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The Emperors of Rome

Page 23

by David Potter


  The civil war that broke out between Arbogast and Theodosius in AD 394, although later presented as a religious conflict between pagans and Christians, was really nothing more than a repeat of earlier conflicts between eastern and western bureaucracies. The one difference from earlier struggles was that Theodosius’ propagandists decided to dress the conflict in virtually mythic terms, suggesting that Arbogast openly placed his faith in the power of the old gods while Theodosius made much of his devotion to his God

  When the two sides met at the Battle of the Frigidus on 6 September, Theodosius attributed his eventual victory to the intervention of a violent storm, which he proclaimed a divine miracle. Arbogast and Eugenius were executed and Theodosius moved into Italy to re-establish his authority. Before leaving on campaign, Theodosius had elevated his teenaged son, Arcadius (AD 377–408), to the rank of Augustus in the east, a sign perhaps that he intended to remain in the west for some time. That was not to be; in January, AD 395, he died at the age of 49 in Milan. Theodosius was the last emperor who could claim to rule the bureaucracies of both east and west. Following his death, these were divided into two equal parts, with the Balkan dioceses of Illyricum and Macedonia going to the west, and Moesia and Thrace going to the east. With Illyricum went the land settled by the Goths after AD 382. The specifics of this division determined the future course of Roman history, for the Goths now became an exclusively western rather than an eastern problem.

  Stilicho and Alaric

  Theodosius’ magister militum during the campaign against Arbogast was a man called Stilicho (c. AD 359–408), the son of a German officer and a Roman mother. At Theodosius’ deathbed, Stilicho announced that he had been appointed guardian to the emperor’s successors Arcadius and his brother Honorius (AD 384–423). Also serving in the army that invaded Italy was Alaric, a leader of the Gothic community that Theodosius had settled in the Balkans after the treaty of AD 382. On the first day of the Battle of the Frigidus, Theodosius is said to have ordered these Gothic commanders to launch a series of attacks on their compatriots’ defensive works that cost the lives of 10,000 Goths all told. Theodosius allegedly boasted that he had simultaneously destroyed two enemies of Rome – the Goths and Arbogast. However, this story was greatly exaggerated – the number cited was in fact the entire number of warriors deployed by the Goths. Even so, the result seems to have displeased Alaric, even as Arcadius’ government recognized him as leader of the Goths who returned to Lower Moesia.

  Meanwhile, following the death of Theodosius the next year, Stilicho travelled with the eastern army as far as Thessalonica, where messengers from the eastern government, then dominated by the praetorian prefect Rufinus, sent word that if he personally came any closer to Constantinople, his force would be regarded as a threat and attacked. Stilicho handed control of the eastern army over to Gainas, a Goth who had risen to high command under Theodosius. When the army reached Constantinople, Gainas promptly arranged for Rufinus to be assassinated at a military review. With a loyal supporter now in charge of the eastern army, Stilicho might well have imagined that he had succeeded, at minimal cost, in making himself effective master of the empire. However, this would not turn out to be the case; Gainas allied himself with Eutropius, the eunuch who dominated the court of Arcadius. At their prompting, Arcadius refused to acknowledge Stilicho’s claim to be his guardian.

  The complete lack of cooperation between the two governments in the face of a series of crises over the next seven years demonstrated that the empire was more firmly divided than ever. In AD 397–398, Stilicho received no assistance from the east in quelling a major uprising in North Africa, nor when Alaric burst forth from his enclave to raid the Greek peninsula. Stilicho caught Alaric’s forces in a potentially fatal trap in the northern Peloponnese in AD 399, but in allowing him to slip away, Stilicho may have had at the back of his mind the idea that Alaric might one day prove useful in the event of a war with the east. In Constantinople, Gainas now gave further evidence of his treacherous nature, though this time he overplayed his hand. Sent to suppress a serious revolt against the eastern empire by a group of Goths in Phrygia under the leadership of the chieftain Tribigild, Gainas apparently cut a secret deal with his Gothic counterpart. His aim was to deflect blame for the failure of his campaign onto his erstwhile ally Eutropius; this tactic succeeded, and Eutropius was dismissed and executed. A year later, Gainas again blackmailed the imperial government, forcing the resignation of Eutropius’ successor, Aurelian. But he immediately overplayed his hand by demanding a special church for his men to practise their Ulfilan brand of Christianity in the capital, and higher office for himself. The people of Constantinople rose up, slaughtering thousands of his men and driving the rest from the city. When Gainas tried to lead his surviving men back across the Hellespont, naval forces destroyed their transports, and Gainas fled into Thrace where he, and his surviving followers, were caught and slaughtered by Uldin, king of the Huns, who had recently joined forces with Arcadius. Uldin sent Gainas’ head to the emperor as a gift.

  In AD 401 Alaric launched an invasion of Italy; with no Roman army in his way, he advanced easily into northern Italy, drove Honorius from his palace at Milan to the city of Asta, and besieged the emperor for several months until Stilicho arrived with a portion of the field army from Gaul. On Easter Sunday, AD 402, Stilicho attacked the now largely Christian Goths as they prepared for their religious observances near Pollentia. Despite being caught by surprise, Alaric managed to withdraw with the bulk of his army intact and fought a running war with Stilicho until the following summer, when Stilicho pinned him down and defeated him near Verona. Yet although Alaric had staged two uprisings in under a decade, Stilicho regarded him as more useful alive than dead, signing a pact with him and allowing him to return to his Balkan lands. He evidently still took the view that Alaric could play a useful role in furthering his own ambitions.

  Stilicho’s lenient treatment of Alaric contrasts sharply with his handling of the next group of invaders to cross his path. In the summer of AD 406, Radagaisus led an armed migration of the Alamanni from the Upper Rhine into Italy. So huge was this displacement of people that Stilicho judged the western field army unequal to the task of defeating his new foe. Accordingly, he turned then to the accomplished mercenary leader, King Uldin of the Huns. Uldin’s appearance at the head of a large cavalry force enabled Stilicho to force the surrender of his enemies. Around 10,000 of Radagaisus’ men were taken into imperial service for use in the defence of Italy, while many thousands of others were sold into slavery.

  Invaders cross the Rhine

  Disaster followed hard on the heels of victory. On 31 December, AD 406, the Rhine froze over, allowing a second massive invasion wave to crash down upon Gaul. This time the invaders were relatively new arrivals – the Vandals, Alans and Sueves, all of whom came from central Europe. The bulk of Stilicho’s field army was still caught up further south and there was nothing he could do to prevent the destruction of the Rhine frontier. The tribes that crossed the frontier on this occasion would never leave Roman territory; the integrity of the frontier first established by Augustus, and stabilized by Tiberius, would never be fully restored. Around the same time, the commander of the Roman army in Britain, Constantine, declared himself emperor and moved into Gaul. Driving the recent invaders south and west, he rapidly took control of the Gallic dioceses.

  Stilicho was in a genuine quandary. Uldin had gone home, and he was unwilling to commit his own army to open battle against Constantine. Instead, he contented himself with garrisoning the passes over the Alps. Stilicho also faced a number of other difficulties. The western emperor Honorius, now in his early 20s, had taken Stilicho’s daughter as his wife but had come to detest her. He was also surrounded with courtiers who wanted to be rid of Stilicho. Moreover, there remained among the Romans a deep-seated dislike of Germans. While it was the case that most of the army was now German, the same was not true of the civil administration. Tensions between civil servants and Ger
man soldiers had played a large part in the upheaval in Constantinople that led to the downfall of Gainas. There had also been occasional violent attacks on Germanic units in other imperial cities. In the wake of Adrianople the magister militum of the east ordered the massacre of Goths serving in the Roman army there. Now, with what could not have been worse timing, Arcadius died. The eastern regime replaced him with his seven-year-old son, Theodosius II, on 8 May, AD 408.

  Stilicho’s first instinct was to lead an army east, but at the same time he had to watch Constantine and find some way of dealing with the renegade Alaric. Breaking his parole, Alaric had in the meantime advanced on northern Italy and was demanding a huge tribute in return for a promise of good behaviour. Stilicho’s response was to buy off Alaric and suggest that he should go to Gaul to fight Constantine. This stratagem proved to be Stilicho’s downfall; the anti-German prejudice in the western imperial establishment now reached fever pitch. On 13 August, soldiers mutinied as Honorius reviewed them in Pavia and murdered a number of Stilicho’s generals; eight days later, Stilicho himself was killed in Ravenna. The new leader of the government, Olympius, then ordered a massacre of the ‘Germans’ in the army – in this case former followers of Radagaisus – who were thought to be loyal to Stilicho. The survivors fled to join Alaric. Realizing that there was now no Roman army of any strength between himself and Rome, Alaric bypassed the emperor and made straight for the city. The senate voted to pay him a massive bribe and to negotiate a fresh deal with Honorius that would give Alaric new status within the Roman hierarchy. When Honorius refused to go along with this, Alaric returned to Rome with an even longer list of demands. These included a homeland for his people in Switzerland and southern Austria, and the rank of magister militum for himself. Though Honorius’ officials were willing to accede to this demand – to do so would give them a decisive edge against Constantine in Gaul – Honorius refused outright.

  New thinking was needed to find ways of assimilating immigrants into imperial society. With many Germans serving in the army, even after the massacre of AD 408, and many still in the officer corps, a pragmatic solution should have been possible. With this in mind, in AD 409, after another siege of Rome, the senate proclaimed a new emperor, Priscus Attalus, who with its blessing made common cause with Alaric.

  The fall of Rome

  Alaric seems genuinely to have believed that the empire would last for ever and that the imperial government alone could grant security to his people. The problem was that he still lacked the wherewithal to realize these goals. Attalus had little influence with the bureaucracy, and Alaric’s army had no siege equipment. These two shortcomings meant that Alaric would still have to treat with Honorius; however, having recently gained reinforcements from the east, Honorius refused to deal with him. Betrayed at every turn, Alaric deposed his puppet emperor and appeared once more before the walls of Rome. On 24 August, AD 410, the Goths found that a sympathizer had left the Salarian Gate open. For the first time in 800 years, a man who was not part of the Roman hierarchy took control of the capital.

  The fall of Rome revealed many things. In terms of political power, it demonstrated just how little the city now mattered: Honorius and his government were still secure in Ravenna, as was Theodosius II in Constantinople, while the field army remained encamped on the border with Gaul. In terms of Roman culture, the sack of Rome was more momentous. Jerome, the great Christian theologian who had moved from his home in the west to Palestine – where he was engaged in creating the Latin translation of the Bible that would be the basis of expressions of Christian faith in the west until the Reformation of the sixteenth century – lamented the event as an unsurpassed catastrophe. When the bright light of all the world was put out, or, rather, when the Roman empire was decapitated, and, to speak more correctly, the whole world perished in one city, ‘I became dumb and humbled myself.’ Augustine, the bishop of Hippo in North Africa, responded to pagan claims that the sack of the city was the result of the conversion of the state to Christianity by writing his massive treatise City of God, in which he argued that political history was of little consequence when compared with the history of God’s relationship with humanity. After all, he contested, far worse things had happened in the past, before the rise of Christianity.

  In support of Augustine’s argument, a Christian from Spain named Orosius wrote a seven-volume work entitled History against the Pagans, the bulk of which recounts disasters before the birth of Christ. The city of Rome was a symbol of a world that was past, rather than of the world that was to come. It was eminently possible for there to be a civilized world that was both Christian and Roman and that did not depend on any specific political order. For the Goths, the situation was even more problematic. Alaric had played his last card, and still not gained the office that he wanted or a homeland for his people. He died a year later in southern Italy.

  Final Decline and Fall:

  The Collapse of the Western Empire

  (AD 411–476)

  At the start of the fourth century AD the governments of the eastern and western Roman empires faced essentially the same problem – the movement of peoples from central Europe towards the central tax-generating zones around the Mediterranean. One of the most intriguing questions of European history is why the western regime failed within 70 years of Alaric’s sack of Rome, while the eastern continued, in varying forms, until the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453.

  Certainly, Asia Minor had the geographical advantage of being protected from attack by the Bosphorus, yet this fact alone is not as decisive as it might at first appear. This narrow body of water was no real barrier to a determined enemy, and the walls of Constantinople, mighty though they were, still needed to be manned by large and well-led defensive forces. The main reason that the eastern empire survived the movement of peoples and the western empire did not is that in the crucial decades of the early fifth century the government of the east was far more efficient than its western counterpart.

  Wasted opportunities

  The western empire lacked coherent direction during the period between the death of Stilicho and the advent of a new regime led by Theodosius’ daughter Galla Placidia in the AD 430s. By then, there was no salvaging anything that resembled the western empire of the past. Too much territory had already fallen under the political control of immigrants who could have been peacefully assimilated into the power structure of the empire if Honorius’ court had not been staffed by bigoted incompetents. The primary interest of these officials was self-advancement, and their ways of securing it conspiracy and murder. In addition, the emperor himself was hamstrung by his pathological prejudice against ‘Germans’. In the end, German communities that could not be assimilated were set upon each other in a destructive cycle of violence that saw ever more territory prised from the direct control of the emperor, and ever more land in the provinces laid waste. Tribes that had already decamped once to move into the empire were not so attached to the districts where they settled that they were unwilling to move on to some other area they had not yet ravaged. Ultimately, this led to the catastrophic passage of the Vandals from Spain to North Africa in AD 429, and the loss of North Africa to the Vandal king Geiseric in AD 439. Thereafter, the western government simply lacked the resources to govern alone, while its bureaucrats were unwilling to surrender their authority to the only government with the power to help, the regime in Constantinople.

  The government of the east, by contrast, functioned relatively smoothly in the 30 years after the revolt of Gainas, largely due to the immensely able stewardship of the empresses Pulcheria (AD 399–453) and Eudoxia (AD 401–460), who were able to construct a coherent regime with reasonably orderly patterns of advancement despite their personal antipathy to one another. When the violent incursion of the Huns under Attila occurred in the AD 440s and 450s, the eastern government was strong enough to survive. It did so by adopting the policy of diverting potential enemies to the west, whose failed regimes it had only limited int
erest in supporting.

  Around this time, an important change occurs in the language that Roman writers use to refer to the empire. As late as the AD 430s, the historian Olympiodorus, the principal source for later accounts of the period, was still writing in terms of the eastern and western parts of the empire. Yet the younger Priscus of Panium – an immensely gifted historian who also played a minor role in the government of the period, serving on an embassy to Attila – wrote instead of the ‘western’ and ‘eastern Romans’. Ostensibly a linguistic quibble, Priscus’ terminology in fact indicates that the two states were now distinct entities, pursuing quite different policies when it suited them. Shortly after Priscus brought his history to an end in the early AD 470s, the western empire collapsed completely, leading to the abolition of the imperial office after AD 476, and, within a decade, to the creation of a new Gothic state in Italy. This polity joined the other successor states that had already developed in Rome’s western provinces.

  Ensuring the dynastic succession

 

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