The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History

by Peter Heather

  In my view, the crisis of 405–8 must be seen as a rerun of 376, with the further movements of nomadic Huns as the trigger. This has been suggested many times before, but, in the absence of explicit confirmation, has never achieved consensus.22 It is precisely at this point that it becomes important to realize that Huns in large numbers had not themselves been directly involved in the action of 376.23 As late as 395, twenty years after the Goths crossed the Danube, most of the Huns were still well to the east. In that year they launched a massive raid into Roman territory, but via the Caucasus, not over the Danube (map 7). This has sometimes been explained as a cunning plan by Danube-based Hunnic groups to outflank the Roman defences, but both men and horses would have been exhausted by the inevitable 2,000-kilometre trek around the northern coast of the Black Sea before they could even launch their assault. The direction of the attack makes it clear that, as late as 395, the Huns were still centred much further to the east, perhaps on the Volga Steppe; and, in at least partial confirmation of the point, for a decade or more after 376 Goths continued to provide Rome’s main opposition north of the Lower Danube, as we saw in Chapter 4.24

  But by the 420s large numbers of Huns were established in central Europe, occupying the Great Hungarian Plain west of the Carpathian Mountains. This point is well documented. In 427, for instance, the Romans expelled them from Pannonia, the richest Roman province south of the Middle Danube (map 7).25 And in 432, when a Roman general needed their help, he travelled ‘through Pannonia’ to reach them, his route showing that they had remained west of the Carpathians even after the expulsion.26 By the early 440s, likewise, Hunnic royal tombs were to be found on the opposite bank of the Danube from the city of Margus – again, firmly west of the Carpathians, as was Attila’s main base in the 440s.27 Sometime between 395 and 425, then, the main body of the Huns made a 1,700-kilometre trek westwards from north of the Caucasus to the Great Hungarian Plain.

  Whether it was precisely during 405–8 that the Huns made this move is less certain, but we do have a few tantalizing hints that this may have been the case. For example, in 412/13 Olympiodorus and his parrot visited them on an embassy. Part of the journey involved a horrendous sea voyage, during which their ship put in at Athens. Since Olympiodorus worked for the eastern Empire, he must have started from Constantinople. And since his route to the Huns passed via Athens, he was presumably looking to sail through the Aegean and up the Adriatic, probably to Aquileia at its head. This points to the Middle Danube Plain as the home of Olympiodorus’ Huns by the early 410s, since the port of Aquileia had long existed to service this region (map 7).28

  Confirmation that something very serious was afoot in central Europe round about the year 410 is provided by other, more indirect evidence. At this time the eastern imperial authorities in Constantinople perceived a substantial stepping-up of the threat facing their Balkan territories. In January 412, a programme was put in place to strengthen the Danubian fleets.29 One year later, Constantinople, vulnerable to attack through the Balkans from the north, was provided with new defences. It was at this point that the city acquired its famous landwalls: the formidable triple belt of fortifications much of which still stands in modern Istanbul.30 These walls were powerful enough to keep the city safe for a millennium, and no attacker managed to take it from its landward side until 1453, 1,040 years after their construction, when Turkish cannon blasted a hole through them, near the modern Topkapi coach station. Both of these defensive measures have sometimes been taken as a response to Uldin’s attacks of 408/9, but in that case they would be strangely postdated, and Uldin had anyway suffered a crushing defeat. I find it very tempting, therefore, to associate them with the closer proximity of the main Hunnic threat.

  The evidence is not all that we would like it to be. But, as already noted, it is certain that by 420, and quite probably by 410, the Huns had moved from the Caucasus, where they were in about 395, to the Great Hungarian Plain. Given that their arrival on the outer fringes of Europe in 376 had triggered the appearance of the Goths on the banks of the Danube, it is inevitable that a second Hunnic advance into the heart of Europe would have had similarly dramatic knock-on effects.31 There is also the fact that we have no serious alternative to fall back on. General Roman policy towards immigrants had not changed. All the groups of 405–8 were resisted; none of them was licensed to enter imperial territory. Moreover, Roman frontier security had been reasserted successfully since 376 (and many of the immigrants of 405–8, as we shall see, were about to die). The Rhine crossing of December 406 occurred long enough after Radagaisus’ catastrophic defeat – he had been executed in August that year – for us to suppose that news of it would have filtered back across the frontier, yet still the next wave of immigrants came. Again, all of this suggests that the events of 405–8 were motivated from the barbarian side of the frontier, and were not dependent upon changing perceptions of imperial policy or imperial strength.

  The story takes some piecing together, but the pieces do fit. The key points are these. The intrusion of the Huns into Europe was a two-stage process, part one (the occupation of land north of the Black Sea) triggering the crisis of 376, part two (the occupation of the Great Hungarian Plain) causing, and being preceded by, the displacements from that plain into the Roman world of Radagaisus, the Vandals, Alans and Suevi, Uldin and the Burgundians. All these groups came from the region that was to be the heartland of Hunnic power for the next fifty years, just before Huns in large numbers are documented occupying it. This cannot be coincidence. Like the Goths in 376, many of the inhabitants of Germania west of the Carpathians voted with their feet between 405 and 408: the dangers inherent in trying to make a new life on Roman soil were less threatening than the notion of life under Hunnic domination. Where the crisis of 376 reflected the appearance of the Huns on the far eastern fringes of Europe, beyond the Carpathians, that of 405–8 was caused by their transfer to the very heart of Europe.

  THE FIRST STEP, remote as it might seem, on the road to the sack of Rome in 410 was taken far off on the northern shores of the Black Sea. The further advances of the Huns threw Germania west of the Carpathians into crisis, and the major knock-on effect observed by the Romans was large-scale armed immigration into their Empire. For the eastern Empire, the new proximity of the Huns generated a heightened anxiety which betrayed itself in new and far-reaching defensive measures. But it was the western Empire that bore the brunt of the fall-out both immediately and in the longer term. The collision of the invaders with the central Roman authorities and local Roman elites would have momentous repercussions.

  Pillage and Usurpation

  THE IMMEDIATE EFFECTS of these population displacements were exactly what you would expect. None of the refugees entered the Empire by agreement; all behaved as enemies and were treated as such. The Goths of Radagaisus at first met little opposition, but when they reached Florence, matters came to a head. They had blockaded the city and reduced it virtually to the point of capitulation, when a huge Roman relief force, commanded by Stilicho, generalissimo of the western Empire, arrived just in the nick of time. Stilicho ruled the west at this point, in the name of the emperor Honorius, infant son of Theodosius I. He had mobilized for this counterattack an enormous force: thirty regiments from the field army of Italy, together with a contingent probably from the Rhine frontier,32 supplemented by Alan and Hunnic auxiliaries.33 The delay incurred in mobilizing so many men explains why Radagaisus had enjoyed a free hand in northern Italy for six months or more. But when the Roman response eventually came, it was brilliantly successful. Radagaisus was forced to retreat with his army up to the heights of Fiesole, and there blockaded. The Gothic king eventually abandoned the scene and tried to escape, but was captured and executed. Some of his followers were dispersed, many of them being sold into slavery, as mentioned earlier;34 while at some point in the action his higher-status warriors were brought over by Stilicho into the Roman army. We hear about this only in a brief snippet from Olympiodorus’ history as p
reserved by Photius, and it’s not clear when it happened. It could have been part of the mopping-up operation, but – perhaps more likely – it may have represented a considerable diplomatic coup, drastically cutting away Radagaisus’ support and ruining his chances of standing up to Stilicho’s army. Either way, Stilicho had faced down the first of the challenges posed by the crisis of 405–8.

  In dealing with the Vandals, Alans and Suevi, however, he was much less effective. If he had transferred part of the Gallic army to Italy to help defeat Radagaisus, this would help to explain why the attack on Gaul, from a non-Roman point of view, was that much more successful. As we know, trouble had been brewing for some time before December 406 in the nexus of lands between the Upper Rhine and Upper Danube. Fragments of a contemporary history written by one Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus, preserved in the sixth-century History of Gregory of Tours along with other texts, indicate that the Vandals had been stirring things up on the frontiers of the province of Raetia as early as the winter of 401/2; but if this took the form of an attempt to cross into the Empire, it was certainly repulsed. The Vandals are next encountered trying a quite different tack. By the summer or autumn of 406, the Hasding Vandals had moved some 250 kilometres further north, trying their luck against the Franks of the Middle Rhine. According to the Frigeridus fragments, they took a terrible beating until Alan reinforcements saved the day. This fighting is not dated, but it presumably took place just before the alliance of Hasding and Siling Vandals, together with Alans and Suevi, broke across the Rhine on 31 December 406. The fact that they crossed near Mainz (map 8) confirms that, having tried their luck in the south these groups then shifted their point of attack northwards, circling round, it would seem, the main territories of the Alamanni, and hence coming into conflict with Franks.

  The Rhine invasion cannot be reconstructed in detail: all we have is an outline trail of destruction (map 8). It started where the invaders crossed the river, with the sacking of Mainz, then spread west and north to the large centres in the hinterland of the Rhine frontier – Triers and Rheims – before moving further afield to Tournai, Arras and Amiens. The invaders then turned south and east, drifting through the vicinity of Paris, Orléans and Tours to Bordeaux and the Narbonnaise. All of this took the best part of two years, and our most vivid evidence is provided by some Christian Gallic poets who drew a variety of moral lessons from the disaster and, while doing so, gave us a pretty good picture of the action. The most famous, Orientus, produced a terrific one-liner, quoted in all the best histories: ‘All Gaul was filled with the smoke of a single funeral pyre.’35 Writing to his wife, another poet, Prosper of Aquitaine, pondered on the idea that they were seeing the collapse of ‘the frame of the fragile world’ (laboured though this passage may be, it was following the norms of the genre in listing one by one the conventional categories of Roman society):

  He who once turned the soil with a hundred ploughs, now labours to have just a pair of oxen; the man who often rode through splendid cities in his carriages now is sick and travels to the deserted countryside wearily and on foot. The merchant who used to cleave the seas with ten lofty ships now embarks on a tiny skiff, and is his own helmsman. Neither country nor city is as it was; everything rushes headlong to its end.

  Then, rather more animatedly: ‘With sword, plague, starvation, chains, cold and heat – in a thousand ways – a single death snatches off wretched humankind’.36

  After ransacking Roman Gaul, in 409, this bunch of Vandals, Alans and Suevi forced their way over the Pyrenees into Spain, where they wreaked yet more damage. Such was their mastery of the peninsula by 411, the Spanish chronicler Hydatius tells us, that:

  [they] apportioned to themselves by lot areas of the provinces for settlement: the [Hasding] Vandals took possession of Gallaecia, and the Sueves that part of Gallaecia which [is] situated on the very western edge of the Ocean. The Alans were allotted the provinces of Lusitania and Carthaginensis, and the Siling Vandals Baetica [map 9]. The Spaniards in the cities and forts who had survived the disasters surrendered themselves to servitude under the barbarians, who held sway throughout the provinces.37

  The trail of devastation was finally halted by the seizure and distribution among themselves of one of the most prosperous areas of the western Empire. On the basis of a mid-sixth-century Byzantine source, the historian Procopius, the settlement has sometimes been seen as organized by the central Roman authorities in Italy.38 But Procopius was writing far from these events in both time and space, while the Spanish chronicler Orosius, writing within five years or so, is explicit that the settlement was completely unauthorized.39 His account must be preferred. By 411, after four years of living hand to mouth, the Rhine invaders had had enough of their rootless existence. Rather than looting their way across Roman Europe for ever, they needed to find, and settle, revenue-producing territories that would support them in the longer term. Hydatius (who was also bishop of a small town just inside the borders of what is now Galicia in north-western Spain) isn’t too clear on what exactly happened, but it’s a fair guess that the Vandals, Alans and Suevi diverted the tax revenues of their allotted provinces, which normally went to the Roman state, to their own coffers.40 Fire, rape and pillage in Gaul was thus followed by the forced annexation of Spain, but this is only the beginning of the catalogue of disasters that followed the breakdown of frontier security in the western Empire.

  WHILE THE VANDALS, Alans and Suevi were rampaging through Gaul and Spain, the instability of the western Empire was exacerbated by a new problem. Just before the emperor Honorius’ seventh consulship in 407:

  the troops in Britain mutinied and enthroned Marcus, obeying him as emperor there, but when he would not accede to their demands, they killed him and brought forward Gratian, to whom they gave a purple robe, a crown and a bodyguard, just like an emperor. Becoming displeased with him also, after four months they deposed and killed him, and made Constantine his successor. After appointing Justinianus and Nebiogastes as generals in Gaul, he left Britain and crossed to the continent. Arriving at Boulogne . . . he stayed there a few days and, having won over all the troops of Gaul and Aquitaine to his side, became master of the whole of Gaul up to the Alps.41

  Of all the Roman provinces, Britain, as we saw in Chapter 3, was the province most prone to revolts during the late Empire. Not that they had any particular separatist leanings, but the Roman civilian and military establishment there often felt left out of the loop in the distribution of favour and patronage, and occasionally rebelled in search of a better deal. So we are not necessarily looking for any specific motivation for this latest sequence of revolts, which apparently began in the autumn of 406 – a little before the Vandals, Alan and Suevi crossed the Rhine. On the other hand, the two phenomena share a suspicious chronological proximity, and I suspect that there was certainly one link between them, and probably two.

  First, such rebellions as there had been in Britain didn’t usually last long, rarely spreading across the Channel to the much larger political and military establishments on the Rhine frontier. The fate of the first two British usurpers in 406/7 was pretty much par for the course: they were nonentities whose bids for power failed at the first hurdle. The third – normally known as Constantine III – was a very different proposition. Not only did he manage to avoid being lynched just twenty minutes after his enthronement, but he quickly extended his sway over Gaul as far as the Alps, winning over the Roman army of the Rhine. By the time he shifted his power-base to Boulogne, the Vandals, Alans and Suevi were already across the frontier, and the central Roman authorities in Italy – Stilicho ruling in the name of Honorius – had so far failed to act.

  What we see here is another instance of a classic Roman pattern. Thoroughly Italocentric as it was, Stilicho’s regime failed to come quickly enough to the assistance of Gaul in its hour of need, and Constantine III, shifting his banner to Gaul in spring 407, offered the chance of an effective response to the impending disaster. Once Constantine had establis
hed himself south of the Channel, troops under his command fought a number of sharp engagements against the Vandals and their cronies.42 This presumably explains the invaders’ itinerary. As the Roman response to their incursions in the northern Rhine region became more coherent, the invaders switched their attentions south towards Aquitaine and the Pyrenees. Orosius tells us that Constantine made treaties with some of the more stable Germanic clients of the Rhine frontier region – the Alamanni, Franks and Burgundians – both to secure his own position and to ensure that the Gallic provinces wouldn’t be troubled by more invasions.43 He won support in Gaul, therefore, by supplying a focus for Roman resistance to the barbarian invaders, which the central authorities in Italy were conspicuously failing to deliver. The need for such a response may even have been what triggered the British usurpations. Although the first revolt took place a little before the Vandals and their friends crossed the Rhine, trouble had been brewing for some time, as we’ve seen; even if the hammer blow didn’t fall until 31 December 406, there can have been no doubt in Roman military circles on the Rhine that a major crisis was developing. This, I suspect, prompted the unrest against Stilicho’s rule, of which Constantine III would be the prime beneficiary.

  Alaric’s Goths

  TWO-THIRDS OF our cast have now assembled. To this already volatile mixture we need to add a third element: the Goths of Alaric, into whose hands Rome would eventually fall. To understand these Goths and their part in the action, we must cast our eyes back over the twenty-odd years that had passed since the emperor Theodosius I had finally returned peace to the Balkans, four years after the battle of Hadrianople.