Stilicho, the Rhine Crossing, and the Sack of Rome

The Generalissimo's War395–408

The West after Theodosius was governed from behind the throne, and the volume's remaining chapters are structured by that fact: the emperors — Honorius reigning twenty-eight years without once commanding in the field — recede to Ravenna (the court moved into the marshes in 402, the capital choosing unassailability over everything), and policy passes to the magistri militum whose succession is the real fifth-century king-list. The first and greatest was Stilicho — half-Vandal by his father, Theodosius's nephew by marriage and designated guardian of both his sons, in fact master of the West and claimant to the East's guardianship too; and his thirteen years were consumed by a three-body problem the Editor states as the chapter's frame: Alaric's Goths seeking a settlement worth having (a generalship, a province, the subsidies restored — the king's aims, visible across every negotiation, were a place inside the empire, not its ruin); the eastern court at Constantinople, which twice declared Stilicho a public enemy and used Alaric against him as often as against itself; and the trans-Rhenane world, moving. Stilicho fought Alaric to draws he declined to make destructions — in Greece in 395 and 397 (the eastern government protesting his presence), in Italy at Pollentia and Verona in 402 when the Goths first invaded it (Easter Sunday battle, the royal camp and Alaric's family taken, the king allowed to withdraw; the tradition's charge that Stilicho spared him as a tool is the hostile version of the visible policy that Gothic manpower was worth more hired than dead) — and his defense of Italy was real: the invasion of Radagaisus in 405/6, a vast pagan confederacy out of the middle Danube (the sources' four hundred thousand graded to the modern tens of thousands), was destroyed entire at Faesulae by blockade, the king executed, twelve thousand of his warriors taken into the army, and so many enslaved that the market broke. The price of Italy's defense was the provinces': the field army concentrated south of the Alps, Britain's and Gaul's garrisons thinned — and on the last day of 406 (or 405; the chronicle-date is disputed and the Editor flags it) the Rhine frontier, held for four hundred and fifty years, was crossed in force near Mogontiacum by a coalition the frozen river may or may not have assisted: Vandals (Hasding and Siling), Alans, and Sueves, with the Franks on the bank fighting them first as federates and then not at all. No Roman field army met them. The crossing rolled through Gaul for three years — the coin-hoard horizon and the burnt villa-belt map it; Jerome's letter catalogues the cities, Moguntiacum captured and destroyed, Worms fallen after long siege, Rheims, Amiens, Arras... Toulouse spared thus far by its bishop — while Britain, cut off, raised its own emperors, the last of them Constantine III crossing to Gaul with the island's remaining field troops in 407: the departure from which, in the retrospect the chapter's Note will grade, Roman Britain never returned. Stilicho, holding Italy against Alaric's renewed pressure (the Senate, at his insistence, voting the king four thousand pounds of gold as arrears — "not peace but a pact of servitude," the senator Lampadius protested, and was believed), was destroyed by the politics his monopoly had created: the anti-barbarian party at Honorius's court, the mutiny at Ticinum that massacred his officer-corps, and on 22 August 408, at Ravenna, the generalissimo — who had declined to raise his own visibly loyal barbarian regiments in his defense — stepped out of sanctuary and was executed on his ward's warrant. The sequel was the West's own act of amputation: the Roman garrisons' families in the Italian cities massacred the federate soldiers' dependents, and thirty thousand of Stilicho's barbarian regulars marched to Alaric — the Editor prints the figure as tradition's and the desertion as the hinge: the court had killed its shield and conscripted its besieger.

The Three Sieges and the Sack408–410

What followed was not a war but a two-year negotiation conducted by siege, and the compendium narrates it as the sources force: Alaric before Rome three times, asking each time for the settlement Ravenna would not grant. The first siege (winter 408–409) starved the city to cannibalism-rumor and was lifted for ransom — five thousand pounds of gold, thirty thousand of silver, the melted ornaments of temples, the Senate's embassy warned, when it spoke of the people's desperate numbers, in the king's recorded sentence: the thicker the hay, the easier mowed; the second (409) ended in the political theater of Alaric's own puppet emperor — the city prefect Attalus, crowned by Gothic acclamation, who then refused his maker the African expedition that alone could feed Rome, and was uncrowned in a field ceremony as publicly as he had been made; the third followed the final insult (an ambush on the king's column by a rival federate as he rode to a settlement conference under safe-conduct), and on 24 August 410 the Salarian Gate opened — treachery, hunger, or slaves, the traditions divide — and the Goths held Rome for three days. The sack the compendium grades with the care its shock deserves: it was real — the Gardens of Sallust burned, the Basilica Aemilia's floor still carries the fire's fused coins, the torture of senators for hidden gold is multiply attested, the captives included the emperor's sister Galla Placidia, and the refugee wave reached Africa and Palestine, where Jerome wrote that the city which had taken the whole world was itself taken; and it was, by this compendium's own eight-volume standard of sacks, restrained — three days against Cremona's four and Jerusalem's months, the great churches declared asylum and the immunity substantially kept, the Christian king's Christian army sparing what Brennus's and the Vandals' would not; Orosius within seven years was already minimizing it, Augustine was already building the City of God on its debris — the event's largest consequence being intellectual, the demonstration that the urbs aeterna was mortal, and the whole Christian-imperial synthesis requiring reconstruction on the spot. Alaric marched south for Africa — the grain, always the grain — was wrecked by storm at the straits, and died at Cosentia before the year's end; the tradition of the burial under the diverted Busento river, the slaves killed to hide the place, is Jordanes's, graded romance and printed because no reader of eight volumes would forgive its omission. His brother-in-law Athaulf led the nation north, married Galla Placidia at Narbonne in 414 — the captive princess in Roman wedding-ceremony, a Gothic king declaring (the report is Orosius's, from a witness) that he had once meant to replace Romania with Gothia and had learned the Goths could not obey laws, and would therefore restore the Roman name by Gothic arms — and the nation was settled at last, by the patrician Constantius's blockade and treaty, in Aquitaine in 418: the second great federate implantation, this one holding a Roman diocese's heart, and the model — land, kingship, alliance — for everything the next chapter distributes. The Editor closes on the ledger-entry that outweighs the sack: in the same years, unopposed because every Roman and federate army was engaged in the Gothic negotiation, the Vandal-Alan-Suevic coalition crossed the unwatched Pyrenees (409) and partitioned Spain by lot; the West had lost, between 406 and 418, the effective revenues of Britain, most of Gaul's north, and much of Spain — and the volume's fiscal thesis begins its work.