The History of Rome - 164- The Sack of Rome

Episode Date: January 9, 2012

After failing to secure a deal with Honorius, Alaric sacked Rome in August of 410. It was the first time the Eternal City had been sacked in 800 years. 

Hello, and welcome to the history of Rome. Episode 164, The Sack of Rome. Okay, where were we? When we left off last time, the Western Roman Empire was in the middle of a diplomatic crisis. The Gothic King Alaric had spent the last year holding the city of Rome's head underwater, letting it up to breathe for a bit, before plunging it back underwater again, as a part of a larger strategy to force the Emperor Honorius to give in to his demands. But Hanorius had apparently concluded that since it wasn't his head in the bucket,

he was under no immediate pressure to make a deal with the Goths, even if, as we saw at the end of the last episode, the deal on the table was a really, really good deal for Rome. So we now find Alaric presently back in Rome, holding the city's collective head underwater once again. this time with the added twist of forcing the Senate to appoint a puppet emperor named Priscus Ataulis. Alaric was probably hoping that the people of Italy would take note of how disconnected from reality Honoreus had become, how much his intransigence threatened their lives and property,

and how much better off they would be maybe recognizing the goth-backed Atalus, rather than continuing to support the isolated and delusional Honoreas. I say the people of Italy rather than the people of the Western Empire, because, as you'll also recall, control of the northern provinces had been lost back in 406, first to the semi-anarchy that had set in after the barbarian invasion of New Year's Eve, and then to the semi-imperal order of the usurper Constantine III. Not that he was actually a usurper anymore, Alerc's presence in Italy had forced Honoreas to recognize Constantine as a legitimate imperial colleague. But if you thought that this recognition would prove to be a boon to the fortunes of Constantine III, well, you just don't know the 5th century.

Just a few months after receiving a purple cloak in the mail from Honourius, Constantine had to deal with a rebellion of his own. This new rebellion had its genesis in a previous rebellion that had been organized in Spain by members of the Theodotian household back in 408. Constantine had dispatched his son Constance and one of his top generals, Garantius, to put down this revolt, which the Theodotians not being the most popular family on the block these days, they were able to do fairly quickly. Constance then returned to his father's headquarters at Arles, leaving Garantius in control of Spain. Unfortunately, the general's ego swelled considerably at the site of his newfound autonomy, and he decided to challenge Constance. Constantine's rule by arranging for his troops to elevate a local Spanish noble name Maximus to the rank of Augustus.

As if that was not bad enough, Constantine found out about this little rebellion at the same time he found out that a group of still hostile barbarians had broken through the defensive lines keeping them penned into Gaul and they were not crossing into Spain unchecked. Now, you might think that this would be a good thing for Constantine. You know, make Garantius deal with the barbarians, get two enemies to fight each other, and then swoop in and knock out the exhausted victor. But sadly, rather than fight, the two sides joined forces. Garantius was apparently able to get through to these tribes where Constantine had failed, so rather than grinding each other down into dust, each reinforced the other. Now facing an almost certain attack from the direction of Spain, Constantine was furthered to. made to learn that the province of Britannia, which had been the cradle of his own rebellion, was now breaking off ties with him as well. After Constantine had left with almost all the

available Roman forces, the island had come under heavy attack by Saxon pirates. Since Constantine appeared disinterested in their plight, in late 409, the people of Britain ejected Constantine's few remaining officials and took the defense and governance of their island into their own hands. Just that spring, Constantine III had been the recognized and legitimate ruler of the entire northwest quadrant of the Roman Empire. Now, he was surrounded by enemies defending an ever smaller patch of grass in the middle of Gaul. Over the winter of 409-410, Constantine meditated on his ever-worsening position and resolved to make one last high-risk play to salvage the situation. When spring came, he was going to invade Italy and depose Honorius. He had been in contact with members of the Ravenna court, who were thoroughly dissatisfied with the emperor,

and they had encouraged Constantine to march across the Alps and topple him from power. As soon as the passes thought, Constantine was on the move. Now, unfortunately for us, the details of this campaign are sketchy, and all we really know is that the invasion failed. Honorius had been reinforced by troops from the east, helpfully provided by the eastern prefect and Themius, who had every reason to want Hanorius to remain in power, which, combined with the fact that Constantine's own force

could not have been that large, it was probably enough to send the general scurrying back to Arl. Meanwhile, down in Rome, Alaric was having problems of his own. He had made Priscus atollus a guise, for two basic reasons. First, to gain leverage in his negotiations with Honorius, and second, to have a puppet civil official on the throne who would do what Alaric told him to do. Atalus was failing him on both fronts. Honourius seemed more resistant than ever to negotiations, especially after successfully repelling Constantine, and far from acting as a mere puppet,

Atalus was challenging and resisting Gothic commands, most especially on the question of North Africa. Alaric wanted Atalus to cross over and seize control of the all-important grain supply chain, which Atalus was fine with, but not if it meant using Gothic forces. Atalus did not like the optics of using foreigners to seize Roman territory. If he was going to do it, he was going to use regular Roman forces to do it, which would at least give the operation of the near of legal dignity. But of course, Atalus didn't have sufficient regular forces available to pull off the operation, so his refusal to use the Goths meant that he was refusing to go seize North Africa. Annoyed that his creation was frustrating, rather than facilitating his plans,

Alaric unceremoniously deposed Atalus in early 410. But don't worry, kids, we haven't heard the last of Priscus Atalus. So now Alaric was back to school. where won. And to make matters worse, there had been a power shift up in the Ravenna court that did not bode well for the Gothic king. Olympius, the man who had engineered Stilico's execution, had fallen from favor, and he had been replaced by Saras, the Gothic general who had defected to Rome's banner following the Battle of Verona in 402. This was a rotten development for Alaric. Because where Olympias had stymied negotiations because of a general anti-barian bias, Saris is about to stymie negotiations because of a specific hatred of Alaric.

Their two families had been rivals within the Gothic community for, I don't even know how long. And after the defeat at Verona, Saras had taken the opportunity to throw his lot in with Rome, rather than continue to take orders from the hated and now beaten Alaric. So if Alaric thought he'd had trouble extracting concessions from Hanorius before, well, now that his blood enemy Soros had the emperor's ear, there was no chance of anything ever getting done. Alaric pressed on, however, and in midsummer he was back in North Italy to resume negotiations with Ravenna.

When these talks appeared to be progressing, Sauris used his authority as commander of the emperor's troops to destroy any and all goodwill between the two sides. Without warning, he ordered his troops to attack a contingent of Alarik's army. Nothing came of the battle, and it did not drive the two sides into open war, but it did convince Alaric that talking was officially hopeless. He was never going to get anywhere he wanted to go by remaining at the bargaining table. It was time to act.

So he withdrew back to Rome and placed it under siege for the third time in just over a year. this time it was not a negotiating tactic. He was not waiting for the Senate to buy him off. No, this time he was going all in. The Goths were going to sack Rome. As the siege began, the first major prize of the assault fell into Alaric's lap. Gaglia Placidia, the youngest daughter of Theodosus and one-time fiancé of Stilico's now-dead son Eukarius, had been living in Rome following Olympius's coup. And when this much more serious siege began, she attempted to flee the city. Captured by Gothic soldiers, she became a highly valuable hostage to the Gothic cause. As we will see, Placidia's stay with the Goths would not be temporary, and it would be a full

decade before she was released back into the custody of the Ravenna Court. But fear not, she was no passive hostage. Her capture in 410 was simply the beginning. of a remarkable political career that will see her first influencing and then outright directing Roman state policy until her death in 450. We will have much more to say about good Gaglia Placidia as we move forward. So, welcome to the stage, Your Highness. Which brings us to, yes, here we are. Way back in episode 10, Barbarians at the Gates, we discussed the sacking of Rome by Brennis and his long-haired galls. When it was all over, I noted that it would be some 800 years before Rome was sacked again. Well, here we are, 800 years and 170-odd episodes later,

on the extreme opposite end of the bell curve of Rome's power. On August the 24th, 410 AD, slaves inside Rome opened the Salarian Gate, allowing Aleric and his Goths to come flooding into the city. The Roman city militia, just enough to man the impressive Arellian walls, had no hope of standing against the Goths in open combat. For the first time in almost a millennium, Rome was helpless and at the mercy of an enemy. But interestingly, there was mercy to be had. As I've mentioned in passing, Alleric sack of Rome was not an unrestrained anarchic affair. At this point, both the sacking Goths and the sacked Romans were Christians of one sort or another, so Alaric declared churches and religious artifacts to be off limits.

And further, he sent out word to the citizens of the city, that anyone taking refuge in a church would be left alone. Blood would not be spilled in the houses of God. But beyond that, well, this was an exercise in punitive. plundering, so something's got to be fair game, and indeed most things were. The wealth of the lavish homes and old imperial residences were stripped, stuffed into bags, and carted off. Citizens caught out of designated safe areas were beaten, raped, and killed. The old pagan temples were looted without compunction, and it is with a heavy heart that I report that this is the moment when the ashes of Augustus, Hadrian, and so much,

many other great imperial figures, which had been kept safe for centuries inside of their mausoleums, were toppled and scattered to the winds of time. For three days, the Goths ran amok on a destructive treasure hunt that saw the best of classical Rome, looted, broken, or lost. Now, the sack of Rome was no great strategic blow to the empire in military terms. Politically, it did not signal the end of the old imperial order, and in terms of the decline and fall of the Western Empire as a whole, it was more milepost than destination. But that does not mean that it was not a major blow to the citizens of the empire at the time. Morale had been wavering for years, and the thought of barbarians pillaging the eternal

city was so inconceivable that when it happened, a sort of confused despair seemed to settle in. The psychological shockwaves were strong enough that it drove St. Augustine, the bishop of the North African port of Hippo, to begin writing the city of God. A massive political and religious treatise, defending Christianity from the increasingly pervasive view that Rome had been sacked because it had abandoned its pagan heritage. Augustine did not dwell on religious cause and effect, so much as he argued that everyone was missing the point. We ought to be dedicating ourselves to the eternal and non-coporial city of God, as revealed through the divine incarnation of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, rather than fretting about what happens to the base and worldly city of man. This call, not to save Rome, but to look past it, was a powerful comfort to a population

facing what looked an awful lot to them like the end of the world. When published, the city of God almost immediately became the official political platform of the Catholic Church, and it maintained that undisputed place until St. Thomas Aquinas came along in the 1200s and offered his Aristotelian revisions. Meanwhile, back in the city of man, the Goths had reached their load limit after three days of looting, and Alaric led his men out of Rome laden with treasure. As the barbarian masses disappeared over the southern horizon, the people of the Eternal City were left to pick up the pieces of their shattered city. Some resolved to stay and rebuild, but most looked at the trash shops and broken homes and asked, why bother? Refugees began to stream out of Rome, beginning a cycle of economic depression, exodus, further economic depression, and further exodus that would in time take Rome from a population high of perhaps.

a million people, down to a low of just 20,000 during the Middle Ages. After rocking the Roman world by sacking its most sacred city, though, Allerick did not dwell on the place he had just earned for himself in history. He was already on to the next big thing. The sack of Rome had gotten him a lot of stuff, but it had not gotten him the peace, security, or power that he was really looking for. If threatening and then looting Rome had not been, been enough to shake Hanorius out of his stubborn stupor, then maybe cutting off the Italian food supply would be. The Gothic king led his people south to the toe of the peninsula of Italy, where he planned to launch an invasion of North Africa. Seizing the African grain supply had long been on

Alarik's to do list, and after failing to push Atalus into doing his dirty work for him, Alaric decided to take matters into his own hands. But the cobbled-together Gothic fleet of mostly stolen ships hit a storm almost as soon as they launched, and they were forced back to the safety of the Italian harbors. While the Goths regrouped and planned their next move, they were hit with a further and potentially more debilitating setback. In the autumn of 410, Alaric caught a fever, and he died. He was in his early 40s and was just months removed from the signature event that would ensure

his name was and will be, seared into the history books for all time. Fearful that their dead leader's body would be desecrated if left out in the open, the Goths diverted the course of a nearby river, buried Alaric in the dry bed, and then returned the stream to its natural course. Neither Alaric's body nor the hoard of treasure that would have presumably been buried with him was ever found. Control of the Goths fell to Alaric's brother Atalph, who will lead them for the next five tumultuous years, as they marched from Italy to Gaul and from Gaul to Spain, making, breaking, and then remaking alliances along the way, as the Western Roman world, sometimes violently, and sometimes diplomatically, reshaped itself.

The geographic center of that reshaping would be Gaul, where the political and military power of the Western Empire was about to fracture still further, before being cobbled back together by a dour general who history has come to know as Constancius III. Constanius was of Illyrian origin and likely came up through the ranks of Theodosius' post-Adrianople Eastern legions before, like Stilico, following the Emperor West to put down the revolt of Eugenius and Arbogost. He doesn't really pop into recorded history until 4-11, though, so it is simply an educated guess that his career followed an arc similar to Stilochos, to whom it is also educatedly guessed, Constanches was a loyal subordinate of.

In 411, though, he had risen high enough that Honorius appointed him to the task of finally taking down Constantine III, who was presently back in Gaul, holding down that ever-shrinking patch of grass from his headquarters in Arl. But as Constanius readied the Italian army for war with Constantine, word came down that things had become a wee bit more complicated. The General Garantius had finally launched his expected attack from Spain, and after defeating a division of Constantine's forces near modern Vienne, he had moved on to Arl and put the city to siege.

So now Constantius was facing two hostile armies in the same place at the same time. To get to Constantine, he would have to go through Garantius. Rather than wait for the two enemy armies to wear each other out, however, Constantius decided to aggressively move in and attack Garantius while he was still occupied with his siege. This proved to be a winning strategy, because Garantius' disunited army of barbarians and regular Roman forces, panicked at the first sight of Constantius' army, and most of Garantius' men chose to desert to the approaching Italian army, rather than fight a battle trapped against the walls of Arl.

Abandoned by his troops, Garantius fled, but he appears to have been tracked down and cornered by Spanish soldiers from his own ex-armie and likely killed himself after becoming trapped. Back in Arles, the breaking of Garantius' army had done nothing to improve the situation for Constantine, however, as Constanius simply stepped in and resumed the siege. Constantine's only hope was that Frankish reinforcements from the Lower Rhine would arrive in time to lift the siege. But, though said reinforcements did arrive in time, Constantius simply drove them off, which is not so good if that was your only hope. And indeed it was.

When Constantine desperately called for reinforcements a second time, the call was ignored by the soldiers remaining in the Lower Rhineland. They were no dummies. They could see which way the winds were blowing. Constantine was now on his own. Constanches sent a note into the city promising that if Constantine ended his resistance and handed himself over, that he would be allowed to live. Recognizing that his position was hopeless, Constantine agreed to the terms and surrendered. But as was so often the case in these situations, Constanius' deal was just a real. to lure Constantine out of the city, and the captured general was executed while on the road from Arl to Ravenna.

Okay, so that's it then, right? Constantius has come along, saved the day, and defeated all existing enemies of the imperial throne. The Western Empire is now back under the united control of Ravenna, right? Oh, would that it were so. But as Arl was falling, a new, new usurper appeared. along the lower Rhine. The forces gathered there, dominated by a mix of Franks, Burgundians, and Alans, had been aligned with Constantine until they stopped returning his phone calls.

When it became clear that their patron was going down, they grabbed a local Gallic noble named Jovenus, and hailed him as Augustus in the city of Mainz. Like an oversized game of whack-a-mole, as one usurper got whacked, another popped up on the other side of the board. But before he could deal with this new new usurper, Constanches was going to have to come back to Italy and deal with a more immediate problem. Atalph and the Goths had been making their way north, and were now getting a bit too close to Ravenna for anyone's comfort.

So Constanches headed back across the Alps to hopefully push the Goths out of Italy once and for all. Next week, Constanches will succeed in pushing the Goths out of Italy, But rather than driving them east, back to Illyria, they will instead press on north to the newly pacified but still fragile southern Gaul. As you can imagine, the appearance of this Gothic horde is going to have a major impact on the precarious military and political balance of the Northwest Empire. Who will the goth side with? Who will they then betray? And what would the ramifications be of a Gothic king, like, say, Atalph, fathering a sidel. son with an imperial princess, like, say, Ghalia Placidia. Would those ramifications be even more

extreme if a childless emperor, like, say, honorius, were to die without naming a clear heir? I think that they would.