The Fall of the Roman Empire (3 page)

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 prolonged 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.

Constantius, who was now all-powerful, had married Placidia - against her will - in the previous year, and early in 421 Honorius proclaimed him joint Emperor of the West, the third Constantius to occupy the throne. However, after a reign of less than seven months, Constantius III prematurely died. Had he lived, he might have postponed the downfall of the West - but only at the cost of damaging his Eastern partners, who had angered him by refusing to recognize his accession.

PLACIDIA, AETIUS, GAISERIC, ATTILA

Honorius now proceeded to quarrel with the dead man's widow Placidia, so that she was obliged to take refuge at Constantinople. She took with her Valentinian, her four-year-old son by Constantius. But when Honorius died of dropsy in 423, an Eastern army helped her to return to the West and dispose of a usurper, and Valentinian was proclaimed Emperor (425-55) as Valentinian III. During the first years of his minority, the West was ruled by Placidia. Though she could not improve her son's idle, irresponsible character, and commanders and ministers continued to jostle for power, she, 'the most pious, everlasting mother of the Emperors', stayed firmly, for a long time, at the summit.

Her varied life, which had seen so many dramatic ups and downs, did not come to an end until 450. But long before then she had yielded the central position to another. This was the general Aetius, a Roman from the country that is now Rumania. A fifth-century historian, Renatus Frigeridus, is full of praise for his manliness and incorruptible courage. And indeed Aetius must have been a man of extraordinary distinction. He assumed the leadership of the Western Roman world, relegating Placidia to second place, at a time when this Empire was at a very low ebb. Thereafter, for more than twenty years, he laboured to keep the destructive elements in check. For a time he even partially succeeded. Had it not been for him, the disintegration would have come quicker. But more than that he could not achieve, since he came too late upon the scene.

Before rising to the heights of power, Aetius experienced many vicissitudes. As a youth he had spent some time as a hostage of the Visigoths, and then of the Huns as well, acquiring valuable insight into the leading non-Roman peoples of his day. With the Huns he remained friendly for a long time. In 423-5, he brought a large force of them to oppose Placidia's successful attempt to set Valentinian in on the throne, but then he succeeded in making his peace with Placidia's new government.

During the transitional period the vital region of North Africa, on which Rome depended for its grain, had been under the semi-independent control of the Roman general Bonifatius (Boniface). A curious blend of saint and medieval knight and freebooter, he was described by an eminent sixth-century Byzantine historian, Procopius, as 'the last of the Romans'. In this connexion Procopius bracketed him with Aetius, and it was right to consider the two men together, since their rivalry proved momentous. In 427 Placidia was persuaded to recall Boniface from Africa. But he refused to obey her summons and, in 429, after defeating her troops, called in the aid of one of the German nations which had invaded Gaul and then Spain two decades earlier, the Vandals, led by Gaiseric. But Boniface soon found it impossible to keep his new allies within bounds, and returned to Italy.