Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire

by Baker, Simon

  After a forced march of eight hours over rough country and under a scorching August sun, Valens’s army was given neither food nor rest. All the soldiers received was the order to advance. When the two sides clashed, Valens and his men discovered to their horror that the Goths were no bedraggled barbarian horde. They were an organized, well-equipped and disciplined army 20,000 strong. The wings of the Gothic cavalry immediately wiped out the Roman left wing. Then the Goths brought all their power to bear on the Roman centre. Close-packed and with their shields raised, the Romans were too huddled together to draw their swords and use them to any effect. In addition, a cloud of dust blew up above the place where the fighting was at its fiercest and camouflaged the javelins and spears that rained down upon the Romans. The enemy fire was picking them off one by one.

  Exhausted and confused, the soldiers of the Roman army thrust with their swords as best they could without any purpose or plan. Some killed their own men. Eventually, the Roman line gave way and the massacre reached its climax. By nightfall even the emperor’s bodyguard had been murdered, and Valens himself had been mortally wounded. What was unthinkable to the Romans had actually come to pass: a barbarian force had cut the heart out of the eastern Roman army, which had vastly outnumbered it. The principal general, no fewer than thirty-five military tribunes and perhaps as many as 13,000 soldiers had all died. The battle of Hadrianople was the worst Roman defeat at the hands of a foreign enemy since Hannibal’s annihilation of the Romans at the battle of Cannae nearly six hundred years earlier. By the time Gratian arrived on the scene, there was nothing to see but a field dark with blood and covered with Roman corpses.

  The defeat sent a shock wave throughout the Roman world. Hadrianople had smashed the idea of an invincible Roman empire. Its integrity had been breached, and Rome would never get it back again. Goths were now the conquerors of the Balkans, free to roam as they pleased, free to stay. A region of the empire had been lost, but the reality of a Gothic nation camped out on Roman territory presented an even more threatening situation. The Goths continued to war with the Romans for six years and the result was the ravaging of the countryside, the wiping out of agricultural produce and the erosion of the empire’s tax base. A diminished tax base spelt a reduction in imperial expenditure on the army – bad news when two-thirds of the money paid into the imperial treasury was usually spent on the military. The bottom line revealed a truly bleak state of affairs: the circumstances in which the emperors of Rome most needed the army occurred at exactly the moment when their ability to pay for it was most under threat. Something had to be done.

  Valens’s successor as emperor of the east was Theodosius I. He raised a new army, but that too was defeated. Having utterly failed to overcome the Goths in war, on 3 October 382 he was forced to talk peace. The terms of the treaty agreed with the Gothic leaders allowed the tribes of the Tervingi and the Greuthungi to settle in the Balkans, not as Roman citizens but as virtually autonomous allies of Rome. In Constantinople a spokesperson for Theodosius’s regime put a positive spin on the peace, casting it as a victory. The Goths, he said, had exchanged war for farming. The reality was very different. Throughout Roman history it had always been the Romans who controlled whether to accept immigrants or not. If they did, it was because the barbarian had sufficiently prostrated himself and abjectly begged to be a part of the empire and the Romans had benevolently, powerfully bestowed the gift of admittance.7 In 382, however, it was the immigrant Goths who, to a large part, had dictated terms to the Romans. The balance of power had shifted, but it would soon shift again.

  Despite Roman attempts to treat the Goths fairly and equally, the Goths suspected that their improved status in Roman eyes was only a temporary measure. Indeed, they believed that the Romans were secretly looking for any excuse to undo the peace agreement. Their suspicions centred on the one clause in the treaty that made the peace so uneasy: should the emperor call upon them, significant parts of the Gothic army were required for service in the Roman army. Might the Romans use this to weaken the barbarian allies? In the minds of many Goths those suspicions were about to be resoundingly confirmed.

  In early September 394, by the river Frigidus in modern-day Slovenia, Theodosius I had amassed a huge Roman army. The ranks of soldiers were lined up to face the rebellious forces of Eugenius, a usurper of the western empire. Before attacking, Theodosius placed the Gothic contingent, several thousand men strong, in the vanguard of the assault. When battle was joined, the Goths inevitably suffered the worst of the casualties on a calamitous first day of fighting. Although Theodosius eventually won the battle, for the Goths it was an overwhelmingly pyrrhic victory: approximately 3000 of their men are understood to have died. What further proof was needed, the Goths asked themselves, of the plain truth that the Romans considered them nothing but expendable, second-rate citizens?

  One of the Gothic leaders who voiced the widespread discontent had been a mere boy when the Goths first crossed the Danube in 376. In 394, at the battle of Frigidus, he was the young general in charge of the Gothic allies fighting alongside the Romans. In the following year, when Theodosius I died, he was appointed leader of the united Tervingi and Greuthungi tribes. His name was Alaric and his message was clear. The Goths would avenge their catastrophic losses at Frigidus; they would fight until the treaty of 382 was rewritten; they would fight for a better, more secure future.

  The very same force that was once at the service of Rome and that had secured the key Roman victories at the end of the fourth century, was now about to be turned against it. But there was one man who would stand in Alaric’s way. He was a Roman general who had also fought at the battle of Frigidus – as Alaric’s colleague. Intriguingly, however, Flavius Stilicho would become not only Alaric’s great nemesis, but also his lifeline and ultimately his ally.

  ALLIANCE OF ENEMIES

  Before he died at the start of the year 395, the emperor Theodosius I wanted to establish a new imperial dynasty. He made his two sons, Arcadius and Honorius, emperors of the east and west. However, Arcadius, the ruler of the east, was only seventeen years old, while Honorius, the emperor of the west, was just ten. The man Theodosius turned to on his deathbed and asked to act as the boys’ guardian was his most successful and distinguished general – Flavius Stilicho. Stilicho, however, was not a typical Roman.

  While his mother was Roman, his father, a cavalry general, was a Vandal. The Vandals were a Germanic people who possibly came from the Przeworska culture located in modern-day Poland. Through his extraordinary achievements on the battlefield under Theodosius, Stilicho had risen to the highest ranks of Roman politics, had become the emperor’s chief adviser and had married his niece. His official title was magister militum – commander-in-chief of the Roman army. At the end of the fourth century the people who had risen to the top of the army were also the top politicians of the day and the most influential figures in the imperial court. So when Theodosius died, Flavius Stilicho, a soldier of Vandal origin, became the most powerful man in the entire Roman world. In both east and west, he was the empire’s effective ruler.

  Although we don’t know much about his character, one incident suggests that he was a man of considerable tenacity and ambition. While his regency over Honorius, the emperor in the west, was accepted, Stilicho claimed that he was also regent to Arcadius in the east. We have only Stilicho’s word that this was Theodosius’s dying wish because he alone was present at the old emperor’s deathbed.8 It is possible that Stilicho made it up in order to maintain the unity of the empire that Theodosius had brilliantly but briefly resurrected. If that was Stilicho’s ambition, it was short-lived. As soon as Arcadius was settled in Constantinople, the imperial court officials in the east refused to be ousted by a mere Vandal in the west, and intrigued for control of the young man. Stilicho was forced to shelve his ambitions in the east and to focus, for the time being, on guiding Honorius and governing the west. Within a few years of his charge’s accession, he married Honorius to his own daughter
. Over the next thirteen years Stilicho would become like a father to the young emperor. Indeed, the young man on the throne was going to need Stilicho’s firm grip to retain it. The rumble of war was building once again to a crescendo. Alaric had begun his rebellion.

  Under Alaric’s leadership, the Goths first set their sights on forcing the eastern empire into a new deal. To help encourage Arcadius’s court to come to the negotiating table, Alaric decided to apply some pressure. Departing from their base in Bulgaria, the Goths ransacked their way through the Balkans, into Greece and along the Adriatic coast. The display of violence paid off and a deal was soon forthcoming, but it did not last. When the conciliatory court official responsible for brokering the deal with Alaric was toppled by more hawkish colleagues, the agreement was torn up. Reaching a dead end, Alaric decided to exploit the division in the Roman empire, to play one side off against the other. He turned the full firepower of his army on the west, and in 402 invaded Italy. Perhaps, thought Alaric, force would prove more fruitful there.

  Alaric’s demand was simple: long-term legal recognition for his people. This he wanted to achieve in two ways. The first step was his appointment to magister militum because he hoped that this high-ranking military position would help him make the Gothic allies legitimate and equal partners in the Roman army. The second step was a food subsidy. He wanted Stilicho, his former comrade in arms, to grant the Goths part of the agricultural produce from the region they had settled. It was to be levied as a tax dedicated to the Goths. Stilicho, however, had other ideas. He was not about to give in to these demands; he was not prepared to stake his entire political career on a peace with the Goths just because they were prepared to put a knife to the western empire’s throat. It was not a political gamble he wanted to take.

  As a result, the armies of Stilicho and Alaric clashed on two occasions, but in both battles there was no decisive outcome. Negotiations by war seemed to have reached stalemate. Cut off from his food supplies and with no victories to his name, Alaric was forced to make a weary, miserable retreat from northern Italy back to the Goths’ base south of the Danube in modern-day Bulgaria. His policy to get a better deal from Rome seemed to be going nowhere fast. He could not then have imagined how, within a few years’ time, all that would change. In 406 Stilicho was prepared to make a pact with the devil.

  Stilicho sent his negotiator, Jovius, to Alaric: the regent ruler of the west had a message for him. It revealed that, far from thinking the Goths were a thorn in his side, Stilicho now saw them as the key to fulfilling his plans. He wanted to kill three birds with one stone. First, he wanted to grant the Goths the legal rights to the land they occupied. If he did this, he would achieve his second aim, which was to use the Gothic army to secure the northeastern Roman frontier from further invasion. However, there was a problem. The lands where Alaric and the Goths were settled – Dacia and Macedonia (east Illyricum) – belonged not to the western empire, but to the eastern half. If Stilicho were able to remove that province from the eastern imperial court through a display of military muscle, he would gain a third advantage – an excellent and much-needed recruiting ground for soldiers for the western army. And so, on behalf of Stilicho, Jovius proposed the following: in exchange for granting Alaric’s demands, the Goths would join forces with Stilicho and together they would march on the eastern empire. Alaric agreed.9 But just when peace between Romans and Goths was at last in sight, all prospect of it was hopelessly shattered.

  Alaric waited for Stilicho’s army, but it never arrived. A year passed and there was still no sign of it. Stilicho had been detained by events way beyond his control. A second massive shock wave had been sent rippling through the Roman empire, leaving only chaos in its wake. The year 406–7 had just become a second critical moment in the collapse of the western empire.

  In the space of approximately twelve months Stilicho had to confront not one but three crises in the west. All three events were provoked by a second wave of Hunnic raiders overrunning the lands to the northeast of the Roman empire. First, another Gothic king, Radagaisus, accompanied by a huge following, crossed the Danube and invaded Italy. He reached as far as Florence, where Stilicho met him and, with the best Roman army he could muster, overcame his forces. Radagaisus was executed and thousands of his troops were drafted into Stilicho’s ranks. Much more crippling, however, was the second crisis to swamp Stilicho: the breaching of the empire’s northern frontier by a new wave of barbarian invaders.

  This group was made up of Vandals, Alans (a nomadic people from the Black Sea) and Suevi (a Germanic-speaking people who had long been based on the Hungarian plain). Together they crossed the river Rhine near the town of Worms in Germany, sacked the old imperial capital of Trier, wreaked havoc across Gaul, and eventually crossed the Pyrenees to reach Spain. Thus a second vast group of barbarians had breached the Roman frontier, ravaged Roman territory and had no intention of going back.

  The third crisis originated with the army in Britain. At this time, the western Roman army consisted of garrison forces stationed along the frontiers, large field armies in Gaul and Italy, and smaller field units in North Africa and Britain. In 407, that army in Britain proclaimed the self-styled Constantine III as the rightful emperor of the western empire. When Constantine crossed over to Gaul and tried to stem the flood of the Vandals, Alans and Suevi into the west, his popularity soared and he won over the Gallic field army too. The provinces of Britain, Gaul and Spain thus fell into his control. It was a potent power base from which to launch an attack on Italy.

  Under the impact of these three blows, the western Roman empire was on the brink of collapse. Stilicho was still in control of the large field army of Italy, the same force that had neutralized Radagaisus’s invasion. But while this army may have been sufficient to defend the country from the likes of Radagaisus, they were not strong enough, however, to attack either Constantine the usurper or the combined invading force of the Vandals, Alans and Suevi. And as for the proposed venture with Alaric’s Goths in the Balkans – that was now out of the question. Suddenly the great generalissimo of the west found his hands tied behind his back. The full effects of the crisis, however, were only just beginning to be felt.

  Finding new forces to fight back required money. But at the start of the fifth century, money in the western Roman empire was in short supply. Now, in 406–7, with the western empire convulsed by both the arrival of tens of thousands of barbarian invaders and the seizure of Britain, Gaul and Spain by the usurper Constantine, tax revenues in those provinces were, for the time being, as good as lost. Money was scarcer than ever before: only Italy, Sicily and North Africa were paying into the imperial coffers. Now the crisis was about to get worse. The Goths, tantalized by the prospect of Stilicho’s hand of peace, were beginning to get itchy feet.

  After waiting over a year to pursue Stilicho’s planned attack on the east, Alaric knew full well that the alliance with the western Roman empire was slipping away once again. Nonetheless, he expected payment for maintaining his army at Stilicho’s request during that time. He therefore sent a message requesting 4000 pounds (1800 kilograms) of gold. It was money the west could ill afford. To put teeth into his request Alaric advanced his army closer to Italy, pitching camp in Noricum (modern-day Austria). When the request reached Stilicho, he travelled to Rome to consult the emperor Honorius and the Senate about what to do. The matter sparked a furious, barnstorming debate.

  The majority of the senators offered a succinct and brutal response to Alaric’s invoice. It merited nothing less, they said, than a declaration of war – a war to wipe out the threat of the wretched Goths once and for all! Stilicho’s, however, was the voice of restraint: we must pay the money, he said, and maintain our peace with the Goths. This controversial position only caused more of a furore. Why on earth, the senators demanded to know, should Rome suffer the dishonour and shame of paying such a vast sum of money to these miserable barbarians? Stilicho’s reply was plain: it was as a result of his alliance wit
h the Goths. This had been agreed with a view to winning back for Honorius the critical province of east Illyricum from the eastern court. It was also intended, he reminded the right honourable senators, to settle the Goths, bolster the northeastern frontier and rejuvenate the depleted army with new recruits.10

  This was the policy on which Stilicho had staked his political clout in 406. Now, in the crisis enveloping the western empire, he had to stick with it. Rome had no choice. Beneath the debate there lurked an impasse. While the majority of senators advocated war, Stilicho knew full well that the western empire had no forces with which to fight the Goths. Stilicho, it was becoming clear, was right to advocate paying Alaric. One hawk, called Lampadius, conceded to Stilicho’s policy, but accepted defeat ungraciously. ‘This,’ he cried out, ‘is not a peace but a pact of servitude!’11 However, there was another man present in the Senate who was quietly prepared to take the long view.

  Olympius was an insidious senator, a highly ambitious courtier and the unofficial leader of the hawks in Honorius’s administration. As he watched the debate go Stilicho’s way, he could console himself that as soon as the threat from Constantine III had been dealt with, the full western Roman army of Britain, Gaul and Italy could regroup and fight the Goths another day. Indeed, it is easy to imagine why Olympius’s thoughts might have drifted to the future. The emperor Honorius was still young, suggestible and weak. He had known only the flatteries of court life and nothing of the real world. Stilicho’s hold over him was slipping away day by day. Yes, it was true that the great general had won the debate in the Senate, but he had done so at the cost of expending all his reserves of political capital. To Olympius, the high-wire act of Stilicho’s Gothic policy was looking decidedly perilous. It was only a matter of time before he lost his balance. Olympius would soon be proved right.