and had returned to Rome himself after Alaric’s death to strip it “bare like locusts,” stood at his bride’s side dressed smartly in a Roman soldier’s white formal wear. The former prefect of the city, short-lived emperor of Rome, and man of eclectic talents, Priscus Attalus, helped compose the wedding poetry, a standard element for a classical occasion meant to honor the bride and groom. Honorius did not attend.
By 418 or 419, Galla’s husband, who had returned to war to fight against Vandals in Gaul and Spain, was dead—killed, Orosius says, “by the treachery . . . of his own men.” But Galla remained deeply connected to the Gothic community. Political reconciliation between the Roman government and the Gothic community at last seemed possible.
Honorius, now in his mid-thirties, convinced that a true and proper Gothic state was the surest way to avoid future attacks, had ordered his advisers to scrutinize the empire’s maps for Roman territory to divest. They settled on the Roman province of Aquitaine, nestled on the Bay of Biscay. The pleasant Garonne River, which emptied into the blustery Atlantic, made communication among inland towns easy, and the land around the larger cities, like Bordeaux and Toulouse, teemed with fertile soils that would provide the Gothic settlers with ample food. Due to the recent border wars against the local Franks and Burgundians, as well as the Vandals, many citizens had already evacuated their estates. The Goths could farm as much as they liked here and could govern themselves as they wished.
The borders of this new Gothic kingdom were hazy in the fifth century, as borders usually were, and the precise legal arrangements that secured its creation remain, centuries later, unclear. But the Roman emperors ceded their rights to the land, and their decision to forfeit Aquitaine was the first move in the dissolution of the once-united Roman Empire. Gothic monarchs ruled this corner of western Europe for three centuries and shaped the history of the continent—actual kings, not men with honorary titles. King Euric established a law code that incorporated long-respected Roman legal principles, encouraging Gothic lawyers to borrow what they needed from Rome’s law books, including the need to protect private property, to establish the power of the courts, and to preserve the ancient right of the paterfamilias, the ability of a Roman father to manage the affairs of his extended household. Gothic legal scholars added what they needed from their own customs, too, such as the Goths’ practice of punishing legal infractions with fines, which they applied even to the loss of life, as when a pregnant woman miscarried through an act of household violence. According to Visigothic law, a man guilty of killing a woman carrying a “formed fetus” was required to pay 150 solidi; if the fetus was “unformed,” the penalty was 100 solidi. The desire of jurists to distinguish an early-stage pregnancy from a later one not only demonstrates, in the estimation of one scholar, the Visigoths’ “pragmatic and relatively compassionate” approach toward reproductive health and justice; it also finds no parallel in the Roman world, which, after Theodosius’s revolution, increasingly often chose to enforce orthodox canon law.
In the sixth century, Alaric II, traditionally identified as Alaric’s great-grandson, codified all these laws in a collection called the Breviary of Alaric II and, in yet another move that reaffirmed the Goths’ commitment to building a religiously neutral public space, denied Christian priests the privilege of sitting as judges in civil matters, a right they maintained in contemporary Roman law. These and other moderate Gothic ideas, interwoven with selected Roman precedents, formed the basis of legal culture in medieval Spain.
As a Gothic golden age settled upon Europe, an artist fashioned this evocative sapphire gem with an unmistakable echo of the Gothic past. The surrounding text, carved in reverse so that its owner could use the gem as a seal, reads, “Alaric, King of the Goths.” The portrait is likely that of King Alaric II.
The Roman Empire did not fare as well. As it had with Dacia in the third century, Rome’s government abandoned England in the fifth century because of difficulties securing the island’s towns. Franks unseated Rome’s government in northern Gaul, and by the 430s, less than a decade after Honorius’s death, the Vandals had commandeered the great port city of Carthage, where they installed their own government and halted grain shipments to Italy. Romans, raised to expect an unending supply of cheap, state-subsidized food, were forced for the first time in hundreds of years to pay full market price for their grain and olive oil. Rome’s population thinned as people decided to take their families elsewhere. Estimates put the loss to Rome at around a half million residents over the course of the fifth century.
Two generations later
, as the Goths solidified their kingdom in Aquitaine, the Roman Empire crumbled. Without the engine of the cross-continental economy to inject money into its cities, people couldn’t afford the same luxury array of spices, clothes, and even mass-manufactured building materials as before. Standards of living dropped in the western Roman territories. As urban investments declined, houses shrank into huts again. Italian families set out modest handmade dinnerware on their tables, no longer the fancy wheel-spun imports from Alaric’s time. Neighborhoods contracted, and unused land devolved into private urban farms.
By 476, when a northern warlord, named Odoacer, seized control of the Roman government by forcing the western emperor to abdicate, residents of the city of Rome no longer lived within the borders of their own empire. All that remained of the Roman world was the territory governed by the eastern emperor, Zeno—a horseshoe-shaped state that followed the coast of the Mediterranean from the Aegean Sea to Egypt. While the empire’s citizens and its leaders remained oblivious to the fortunes of those on its borders, Constantinople led this greatly diminished Roman Empire into its next millennium from one capital, not two, with two imperial prefectures, not four, and with a collection of semiautonomous territories. But the torch of Romanitas would be picked up and carried forward from surprising directions during these centuries of change, as it was by another Gothic boy from the Danube River, a lad named Theoderic.
“A youth of tall stature but very poorly clad” when he started his first job in the eastern Roman Empire in the late fifth century, Theoderic studied hard, won the emperor’s trust, and was promoted to high office in Constantinople. Theoderic served the emperor loyally on the battlefield and in civil service during those years, even as the hardships and misfortunes of the Goths who had settled in Illyricum weighed heavily on him. It seemed heartless, Theoderic told the Roman emperor Zeno, “to enjoy the advantages of the Roman Empire in luxurious ease while his tribe lived in want.”
The receptive Roman emperor, keen to keep the rising Goth at a safe distance, answered with a proposal: Theoderic should take his followers, organize a Gothic army, and march westward to Italy. If they successfully deposed the warlord Odoacer, who had forced the western emperor into recent retirement, Theoderic could keep the old Roman territory as his personal reward and govern it as he wished. In 493, the victorious Goths acclaimed Theoderic king of Italy, and his reign inaugurated a Gothic golden age. The Ostrogoths of Italy and the Visigoths of southern Gaul and Spain united their kingdoms such that, in the sixth century, a Goth could sail down the Tiber River, head to the Atlantic Ocean, and still be in this new “Gothia.”
Under Theoderic’s leadership, religious pluralism reigned, with the king’s family serving as its model. Theoderic’s mother recited the Nicene Creed, while her son the king recited Arius’s. State money was used to repair Italian churches and synagogues alike. When Theoderic visited St. Peter’s Basilica, people said that he had done so “with as much reverence as if he himself were a Catholic.” His concern for religious moderation and justice impressed many, it was said at the time, and “won the good-will of the neighboring nations.”
A healthy economy returned to Italy after decades of mismanagement by the Roman emperors. The Gothic king, who discovered the state’s finances “nothing but a haystack,” quickly replenished the treasury by raising taxes. He brought a welcome transparency to government, reinvested in public works, and repaired Italy’s aqueducts and the grand bath halls of Rome, Ostia, Verona, Ravenna, and Pavia. Streets were swept; public announcements were posted in highly trafficked areas so that everyone could read “the words of the promise” the king had made to his people. In a move that would have raised eyebrows among Gothic partisans in Alaric’s time, Italians acclaimed this successful boy from the Danube as a new Emperor Trajan.
Highly traditional Christians, many of whom, in the sixth century, remained as fearful of the Goths as ever, endeavored to lead an exodus from society during these years. Hoping to lure like-minded Christians to protected islands of self-imposed isolation, men like Benedict of Nursia established Europe’s first monasteries as the Ostrogoths came to power. Day and night, Benedict’s monks copied old Greek and Roman manuscripts, prayed, and engaged in self-reflection. The activities kept their anxious minds off the new realities of life beyond their cloistered walls, where Goths and Romans lived side by side in cities and “the two groups of people were governing as one”—duas gentes in uno, people quipped in Latin. The idea seems to have been an aspirational motto for many Goths, harking back to the days when the aged Judge Athanaric had toured Constantinople on a state visit and marveled at the Roman city’s many waters flowing into one.
A sense of civic community came back to Italy; it could be seen in the camaraderie between Romans and Goths at the stadium, in public marketplaces, and on holy days. People attended Arian churches, Catholic churches, and synagogues in the same city. As the powerful rays of civilitas returned, the clouds of fear lifted. “Everyone could carry on his business at whatever hour he chose, as if it were in daylight,” people boasted. The king from the Danube was so committed to bringing back ancient Roman civic ideals that “he gave no city a gate. And where there were already gates, they were never shut.” An open door was probably all Alaric had ever wanted.
While Theoderic’s Ostrogothic kingdom flourished, Visigothic kings successfully protected their people from outside threats, and they fought off invasions for most of the fifth century, until Alaric’s great-grandson, Alaric II, lost a major battle at Vouillé in 507. The defeat forced the Visigoths to leave Aquitaine in disgrace, and they fled to Barcelona, transforming the old Roman town into a vibrant Gothic harbor. Other ancient cities across the Iberian Peninsula, like Mérida, Seville, Córdoba, and Toledo, were reborn under Gothic leadership, until the last Visigothic king, Roderic, lost his crown to a conquering army of Muslim Arabs and Moors, in 711. Roderic’s memory would be preserved in an unexpected place.
The Islamic caliph’s small stone lodge sat in a bright moonscape of rocks and wadis in the Jordanian desert, a seemingly unimpressive location for a ruler of a young but rapidly growing empire. By the time al-Walid II occupied the lodge at Qusayr ‘Amra, Jordan, Islamic forces had already taken Syria, Egypt, and northwestern Africa, including the port at Carthage. From there, they conquered Europe’s southwestern corner, the Iberian peninsula. The proud caliph wanted to impress his desert guests with his knowledge of the wonders of this expanding globe, so he commissioned a series of portraits for his lodge. On the walls of this luxurious space, which included a private bathhouse fed by a nearby cistern, al-Walid commissioned artists to paint a series of human figures: the emperor of Constantinople, the shah of Persia, the king of Axum (in Ethiopia), the emperor of China, and the ruler of Sogdiana, a rich trading community along the Silk Road. Joining the gallery of distinguished rulers on the walls was the last king of the Visigoths, Roderic.
It is a safe bet that Alaric would never have imagined that a Gothic face would one day be painted on the walls of a Muslim lodge in the Middle East. But in many ways, it was Muslims who helped preserve the Goths’ story, not the narrow-minded churchmen of Europe or the secular humanists of the Renaissance. It was Muslims who challenged medieval Europe to incorporate Gothic history into an emerging sense of world history. The Islamic governors of al-Andalus—to use the medieval name for the lands of the Visigothic kingdom—drove this new conversation.
In order to foster a society built on coexistence, Muslim rulers of Visigothic Spain decided to research how Rome’s empire fell apart and began by collecting evidence for their histories of the Goths. The Arabic writer Ibn Habib al-Ilbiri told his audience that al-Qut, as the Goths were called, had migrated from Persia. Others erroneously claimed that the Visigoths had lived in Spain “for a thousand years.” One explained that the Arabs had conquered Spain by displacing al-Rum, the Romans. There’s a delightful irony in seeing a Muslim writer mistake the Goths for the Romans, given Alaric’s long quest for unit
y and Rome’s hard-fought battle to oppose it.
All these early Islamic history books were based on a mix of misheard words, oral stories, and foreign authors who were read in translation. But the Muslim effort to gather this material was in many ways more important than the outcome. Islamic scholars taught themselves Latin, so that they could read the history of the later Roman Empire, and they hunted for other books to fill in the gaps in their knowledge of the time. During the ninth and tenth centuries, Arabic translators made the first copies of important Latin texts they found and passed those stories down to the people of al-Andalus. Among their cherished discoveries was the Latin author Orosius of Spain.
A Roman, a Christian, a friend of Augustine’s, and a pioneer in writing the history of the Roman Empire, Orosius had authored a monumental work called Seven Books of History Against the Pagans, which he published in the decade after Alaric’s attack. One of the first works by a Latin writer to eschew the gloomy picture Jerome and Augustine had painted, the work gave Christian readers an honest account of what had happened in 410. Orosius’s message was that even after serious disasters, history went on. The world did not end. Life could and did recover. Orosius’s straightforward approach to 410 became essential reading for Christian realists during the Middle Ages, many of whom had tired of hearing apocalyptic sermons from their pastors about the “Fall of Rome,” the downfall of society, and the immediacy of the Second Coming.
Two centuries after Orosius died, the Muslims of al-Andalus, eager to repair social relationships across a kingdom of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, sought out Latin editions of his text from libraries and marketplaces and enthusiastically recopied and translated his books. Like Virgil to Dante, Hurushiyush, as they styled Orosius in Arabic, became medieval Islam’s guide to this captivating lost world. Islamic and Christian readers alike found a road map to their common future in Orosius’s pages. The Muslim scholars of al-Andalus were thus intellectually a step ahead of many later Christian book hunters, most of whom lauded Cicero and the Roman Republic but scoffed at any attempt to valorize the period of the Goths or the study of the Roman Empire. The Renaissance’s well-educated men, like Petrarch, Giorgio Vasari, Flavio Biondo, and their classically minded followers, regularly told others that a gloomy dark age had settled over Europe with the Goths’ arrival. In their minds, Alaric and his followers were animals, just as Ovid, Prudentius, and others had said they were.
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