Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire

by Baker, Simon

  The Gothic invasion of Italy, its culmination in the sack of Rome, and the western emperor’s utter inability to find a solution to the crisis had dealt the western Roman empire a critical death blow. But it was not knocked out yet. Certainly the facts painted a bleak picture. The barbarian grouping of Vandals, Alans and Suevi still occupied territories in Spain; Constantine III still had his ambitions and controlled Britain, Gaul and the rest of Spain; and Alaric’s Gothic nation was still in Italy. Yet the Roman state in the west had by no means fallen.

  Indeed, against the odds, the western Roman empire would be pieced back together again. The architect of this extraordinary resurgence was a brilliant general and politician who took on the dual role of magister militum forged by Stilicho; he was the commander-in-chief of Roman forces in the west and, overshadowing the weak emperor Honorius, effective ruler of the western empire. Indeed, Flavius Constantius, an utterly ruthless career soldier born in Naissus (modern-day Nis in Serbia), was one of the last great leaders of the Roman world, an individual in the mould of Julius Caesar, a man who, by the mere fact of his existence, could turn the course of history.

  First, Constantius’s hands were significantly freed when the Goths eventually left Italy. After the failure to negotiate a peace with Honorius, Alaric planned to make a home for the Goths in North Africa. However, before this could occur, the man who had promised so much met an anticlimactic end. Seized by a violent fever, Alaric died in 410 perhaps without having reached even his fortieth birthday. He received a Gothic burial fit for a king: the Busento river in Cosenza (in modern-day Calabria) was diverted, and in the river bed was dug a grave. Once Alaric’s corpse had been laid to rest in it, the dam was broken and the waters rushed over his dead body. The Roman captives who had carried out the burial were afterwards executed to keep its precise location a secret for ever. Athaulf now succeeded his brother, abandoned the plan for North Africa and, plundering Italy along the way, moved the Goths to southern Gaul in 412. In the hopes of coming to an alliance with the western court, Athaulf had brought with him a bargaining chip. The Roman princess Galla Placidia was still a hostage of the Goths and would soon become Athaulf’s wife and mother of his son. Should Athaulf succeed in winning a place at the imperial court, that child would be a potential emperor in waiting.

  With strategic room to manoeuvre, Flavius Constantius finally moved the Roman army in Italy against Constantine III and defeated him. The usurper was captured, executed and his head taken to Honorius at Ravenna. With the Roman armies of Britain, Gaul, Spain and Italy united once more, Constantius now had the military muscle to seek a permanent settlement with the Goths – but on his terms. In particular, Constantius refused to make Athaulf an equal partner in the Roman administration. For Athaulf this was a deal-breaker. His obstinacy proved very unpopular when Constantius applied force and tried to starve the Goths into an agreement by blockading them at Narbonne (southwestern France). The Goths eventually toppled their leader, and a moderate successor agreed terms with Constantius. In 418 Alaric’s dream of a homeland for his nation was realized. The Goths were finally settled in Aquitaine in the Garonne valley of southwest Gaul (modern-day Bordeaux). In keeping with the return of advantage to Rome, Galla Placidia was handed back to Honorius and married off, against her will, to Flavius Constantius. Her son by Athaulf having died prematurely, she would, in due course, bear her new husband two children.

  The final parts of the jigsaw were the Vandals, Alans and Suevi. Constantius now used his peace with the Goths to his advantage. Reinvigorating his Roman army with Gothic allies, he moved south to Spain, defeated the Vandals, Alans and Suevi, and brought the Iberian provinces back under Roman control. In the space of just ten years Constantius had brilliantly extricated the western Roman empire from the crisis that had nearly killed it. He pulled together once more all the threads of the western domains that a decade earlier had looked to be hopelessly untangling, and held them in the grip of his hand. In achieving this brilliant feat, however, there had been a high price to pay.

  The years of looting and the ravages of warfare across the west meant that agricultural produce, and hence revenues, were down. With the Goths settled in Gaul, there was a much smaller area of provincial territory able to deliver tax into the imperial coffers. For example, the island of Britain, ignored by Constantius as his army focused on putting out fires in Gaul and Spain, was now detached from the western empire and lost for ever. Henceforth it could not rely on the protection by the western empire’s forces. As a result of such changes, there were few resources to rejuvenate a western army that had been reduced by almost half in the wars against the barbarians during the critical years of Honorius’s reign (395–420). Although the emperor remedied the western army’s huge losses by providing more units, the majority of these were not new field army units, but lower-grade auxiliary units that had been upgraded and reclassified. The money did not stretch far enough for anything more than a military facelift.38

  The final hangover from the years of invasion was widespread disaffection among the provincial landowning élites. These were the local self-governing centres of power that organized tax-gathering, and on whom the imperial centre of the west depended for the task’s successful administration. They were not happy, and their disaffection centred on one simple fact. The emperor Honorius had not been able to keep his side of the bargain – to provide military protection for their property in exchange for the collection of taxes. After years of upheaval and diminishing security, it was becoming obvious that the ancient contract between emperor and local élite was slowly being torn up.39

  This disaffection could easily turn to outright defiance. The train of thought perhaps ran as follows: if life under a Gothic or Vandal king would prove safer, if it offered the benefits of protection from war, and if it proved more conducive to sustaining their lifestyle, why bother to be part of the Roman empire at all? In the early fifth century cases of local élites breaking away from the centre were isolated, but this could and would become a trend. With five per cent of western Roman citizens owning 80 per cent of the land, the loosening of this old cornerstone of the Roman empire was a critical effect of the barbarian invasions – another hammer blow in the fall of the western empire.

  Consequently, despite Constantius’s success, the same forces that had so rattled Italy under the impact of Alaric’s Goths had returned to wreak havoc on the western empire during Constantius’s years of regaining control. Like a convalescent from major surgery, the western empire was now well again, but it was a pale shadow of its former self. Soon it would have to find the strength to stomach further pummellings. The most fatal of these centred on the rich Roman province of Africa, the granary of the western empire.

  In 421 Constantius, now appointed co-emperor, fell ill and died unexpectedly. When Honorius passed away two years later, a protracted struggle for power was let loose with one brief regime swiftly falling prey to the bloody cull of another. Eventually, Valentinian III, the six-year-old son of Constantius and Galla Placidia, was promoted to emperor. The real ruler, the man who had actually won the power struggle in 431, was a worthy successor to Constantius. Known as the last great Roman commander, Flavius Aetius had his hands full when he became commander-in-chief of the Roman forces. During the fight for succession, the regrouped and revitalized Vandals had crossed from Tarifa in southern Spain, landed in Africa in May 429 and began heading east. Either by assault or by treaty, they gradually took control of what is now Morocco and Algeria. By 439 they had captured the empire’s third largest city – Carthage. By taking this province, the Vandals had their hands at the west’s jugular.

  In the early fifth century, Africa was the chief source of grain and revenue for Rome and Italy. Under Julius Caesar, 50,000 tonnes of grain in a year was shipped from Carthage, and since that time shipments had continued from the massive extended Roman docks there. For this reason Africa was the western empire’s lifeline. Now Aetius set about resuscitating it. During the 430s
he had been detained from taking action against the Vandals by a new wave of barbarian invasions and rebellions in the western provinces. By 440, however, he had brought those under control, had won – through brilliant diplomacy – assistance from the eastern empire, and had amassed an extraordinary allied fleet in Sicily. The aim of the united forces of the eastern and western Roman empire was the reconquest of the key province of Africa. However, at the moment when Aetius should have given the order for the 1100-ship fleet to sail, the mission was suddenly abandoned. The eastern forces, said the emperor of the east, were urgently required back in his half of the empire because Constantinople was facing an invasion like no other. The decision to ditch the attack on North Africa would prove to be the last critical turning point in the collapse of the west. The man who had provoked it came from the very same people who, in 376, had sparked the first ‘big bang’ moment in the fall of the west, the first invasion of Rome’s northern frontiers. His name was Attila the Hun.

  Just as the Huns began the story of the fall of the western Roman empire, so they end it. During his campaigns of the 430s, Aetius had temporarily engaged the services of the Hunnic forces. However, now, in 440, with their leadership united under Attila and their ascendant empire stretching from the Black Sea to the Baltic and from Germany to the central Asian steppes, the Huns were back for much more than a lucrative military partnership. In two devastating sweeps through the Balkans in 441 and 447, Attila invaded the eastern empire and made a mockery of the Roman army’s resistance. The effectiveness of his forces came down not only to the use of the bow. The Huns were the first barbarian force to work out how to storm well-defended fortress towns. The secret of their success lay in the skilful use of siege engines, battering rams and scaling ladders, which they had simply copied from the Romans. By ransacking the eastern empire in this way, Attila was able to extort incredible amounts of gold out of Constantinople. In 451, however, he received an invitation to lay his hands on new riches. Allegedly enticed by a rescue plea-cum-marriage proposal from the rebellious sister of the emperor Valentinian, Attila turned his attentions to the west.

  In perhaps the last great military encounter in the history of the western Roman empire, Aetius managed to pull together an army of Romans, Goths, Franks, Burgundians and Celts, and with it decisively defeated his enemy at the battle of the Catalaunian Plains (modern-day Châlons) in Gaul. At the Huns’ second attempt, however, in 452, Aetius could offer little resistance. Attila invaded Italy and sacked several cities in the north. His greatest triumph was the successful siege of the imperial capital of Milan, and in a moral victory he also forced Valentinian III to flee from Ravenna to Rome in terror. However, at the river Po disease and inadequate supply lines brought the Huns’ campaign to a stuttering halt and they eventually retreated. Attila died that same year. According to one source, he met his end not fighting but, bizarrely, on his wedding night. He had been feasting to celebrate his marriage to a beautiful Gothic princess by the name of Hildico, and after retiring to their nuptial quarters, the great Hunnic leader suffered a nosebleed and choked to death on his own blood.

  As quickly as Attila’s empire sprang up, so it disintegrated after his death. By that time, however, the death blow to the west had been dealt. Aetius may have successfully seen off Attila, but he lacked the military firepower to take North Africa back from the Vandals. He did not live to see the proof of that stark fact. In return for brilliantly defending the western empire from the blistering assault of Attila’s forces, Aetius – the ‘last Roman’ – was thanked by Valentinian III with assassination in 454. The emperor was fearful and envious of his commander’s power. Over a decade after Aetius’s death in 468, the eastern empire made one final play for North Africa. In a sea battle off the coast of what is now Libya, however, the Byzantine fleet was roundly defeated by that of the Vandals.

  After the loss of Africa, the only revenues the western empire could rely on were those of Italy and Sicily. These were not nearly enough to pay for an army large enough to dictate terms to the multitude of barbarians settled in the west: the Goths, Burgundians and Franks of Gaul, the Goths and Suevi of Spain, and the Vandals of North Africa. The balance of power between the Roman army and the forces of barbarians, between the western emperors and the barbarian kings had fatally, permanently shifted. The reality of where power now lay was most clearly pronounced in the accession in 455 of Emperor Avitus. The one thing that had secured his rise to ‘power’ was a military alliance with Theodoric II – a barbarian king. In due course, further treaties were struck between the imperial administration at Ravenna and the Goths and Vandals, whom the administration acknowledged, in effect, as legitimate possessors, inheritors and partners in the west. Bit by bit the remaining Roman territories splintered out of central control. The last breath of the western empire, however, was gasped in Italy.

  By 476, the financial and military muscle of the central authorities of Italy were so limp, so withered that they were no longer able to maintain themselves let alone keep intruders firmly in check. The lines defining Roman and barbarian were becoming increasingly blurred, the histories of citizen and invader ever more fused. However some distinctions were still visible, some did still matter. Take Odovacar, for example. This man made the gentle transformation from top Roman general to Germanic king when he settled his Roman soldiers in Italy. Indeed, that little rump of the Roman army in Italy wasn’t really Roman either. The soldiers were Germanic mercenaries who, like their leader, came from the people of the Sciri. Odovacar had no money to give them, so he paid them with land – possibly as much as one-third of Italy once its current Roman owners had been booted off. There could be no clearer statement of who were now the successors to the old western empire.

  Odovacar thus became sole effective ruler of Italy. With the loyalty of his settled Scirian soldiers, he had now secured his personal power base too. There remained one awkward distinction left to resolve – the small anomaly of Romulus Augustulus. The office of the western Roman emperor had long been a quaint tradition in the process of fossilization, the ceremonial appointee of some barbarian commander or king. Little Romulus, however, took this trend to a new extreme. He was a sixteen-year-old boy and the son of a usurping army commander recently toppled by Odovacar. He controlled nothing outside Italy, Odovacar controlled everything within it. Legitimacy, if it existed at all, belonged really to the man whom Romulus and his father had usurped, Julius Nepos, the last emperor to be formally recognized by the eastern emperor. So, why bother keeping Romulus? Indeed, why bother finding a replacement? Surely it would be better to send him back to his family in Campania, to give him a decent pension and to let him live in peaceful obscurity?

  Taking the side of caution, however, Odovacar despatched an embassy to Zeno, the eastern emperor. Why didn’t Zeno take over sovereignty of both halves of the empire, proposed Odovacar, while the Germanic king administered everyday affairs in Italy? The suggestion posed an awkward dilemma. For Zeno, deposing Romulus was not a problem – Constantinople had never recognised him anyway. The problem was Nepos whom he had recognised. But while he realised that Nepos no longer held any sovereignty, the eastern emperor did not want to be the one who effectively sanctioned the handover of power to the Germanic king, the one who formally ended the western state. Chance, however, offered him a solution.

  Coincidentally Zeno had in his possession a letter from Nepos. The usurped western emperor had written to Zeno to request his help in making a last bid for power, a last bid to win back the Roman state in the west. After some reflection, Zeno made two deft, sidestepping replies. To Odovacar he said that the king needed to offer his allegiance to Nepos because the last formally recognised western emperor was the only person who could legitimately acknowledge Odovacar’s status. To Nepos, however, he made an apology: he could not offer him any practical assistance in recovering the west. Such an endeavour, he implied, was utterly futile. And with that Zeno had accepted – without having to spell it out – that
the western empire was lost and Odovacar had seized power

  In Italy, with Romulus deposed, Odovacar tended to one last tidying up exercise. What to do about the ceremonial robes of office of the western Roman emperor? He was certainly not going to be wearing them. He was not a sovereign Augustus – that was not his role nor the basis of his power. He was happy to call himself king. No, perhaps the best place for them was in the east, with the emperor Zeno. A messenger was summoned and the imperial vestments, diadem and purple cloak were dispatched to Constantinople.

  If Odovacar was tempted to see the occasion as momentous or somehow ominous, maybe he reassured himself that there could well be another emperor some time in the future. There might one day be the occasion for just such a leader, but there was certainly no need for one now, not in his Italy. The ancient Roman authority of an Augustus, the power which had created and ruled an empire for centuries and which was embodied in those imperial signs of office, was, at least for the time being, leaving the west.

  NOTES

  SEVEN HILLS OF ROME

  1. Virgil, Georgics, Book 4. 8ff.

  2. Ibid., 73–4.

  3. Peter Jones and Keith Sidwell (eds), The World of Rome: An Introduction to Roman Culture (Cambridge, 1997), p. 7.

  4. Polybius, Histories, Book 6. 52.

  5. Livy, Book 1. 32.

  I REVOLUTION

  1. Polybius, Histories, Book 6. 54.

  2. Ibid., 53.

  3. Polybius, Histories, Book 1. 1.

  4. Ibid., 20 & 59.

  5. Livy, Book 21. 35.

  6. Livy, Book 26. 11.

  7. Peter Jones and Keith Sidwell (eds), The World of Rome: An Introduction to Roman Culture (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 20–1.