By then Gauls and Romans were united against a common enemy. The Romans were not the only ones who had defeated the Gauls and taken their territory. As Julius Caesar conquered Gallic France another people was seizing Celtic heartlands in Central Europe. These were the new barbarians on the block.
The Germans were coming.
CHAPTER TWO
GOTHS
I
COSENZA, JUST ABOVE Italy’s toe in Calabria, is not too used to visitors. It is a place where people may stop and ask if you are a local, rather hoping you’re not as it makes a change. Though there are no important sights to see, it is a welcoming, likeable city. The old town which sits on a hillside beneath a castle and above the confluence of two rivers, the Crati and the Busento, contains a maze of steep, winding streets and stairways. Calabria may be one of Italy’s poorest regions but Cosenza is working hard to improve itself. The main square of the new town has just been remade, with elaborate skateboard slopes and a long pedestrianized street is filled with modern artworks for Cosenzans to admire as they take their evening passeggiata.
It was a smaller and sleepier city when, at dawn on 19 November 1937, a group of people gathered by the riverside, at the point where the Busento and Crati rivers meet. They included all of Cosenza’s high officials, led by the prefect. As well as being bleary and a little resentful at having been forced to get up at such an early hour, they were also nervous. They had assembled at the request of a visitor who had arrived with his wife and interpreter the evening before. The three had had a long and trying drive. They had begun by ascending Vesuvius only to find it was cold, windy and lost in cloud. After a further 350 kilometres and several breakdowns they finally reached Cosenza after midnight. The visitor was the commander of the German SS, Heinrich Himmler.
Himmler’s interpreter, Eugene Dollmann, later wrote an account of what happened that morning. Himmler surveyed the river, which was low almost to the point of dryness, and cautiously tested the muddy waters. He then began to lecture the Cosenzan officials on ways in which the river might be diverted from its course so its bed could be drained. At this point, a second group appeared beside the river, made up of French archaeologists led by a young and attractive female diviner:
As the dawn light grew stronger Sweet France became ever more appealing to the Italian delegation … The enraptured eyes of the sons of the south followed each movement of her diviners’ rods that rose and fell with her ample breasts. The willowy sticks acted like Circe’s magic wand and the sombre city representatives slowly edged further from Himmler and closer to the French, and especially to their diviner. Impassive, cold, undeviating, only the melancholy prefect and the police chief stayed beside their German ally, to whom nothing remained except to promise speedily to send an archaeological expedition from Germany.1
Himmler and the French water diviner had both been drawn to Cosenza by a narrative written fourteen centuries earlier by the chronicler Jordanes. In his History of the Goths, Jordanes recounted how in AD 410 Visigothic warriors had halted at the very spot where Himmler and the French archaeologists now gathered. The warriors had their slaves divert the Busento from its stream and then dig a deep grave. In it they placed a corpse, together with numerous other items, before filling in the grave and returning the river to its old path, so the burying place was concealed by its waters. The warriors then killed all the slaves to ensure the grave’s precise location would remain forever secret. In it lay Alaric, the Visigoths’ king, and the objects buried with him, Jordanes wrote, were all the golden treasures of Rome, which Alaric and his followers had looted only a few weeks earlier.
The Visigoths’ road to Rome was a long and convoluted one. It had begun more than two centuries before Alaric’s death on the southern shores of the Baltic. Here the Visigoths’ ancestors had followed the glint of Roman gold, raiding and conquering their way south along trade routes to the Black Sea, where they established kingdoms that stretched from the Danube to the Crimea. Their move south made them neighbours of the Roman Empire and an intense and frequently violent relationship began, which would have a profound effect on the destiny of both.
The first aggression was by the Goths. From the late 230s AD they and other barbarian peoples launched waves of raids into the southern Balkans, Asia Minor and Greece, sacking some of the Empire’s greatest cities, from Ephesus and Corinth to Athens. The Goths played their part in what is known as the Third Century Crisis: a dire fifty years for the Roman Empire, during which it struggled to cope with barbarian attacks, invasions by the Persian Empire, runaway inflation and endless civil wars between would-be emperors. At times it seemed questionable whether the Roman state would survive.
A century later the Romans got their revenge. By the fourth century AD the Goths were doing well in their Black Sea kingdoms, modernizing their farming and developing simple industries. In AD 327 Emperor Constantine crossed the Danube and led his forces into Gothic territory to show who was boss. The Goths fell back to the Carpathian mountains but it was not far enough. Constantine starved them into surrender and forced them to accept a humiliating treaty that made them vassals of the Empire.
Worse was to come. Half a century later, in AD 376, several Gothic peoples camped by the Danube frontier and begged the Romans to give them sanctuary inside their empire. They had been forced into this humiliating position because of attacks by a Central Asian people, the Huns, whose tactics even the warlike Goths found impossible to cope with. Hun cavalry archers would shower them with arrows from a safe distance and then move in for the kill. Some Goths fled to the fringes of the Roman Empire in Central Europe. The rest, camped by the Danube seeking pity from their old enemies, would gradually become fused into a new people, who called themselves the Valiant Goths, or Visigoths.
Valens, the Eastern Roman Emperor – by now the Empire was so unwieldy that it was split in two – let them in, probably because they were too numerous to keep out. He may also have hoped to use them to bolster his armies. Whatever his thinking, it proved a bad mistake. Roman officials profited from the Visigoths’ hunger by selling them overpriced food and then made a botched attempt to kidnap their leaders at a banquet. The Visigoths responded with a rampage of plundering. Two years later, at the battle of Adrianople, they inflicted the Romans’ worst defeat for five hundred years, massacring two-thirds of the Eastern Empire’s field army and killing Emperor Valens. It was a sea change moment. Thereafter the Romans, who ever since their recovery after the battle on the Allia had been confident of defeating barbarian enemies, fought them with caution, as equals.
For the next three decades the Visigoths were unwelcome tenants of the Empire, with which they were sometimes at war and sometimes at peace. Driven by fear of the Romans and the need to extort pay-offs from them, their tribes united. The Visigoths also picked up some Roman habits. They abandoned their old pagan gods and took up Christianity. To some extent this was forced upon them, as Emperor Valens had insisted their leaders convert before they could be admitted into the Empire. The Visigoths took up a creed favoured by Valens – Homoean Christianity – which would bring them all kinds of difficulties in the future. After Valens’ death the Eastern Empire adopted the creed that would become mainstream Christianity, leaving the Goths stranded as heretics. Yet it was an arrangement that probably suited them, as it meant their religion was safely outside Roman control.
A seventeenth-century view of Alaric’s forces in battle, from Alaric or the Conquest of Rome by Georges de Scudery, 1654.
It was also during these limbo years that the Visigoths chose Alaric as their leader. The sources tell us almost nothing about his character or even his appearance, describing only what he did, yet one can understand a good deal from his actions. He rose to power on a surge of Visigothic resentment at the way the Romans treated them. At the battle of Frigidus in AD 394 the Visigoths were required by treaty obligations to fight for the Eastern Emperor against a western usurper. Placed on the front line the Visigoths suffered huge ca
sualties, leading them to suspect – correctly – that the Romans were deliberately seeking to weaken them. Alaric led them in a second revolt against the Empire, embarking on raids into Greece that were among the most destructive the region had ever seen. Athens was sacked and huge numbers of people were taken as slaves. Five years later Alaric did much the same in northern Italy. One begins to envisage him as a kind of action film villain, spoiling for a fight and revelling in his own cruelty.
Yet the truth was very different. Sources of the time do not portray Gothic leaders bellowing orders but rather ruling through persuasion. Alaric may have enjoyed raiding but it was also something he needed to do, as if he did not reward his warriors with regular loot they would turn against him. To stay at the top of the greasy pole of Visigothic politics, which Alaric did with great success, he must have had a talent to convince, even charm. Also revealing is his military record. In his years as leader he fought surprisingly few battles, while those he did fight were rarely if ever decisive. Alaric played for the draw rather than the win. One can understand his caution. A single major defeat and his people would have been destroyed: enslaved or drafted into the Roman army. He himself would have been publicly garrotted at an imperial triumph.
What led cautious, charming Alaric from the Balkans to the walls of Rome? The answer lies with another skilled political survivor of this era, Flavius Stilicho. Half Roman and half Vandal German, Stilicho was the military chief of the Western Empire at this time and the power behind its young emperor, Honorius. Having fought Alaric twice, beating back his earlier raids in Greece and then northern Italy, in AD 406 Stilicho proposed they ally against the Eastern Empire. To this day it is not entirely clear why, though conflicts between the two halves of the Empire were common. Alaric, whose Visigoths were lost in limbo in the Balkans, in a world that was growing ever more dangerous – the Huns had now set up camp in Central Europe – needed a powerful patron and he accepted.
But the alliance never happened. Alaric fulfilled his part of the deal, moving his people into today’s Albania to link up with Stilicho’s forces, but Stilicho did not turn up. He had a good excuse. Within weeks of the alliance being agreed several Germanic peoples, pushed by Hun aggression, swept into what is now France. It was the beginning of the attacks that would eventually destroy the Western Empire. Alaric waited in Albania for a year and then lost patience. His followers would have been growing impatient for loot. He marched them to the Alps where he could hover threateningly above the Western Imperial Court in nearby Ravenna, and then demanded 4,000 pounds of gold for his trouble.
Stilicho, who had more than enough worries already, agreed to pay up, but it cost him dearly. A Roman senator named Lampadius complained that paying off Alaric was not peace but servitude. His outburst was the beginning of the end for Stilicho. As the gold was raised and paid, his enemies at the Ravenna court poisoned Emperor Honorius against him, claiming that Stilicho, whose Germanic origins made him suspect in Roman eyes, had secret dynastic ambitions for his young son. Late Roman regime change was anything but pretty. In August 408 AD Stilicho was beheaded in a Ravenna church and all his close associates, including his son, were killed. Worse, his death provoked a wave of anti-barbarian feeling across Italy, as Roman troops massacred the families of Germanic soldiers whom Stilicho had recruited.
Alaric’s patron had been killed and his fellow Goths slaughtered. One might have expected him to seek revenge. The force he commanded was stronger than ever, as he had recently been joined by another tribe of Visigoths, led by his brother-in-law Ataulf, as well as numerous warriors fleeing from the pogroms in Italy. As ever, though, Alaric was cautious. He needed to make a new deal with emperor Honorius, yet his demands were modest: all he asked for was a home for his people in a part of the Empire that was barely under Roman control any more, in today’s Hungary and Croatia. The Ravenna government, which was still locked into anti-barbarian intransigence, still refused. Frustrated, Alaric finally struck out, but even now his thinking was tactical. He needed a bargaining chip that would force the Emperor to make a deal: a place that had not yet been destroyed, and which the Romans valued so highly that they would make any concession to ensure it was not harmed.
The Visigoths packed up their possessions and began heading south in a forced march. Though little can be said about them with absolute certainty, they were not a war band, like Brennus’ Gauls but were a whole people on the move: warriors, their wives and their children. There were also many non-Goths. Alaric’s followers were no simple horde but had a complex and clearly defined hierarchy. At the top was a small political elite. Below them was a large group of free warriors, who formed fewer than half the total and may have accounted for as little as one-fifth. Beneath these was a subservient population who outnumbered the warriors and who were also divided, some of them slaves and others free, and who were probably prohibited from intermarrying with their superiors. Only the minority of free warriors truly thought of themselves as Goths and it is doubtful how willingly the rest followed them. Though they would not have seemed so at the time, Gothic tribes were fragile entities. If the free minority became too reduced in numbers the whole tribe would collapse.
The Visigoths, though, were in no danger of collapse now. Their total numbers have been estimated as some 150,000 people, or enough to populate a good-sized city of the Roman Empire, of whom as many as 30,000 were fighting men. By the standards of the time, when imperial armies were growing ever smaller, it was a huge horde: an exodus of people, some on horseback, others on foot and yet others crowded into carts. Long-haired – the German fashion of the time – the elite would have had finely ornamented weapons and metal armour, while the rest made do with leather tunics or scavenged Roman breastplates and helmets. They would have carried an array of weapons from shields and lances to swords and even wooden clubs. And, like Brennus’ followers, they must have stunk and been infested with lice. This was the multitude that, on a November day in AD 408, appeared as if from nowhere outside the walls of Rome.
II
What kind of city awaited Alaric and his Visigoths? Mostly they would have found themselves looking up at a high wall. Though Alaric would not have known, it was something for which he himself was partly responsible. This was not the Servian Wall that had been built after the Gallic sack, most of which had long ago succumbed to demolition and city construction. This wall – the Aurelian – was twice as long as the Servian had been, and it showed precisely how the city had shifted over eight centuries. The lozenge-shaped Servian Wall had enclosed only the seven hills, while the Aurelian formed a square that reached down to the river and beyond, to the Trans Tiberina district on the far bank. It had been built towards the end of the Third Century Crisis, when, for the first time in many generations, Rome again seemed vulnerable, and it was built in a hurry, slicing through buildings and gardens. Constructed too low, it was raised a few decades later, and when Alaric’s Visigoths raided northern Italy in 401–3, Stilicho raised it again to 20 metres. He also built a new section that encircled Trans Tiberina on the far side of the river, which had previously been left undefended. The city Alaric looked upon in the autumn of AD 408 had never been so well protected.
And inside the walls? If someone had been transported across the centuries from the Rome of the Gallic sack to the Rome of AD 408 they would have hardly known where to look. The small town they had known had grown forty times over. Though its greatest days had been three centuries earlier, and many of its buildings would have been a little run down, it was still the largest metropolis on earth, whose architectural treasures made the Roman Empire’s other leading cities, from Trier to Carthage and Constantinople, seem drab and provincial. Rome in 387 BC had been a city of timber and brick. Now it gleamed white and red: white walls and red terracotta roof tiles. Its great temples and palaces were faced with every kind of marble: white marble from Tuscany, Greece and the Sea of Marmara; black-red and purple marble from Asia Minor; green marble from Euboea; pink-grey marble
from Chios; red marble from the southern Peloponnese and yellow marble from North Africa.
Itineraries of the city from just a few decades prior to Alaric’s arrival tell us that Rome had 2 main markets, 2 colossal statues, 2 circuses, 2 amphitheatres, 3 theatres, 4 gladiator schools, 5 artificial lakes for mock sea battles, 6 obelisks, 8 bridges, 10 basilicas, 11 forums, 11 public baths, 19 aqueducts, 22 equestrian statues, 28 libraries, 29 avenues, 36 marble arches, 37 gates, 46 brothels, 74 ivory statues of gods, 80 gold statues of gods, 144 public latrines, 254 bakeries, 290 warehouses, 423 neighbourhoods, each with its own temple, 856 private bath houses, 1,790 houses, 2,300 oil sellers, and 46,602 blocks of flats.
Was there anything that an early republican from the time of the Gallic attack would have recognized? Not much. The Forum Boarium animal market was still held in the same spot, between the river and the Palatine Hill, though its shrines would have been rebuilt many times. The Circus Maximus chariot-racing circuit was still in the valley between the Aventine and Palatine hills, though by AD 408 its simple wooden stands had long ago been replaced by a vast structure, with two stone tiers of seats and more above of wood, that could hold a quarter of a million Romans. Races that had been rare celebrations of military victories were now commonplace events, held throughout the year. Even the parade that opened the games had changed. Though floats still made their way down from the Capitoline Hill they no longer contained images of Rome’s gods. They almost certainly displayed images of the Emperor.
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