The Fall of the Roman Empire

by Michael Grant

  But this great strength had only been maintained by his own unremitting vigilance and energy. For as soon as he came to the throne, he was plunged immediately into a variety of emergencies. In the words of Ammianus, who wrote a magnificent Latin history of the later Roman Empire, 'at this time, as if trumpets were sounding the war-note throughout the whole Roman world, the most savage peoples raised themselves and poured across the nearest frontiers'. Yet Valentinian and his able generals were a match for them.

  The first thing that had happened was that Germans broke across the Rhine, capturing the fortress of Mainz. But they were defeated by the Romans three times, and then the Emperor himself, moving his headquarters from Lutetia (Paris) to the frontier city of Treveri (Trier), marched up the valley of the River Neckar and won a ferocious victory in the Black Forest. He remained in Germany for seven years, constructing an elaborate system of fortifications on the Rhine, building a strongpoint at Basilia (Basel), and moving to Ambiani (formerly Samarobriva, now Amiens) in order to direct operations in Britain, which was overrun by Saxons from across the sea and Picts and Scots from the north.

  Valentinian also deliberately stirred up dissension among the Germans themselves by calling to his aid the Burgundians, hereditary foes of their compatriots the Alamanni who were the enemies of Rome. Meanwhile, many Germans continued to be admitted as settlers within the boundaries of the Empire.

  In 374 a more easterly section of the northern border was breached when other Germans, as well as members of the great group of Sarmatian peoples of mainly Iranian stock, erupted across the middle and upper Danube into what are now Hungary and Austria. In the following year Valentinian established his residence at Sirmium, and restored the fortresses on the Danube, which he crossed to ravage the German territory on the other side. Later in the same year the insolent attitude of German envoys who came to see him in Hungary so infuriated him that he broke a blood-vessel and died.

  His son Gratian, a somewhat insignificant sixteen-year-old, became his successor, but in his absence on a different part of the frontier the powerful Roman army of the Danube attempted to set up one if its own generals as Western Emperor in his place. To prevent this, German staff officers hastily summoned Valentinian's widow Justina and her four-year-old son, who was proclaimed Emperor as Valentinian II at Aquincum (Budapest). Neither Gratian nor Valens had been consulted. But they accepted the child as joint ruler, and assigned him half of the Western Empire, comprising Italy, north Africa, and most of the Balkans.

  The Eastern Empire now suffered a terrible setback, which profoundly affected East and West alike. This was the battle of Adrianople (Hadrianopolis, now Edirne in European Turkey) which had been fought against the Visigoths.

  Descriptions of the various, differing Germanic peoples can be found in E. A. Thompson, Romans and Barbarians: The Decline of the Western Empire (1982) and J. D. Randers-Pehrson, Barbarians and Romans: The Birth Struggle of Europe, AD 400-700 (1983). There were two great German states in eastern Europe, the Ostrogoths ('bright Goths') in the Ukraine, and the Visigoths ('wise Goths') centred upon what is now Rumania. But the formidable cavalry of the Huns, a non-German people, had broken into these regions in about 370, destroying the Ostrogothic kingdom and driving 200,000 Visigoths before them across the Danube into the Eastern Roman Empire, where the representatives of Valens allowed them to settle. However, these Visigoths very soon complained, with a good deal of justice, that they were being oppressed and exploited by the Eastern Romans, against whom they consequently rebelled. Led by their chieftain Fritigern, they devastated the Balkans, while at the same time further German tribesmen burst across the Danube in their wake. The Eastern Emperor Valens hurried from Asia to deal with the emergency, and moved to the attack at Adrianople on 9 August 378. But the Visigoths, after a successful flank attack by their horsemen, won an overwhelming victory. The Roman cavalry fled and the Roman infantry was utterly destroyed. Valens perished, but no one ever found his body.

  'We might stop here,' declared the nineteenth-century historian Victor Duruy; 'the invasion has begun: Fritigern has come right up to the gates of Constantinople: in a few years Alaric will take Rome.'

  THEODOSIUS I

  The Western Emperor Gratian, having failed to reach Adrianople in time, moved back again into his own territories. But he also took steps to appoint a new colleague. His choice fell on the thirty-two-year-old Theodosius, the son of a land-owner of the same name from Cauca (North-west Spain) who had at one time (before falling into disgrace) been Valentinian I'S most successful general. Proclaimed Emperor at Sirmium, his son ruled for ten years in the Eastern Empire, to which the West now ceded the greater part of the Balkans. Then he became the ruler of the Western Empire as well, so that the two Empires were momentarily reunited before his death.

  Theodosius, with his fine aquiline nose and hair as fair as Valentinian's, presented an elegant appearance. But Theodosius was less uniformly energetic, oscillating between passionate activity and indolence, between the simple existence of a soldier and a resplendent court life, diversified by the reading of Roman history. He liked to dole out cruel sentences and penalties, but was quick to revoke them and grant pardons. Greedy and extravagant, he wanted to please, and tried to keep his promises, though he lacked the reputation of a reliable friend or chief.

  Theodosius was called 'the Great', because of the uncompromising Christian orthodoxy which characterized his reign. Its other dominant feature was the acceptance of the Visigoths en bloc inside the Empire (382), to live under their own laws and ruler on the condition that they provided soldiers and agricultural workers for the Romans - the first of a number of German nations to be granted such allied, 'federate' status.

  Theodosius soon lost his Western colleague Gratian, murdered at Lyon in southern France by the troops of a usurper, Magnus Maximus, in 383. Four years later, Maximus suddenly invaded Italy, but Theodosius 1 defeated him in two battles, and beheaded him at Aquileia. However, in about 389, he had to yield to severe external pressure, and ceded to the Germans the western extremity of the upper Danube line north of Lake Brigantinus (Constance), near the modern border between Germany and Switzerland.

  When Theodosius returned to Constantinople, he left behind, as the real ruler of the West, his Master of Soldiers or commander-in-chief, Arbogast; and in 392 it was he, in all probability, who was responsible for the death of Valentinian II at Vienna (Vienne) in southern France. Arbogast then endeavoured to assert his independence from Theodosius. Being a German, he did not aspire to the purple himself, since men of his race, however great their practical power, were not acceptable as Emperors. Instead he set up a puppet, the rhetorician Eugenius, in whose name he assumed control of Italy and the Spanish provinces.

  But Theodosius defeated Eugenius at the River Frigidus (Vipava) and put him to death. He was again ruler of the entire Empire, East and West alike. Yet he only reigned over it for five months, since in January 395 he died.

  STILICHO AND ALARIC

  Theodosius' elder son Arcadius, aged eighteen, now took the East, while his brother Honorius, aged eleven, became the titular lord of the West; and the reunification of the Empire came to a permanent end. They remained Emperors for thirteen and twenty-eight years respectively. Arcadius was undersized, somnolent, and slow of speech. Honorius was pious and gentle, but incompetent and mulishly obstinate. The eighteenth-century Scottish historian William Robertson decided that the hundred-and-fifty-year perid during which the condition of the human race had been most calamitous 'began with the joint accession of this uninspiring pair'.

  Obviously the task of governing the two Empires devolved upon others. The effective ruler of the West, and the outstanding military and political personality of his time, was the enigmatic Stilicho, half-Roman and half-German, who had become Theodosius I'S Master of Soldiers, and was married to his favourite niece Serena.

  Stilicho was an army commander of exceptional talent and energy. Yet a career that might have brought a prolon
ged respite to Rome was darkened by two clouds. The first overshadowed his attitude to the Eastern Roman Empire, and the second his relations with the Visigothic 'federates' who were now settled within the Imperial borders.

  Towards the Eastern authorities, Stilicho behaved in a cool and finally hostile manner, because he wanted to prise the Balkan region out of their hands once again - and this alienation created a disastrous disunity between the two Empires. To the Visigoths on the other hand, and particularly their very able ruler Alaric I (395-410), Stilicho was not as hostile as he might usefully have been. On the death of Theodosius 1, Alaric had broken into rebellion, complaining that subsidies promised to his people had not been paid. Later, Stilicho fought a number of battles against him - and could have broken him, but never did so, because he believed that his fellow-German might prove a useful counterweight against the Eastern Empire. Yet Alaric, although initially aiming at a peaceful settlement with the Imperial authorities, had as time went on become their enemy, and it was perilous to let him be.

  The trouble began because Stilicho, left by Theodosius as Honorius' regent in the West, resented the fact that another man, Rufinus, was given the guardianship of the young Eastern Emperor Arcadius. When, therefore, Alaric rebelled and marched towards Constantinople, and Stilicho was requested by the East to stop him, he deliberately intervened with insufficient determination to produce decisive results - and then in 395 arranged for Rufinus, whom he suspected of sabotaging his plans, to be murdered.

  Two years later, Stilicho appeared in the Balkans with another army, and surrounded the Visigoths in Greece. But once again, to the indignation of the Eastern government, he did not compel them to capitulate.

  In 401 Alaric, in spite of Stilicho's forbearance towards him, turned against the Western Empire, and launched an invasion of Italy. Stilicho, whose daughter Maria was married to the Emperor Honorius, summoned troops from the Rhine and Britain, and defeated the invaders in north Italy in the successive years 402 and 403. Yet once again Alaric got away, and was allowed to leave the country.

  But meanwhile a different group of German tribes, the Ostrogoths, had been eroding Imperial territories on the middle Danube; and a large part of the Roman population had fled from the Hungarian plain, thus depriving the Western Empire of one of its finest recruiting grounds. Now, in 405, these Ostrogoths and others, led by a certain Radagaisus, poured southwards into Italy. Stilicho overwhelmed and massacred them at Faesulae (Fiesole) near Florence. He then made overtures to Alaric with a view to a coordinated military offensive - not against an external foe, but against the Eastern Empire. But his plans were interrupted by the gravest and most decisive of all the German invasions of the West.

  This took place on the last day of 406, when a mixed host of various German tribesmen - Vandals, Suevi, Alans, Burgundians - crossed the ice of the frozen Rhine, and in the face of only a feeble resistance fanned out into the adjacent territories and into Gaul beyond, spreading devastation everywhere they went. Moguntiacum (Mainz), near their crossing point, was plundered, and so was Treveri (Trier), and many other cities in what are now Belgium and northern France suffered a similar fate.

  On marched the raiders and infiltrators until some of them had crossed the entire country and reached the Pyrenees. On the way, only a very few towns, notably Tolosa (Toulouse), put up a fight. 'Innumerable and most ferocious people', declared St Jerome, 'now occupy the whole of Gaul. . . . All but a few cities have been ravaged either from without by the sword or from within by starvation.' This was rather too gloomy a picture, but in discerning that the breakthrough was a landmark, Jerome was perfectly right....the memorable passage across the Rhine [observed Gibbon with hindsight] may be considered as the fall of the Roman Empire in the countries beyond the Alps; and the barriers, which had so long separated the savage and the civilized nations of the earth, were from that fatal moment levelled with the ground.

  Stilicho did nothing effective to help, because he was so preoccupied with his plans for invading the East. But meanwhile the shock-waves of these German onslaughts stimulated several attempted usurpations of the Western throne by ambitious Roman generals. One of these usurpers, Constantine in, was declared Emperor by the troops in Britain, whereupon he crossed the English Channel, leaving the country wide open to subsequent Saxon incursions, against which the Britons were told to organize their own defences as best they could. Then, fighting the Germans in Gaul and extorting temporary recognition from the Imperial government, Constantine moved on into Spain; but he could not prevent many of the German invaders from following him, and reaching that country in their turn.

  Meanwhile Alaric had demanded four thousand pounds of gold from the Roman authorities, and Stilicho compelled a highly reluctant Senate to give him what he asked. However, Stilicho's influence was on the wane, and soon afterwards he found himself accused of conspiring with Alaric to place his own son on the Imperial throne. In consequence, a mutiny against Stilicho was fomented among the garrison at Ticinum (Pavia), which then proceeded to massacre his supporters, including many of the highest military and civil officials. He himself went to Ravenna, which was now the capital of the West, and there, after refusing to allow his German bodyguard to come to his protection, he surrendered to the Emperor Honorius and was executed. An Imperial edict pronounced him a brigand who had worked to enrich and incite the barbarian nations. For half a century to come, no German was able to assume the position of the Western commander-in-chief again.

  In the wave of anti-German feeling that accompanied Stilicho's death, the Roman troops massacred the wives and children of their German federate fellow-soldiers, who consequently went over en masse to the Visigoths. Alaric, lacking the helpful contacts he had hitherto maintained with Stilicho, demanded money and land for his men, and when these were refused, marched on Rome and cut off its food supply, only raising the siege and withdrawing when the Senate paid him large quantities of gold, silver and copper. In the next year, after the government had again refused to grant his demands, he descended once more upon Rome, where he established a transient Emperor, Priscus Attalus.

  In 410, in the face of continued intransigence from the imperial authorities, Alaric besieged the city for the third time. The gates were treacherously opened to admit him, whereupon, to the horror of the Roman world, his soldiers moved in and occupied the ancient capital, which had not been taken by a foreign foe for nearly eight hundred years. Much wealth was plundered, and some buildings were burnt - but not very many. For this was not quite the final downfall of the Roman Empire which Renaissance historians subsequently pronounced it to be, since the Visigothic troops only stayed for three days.

  Evacuating Rome, and taking the Emperor's twenty-year-old half-sister Galla Placidia with him, Alaric marched on to the southern tip of Italy. From there, he planned to invade north Africa. But his ships were wrecked, and he turned back. When he reached Consentia, the modern Cosenza, he died. His body, adorned with many spoils, was buried deep in the bed of the River Basentus (Busento), so that it should never be found, and might remain free of desecration for evermore.

  CONSTANTIUS III

  The dominant Roman military leader of the next decade was Constantius, a general from Naissus (Nis) in what had formerly been Upper Moesia and was now the province of Dacia Mediterranea (Yugoslavia). Entrusted with the supreme command by Honorius, he later, for a few months, became the Emperor Constantius in. We know all too little about the details of his remarkable career, but a description of his personal appearance and habits has come down from a contemporary Greek historian, Olympiodorus.

  . . . On his progresses Constantius went with downcast eyes and sullen countenance. He was a man with large eyes, long neck and broad head, who bent far over toward the neck of the horse carrying him, and glanced here and there out of the corners of his eyes so that he showed to all, as the saying goes, 'an appearance worthy of an autocrat'.

  At banquets and parties, however, he was so pleasant and witty that he even
contended with the clowns who often played before his table.

  In the year after the sack of Rome, Constantius invaded Gaul, where he put down no less than three usurpers, including Constantine in whose earlier recognition Honorius had by this time withdrawn. Constantius then established himself at the defeated man's former headquarters of Arelate (or Constantia, now Aries), which now replaced the ravaged Treveri (Trier) as capital of the Western provinces. In 413, he granted one of the invading German tribes, the Burgundians, the status of allies or federates. They were allowed to dwell on the west bank of the middle Rhine, where they established their capital at Borbetomagus (Worms).

  Meanwhile, Ataulf, successor of his brother-in-law Alaric as leader of the Visigoths, had marched northwards out of Italy and occupied south-western Gaul, where his people settled in the fertile lands between Narbo (Narbonne) and Burdigala (Bordeaux). Ataulf declared that his greatest wish was now no longer a Gothic Empire - which he admitted he had wanted before - but partnership with the Romans inside the Roman Empire itself. At Narbo, in 414, he married Honorius' half-sister Placidia. But the Emperor had not given his consent to the marriage, and in the following year Ataulf was forced by Constantius to retreat from Gaul into Spain, where soon afterwards, at Barcino (Barcelona), he was murdered.

  His brother Wallia (Vallia) gave up Placidia to the Romans and helped them, in return for liberal grain supplies, by fighting his fellow-Germans in Spain. He and his Visigoths were then allowed to return to their former lands in south-western France where, in 418, they were granted federate status, with Tolosa as their capital. In the same year, Honorius proclaimed a measure decentralizing his authority in Gaul to a regional administration at Arelate (Aries), in which Romans and Visigoths were intended to collaborate. But the project never became really effective.