As to how such different accounts could be written, all by Christians, the explanation is that they represented two wholly different responses to what had happened. The advocates of a brutal sack, including Jerome – who was doubtless still smarting at the wealthy Romans who had driven him out of their city – saw the disaster as divine punishment of the Romans for their luxury and paganism. In Jerome’s eyes the sack must have been terrible because that was what the Romans deserved. By contrast, those who supported the gentle sack looked to a bigger political picture. They wanted to counter pagan accusations that the sack had taken place because the Romans had closed the temples to their old gods and melted down their images. This second group wanted to show that Peter and Paul had done a good job protecting the city and that, thanks to their lobbying, God had softened the hearts of the Visigoths.
So much for propaganda. What actually happened? Archaeology has no religious affiliations and so should provide some more reliable answers. In a living city like Rome excavations are necessarily patchy, but they have nevertheless yielded some interesting discoveries. A good number of hurried human burials from this time have been discovered around the Colosseum. As most Romans felt repugnance towards allowing the living and the dead to mix, and burying corpses inside cities was prohibited, these give a glimpse of the horror of the city’s sieges.
And the sack? Buildings in the monumental centre that are known to have been damaged around this time include the huge Basilica Aemilia in the main Forum, which was largely burned out, along with the nearby secretariat of the Senate House and the Forum of Peace, both of which are mentioned by the sources as being targets of Visigothic violence. Several of the city’s great mansions were also badly affected. A house on the Caelian Hill that belonged to the Valerii family was damaged and abandoned afterwards. The Domus Gaudentius, also on the Caelian, was transformed into stables, workshops and poor-quality housing. Finally, Procopius, writing 150 years later, tells us that the home of the early imperial historian, Sallust, which was just inside the Salarian Gate, was partially burned down and was still unrepaired when he visited Rome.
It is not a very long list. So far, Orosius and the friendly sacking group seem to be closer to the truth. One can almost picture the scene. Before they entered the city, Alaric commanded his Visigoths to behave themselves. Such an approach would fit with his cautious nature. If he destroyed Rome the city would lose all value as a bargaining counter and he would have little chance of striking a deal with the Western Empire. In spite of his orders, when the Visigoths poured in through the Salarian Gate some of them grew over-excited at having finally entered the city after repeated frustrating sieges, and they burned down a few houses close to the gate, including that of Sallust.
They then made their way into the city centre and enjoyed a little further catharsis. The secretariat of the Senate would have suffered because of its connection with the city’s rulers, who, having changed sides twice – supporting Honorius, Attalus and then Honorius again – would not have impressed the Visigoths. The Basilica Aemilia was close by and might have caught fire by accident. As to the Forum of Peace, there is no mystery as to why this was attacked. For three centuries it had housed the great menorah and other valuables that had been looted by the Roman commander Titus from the Great Temple of Jerusalem in AD 70. We know that the Visigoths made off with these objects after the sack. Finally, the Visigoths looted a few of the city’s great houses, lighting a fire or two as they went.
All in all, Rome had a lucky escape in AD 410. Compared to the fate of other cities that were sacked at this time, which saw extensive arson and their inhabitants enslaved, Rome got off very lightly indeed. Yet we should not underestimate what happened. Orosius’ and Sozomen’s stories of soft-hearted Visigoths are probably far from the mark. Archaeological work has uncovered a good number of inscriptions recording rebuilding work that dates from just after the Visigothic attack. Rome was still capable of restoring itself, and some destruction may have escaped notice because it was repaired.
Passages in some sources hint at the brutality of the event. The papal history, Liber Ponficalis, reports that the barbarians carried away a 2,000-pound silver tabernacle, which was not the act of good Christian Samaritans. Augustine of Hippo, who responded to the sack from North Africa in a series of sermons, from which grew his famous work, City of God, mentions that Roman refugees were present in his congregation. They would hardly have fled their city if the sack had been a non-event. In a passage that now seems decidedly sinister, Augustine also addresses Roman virgins who had been raped during the sack, insisting that God had not misjudged them or let them down, and insinuating that they may have brought rape upon themselves for having been excessively proud of their virginity.
Telling details have also survived relating to a number of individual Romans – all of them wealthy ascetic Christians – who were caught up in the sack. The palatial house of Melania’s husband Pinianus, on the Caelian Hill, was left so badly damaged by the Visigoths that it was all but worthless. Anicia Faltonia Proba, too, saw her splendid home partially ruined, while the Visigoths also made off with all her virgins. If she had let them into the city, as Procopius claimed, they were very ungrateful. Finally, there is the story of the very first of Rome’s ascetics, Marcella, who in AD 410 was an old woman. Her tale was recounted by Jerome, in a letter to Marcella’s friend Principia, but which was clearly intended for general circulation. It was in this same letter that Jerome made melodramatic claims that starving Romans had torn one another limb from limb, yet the passage concerning Marcella is calmer and has a strong ring of truth. He tells of how a group of Visigoths broke into Marcella’s house demanding gold:
She pointed to her coarse dress to show them that she had no buried treasure. However they would not believe in her self-chosen poverty, but scourged her and beat her with cudgels. She is said to have felt no pain but to have thrown herself at their feet and to have pleaded with tears for you [Principia] that you might not be taken from her, or owing to your youth have to endure what she as an old woman had no occasion to fear.16
Marcella died just a few days later. Her badly damaged home was never repaired. Perhaps the most telling account of the sack is by one of the few writers who was actually there. This was an austere British monk named Pelagius, whose ideas would develop into a heresy that Augustine of Hippo became much involved in stamping out. In a letter to a Roman woman he described how it had felt: ‘Everyone was mingled together and shaken with fear: every household had its grief and an all-pervading terror gripped us. Slave and noble were one. The same spectre of death stalked before us all.’17
• • •
And then after three days, to the great relief of the Romans, the Visigoths left the city and marched south. Alaric hoped to travel to Sicily and then go on to Africa but he was unable to cross the Straits of Messina. Two months later he died in Cosenza, probably of malaria contracted in Rome. The city had had its revenge. His tomb has yet to be discovered, though attempts continue to be made. If it ever is found, it is very doubtful that it will contain more than a few trinkets. Among Germanic tribes plunder bought loyalty and power, and was far too important to bury in the ground.
For a time the Visigoths’ light burned brightly. Alaric’s brother-in-law and successor, Ataulf, led them out of Italy to Gaul where, in Narbonne, he made a brief and unsuccessful attempt to found his own imperial dynasty, marrying part of the loot taken from Rome: Emperor Honorius’ sister, Gallia Placidia. Her wedding gifts were said to include the treasures of the temple of Jerusalem that the Visigoths had seized in Rome – further evidence that Himmler was wasting his time. In AD 418 the Visigoths finally succeeded where Alaric had failed and made a treaty with Rome that gave them a permanent homeland within the Empire, in Aquitaine. For several decades they were the Romans’ firmest allies and they fought side by side at the Western Empire’s last great battle in AD 452, at the Catalaunian Fields, close to Troyes, where they drove back Attila and h
is Huns. Several decades later, as the Western Empire went down for the third time, the Visigoths created an empire of their own, which included most of Iberia. Here they merged with the local aristocracy and finally abandoned their heretical Christianity for orthodox Christianity. But they lost all in AD 711, when Muslim Arabs invaded. They are last heard of in the mountains of the Asturias in the far north of Spain, where they formed part of a small local resistance group, from which would eventually grow the Spanish Reconquista.
As to Rome, though the city had not been destroyed, it had still endured quite a mauling. Many Romans had died in the famines, while others had fled and had no wish to go back. The city’s pork supply lists indicate that in AD 419 the population was still little more than half what it had been before the sack. No less serious was the damage done to the city’s reputation. After AD 410 the prophecy of Jupiter from Virgil’s Aeneid, that every Roman schoolboy learned by heart, and which boasted that Rome would endure without end, seemed very hollow. The most devastating blow to Rome’s self-image as the civilizer of the world came from North Africa. The shock disaster of the sack inspired Augustine of Hippo to attack the whole moral basis of Roman power. Citing examples of Rome’s early history – from the same Livy who described Brennus’ sack – Augustine argued that the Roman Empire was no different or better than other empires that had preceded it, and he claimed that, rather than being founded to bring civilization to the world, it had been built from a simple lust for domination. The Veiians would have agreed with him. If Christians wanted an eternal city, Augustine urged, they should look to the Heavenly City of Jerusalem that awaited them in the sky. No earthly city, including Rome, would endure for ever.
Still, Romans could count themselves lucky that things had not been worse. In many ways the city recovered surprisingly quickly from its disaster. A year after the sack the would-be imperial usurper across the Alps, Constantine III, was dead and the emperor Honorius was finally able to leave Ravenna. He visited Rome to celebrate games and to encourage people who had fled to return, which many did. In AD 414 the urban prefect, Albinus, wrote to Honorius requesting that grain supplies be increased, as they were no longer enough to feed the city. Rome’s population might have halved but it was still the largest and greatest city in Western Europe, if not in all of Europe. Most of its great monuments had survived unscathed and in AD 418 Orosius complained that from the way Romans talked and acted one would think that nothing had happened.
It was a pretence that would not be possible for long.
CHAPTER THREE
MORE GOTHS
I
THESE DAYS THE tiny island of Martana in Lake Bolsena, 120 kilometres north of Rome, cannot be visited. Crescent-shaped, like an upturned new moon, it is privately owned and its only inhabitant is the custodian who watches over the island’s few buildings and cares for the gardens. If you are curious and have money to burn, a boat can be hired from the nearby port of Marta that will tour you around the island so you can see its rocky, wooded shore.
By all accounts almost nothing remains from the one time Martana achieved notoriety, in AD 535. There are a few steps on the shore that the Ostrogothic princess Amalasuntha might have walked on when she was brought to the island at the end of April that year. Remnants of walls could be the ruins of the building where she was held prisoner. We have no idea if, a few weeks after she arrived, she saw the boat that set out from the shore of the lake. Having ruled all of Italy, Sicily and a good part of the western Balkans for eight years, she would have had a shrewd understanding of the politics of her age and, if she did see it, she probably guessed its significance. Sure enough, those on board, who were Ostrogoths like herself, were coming to kill her. What she could not have guessed were the consequences that would follow from her murder. It would be used to justify an invasion of her former kingdom, and would lead to one of the most destructive wars in Italy’s violent history. At its centre would be Rome. In March 537, less than two years after Amalasuntha died, a huge army of Amalasuntha’s Gothic compatriots appeared outside the city, determined to retake what they saw as rightfully theirs.
Like their cousins the Visigoths, the Ostrogoths’ journey to Italy had been a long one. We have already glimpsed them once, if briefly, 150 years before Amalasuntha met her death. When the Visigoths’ ancestors were camped by the Danube, begging the Roman Empire to give them sanctuary from the Huns, the ancestors of the Ostrogoths were taking their chances outside the imperial borders, in Central Europe. Things did not go easily for them. While Alaric’s followers were enjoying their time in the sun, raiding their way round the Mediterranean, their Gothic cousins were subjugated by the Huns, who occupied the Hungarian Plain. For two generations they were Hun vassals, required to grow their crops and fight their wars.
When the Huns’ empire finally collapsed in the 450s, their servants broke free. Living on the fringes of the Eastern Roman Empire, in today’s Bulgaria and former Yugoslavia, they underwent the same process of amalgamation that the Visigoths had gone through, as different tribes fused together to form a force large enough to stand up to the Eastern Romans, and to threaten them into handing over food and gold. In the 480s they became united under a single leader, Theodoric. Their name, Ostrogoths, which meant Eastern Goths, was not their own choice but was given to them by the Roman authorities, to distinguish them from the Visigoths. The Eastern Roman Emperor of the time, Zeno, was understandably nervous of this new power bloc on his doorstep and his anxiousness in turn made Theodoric uneasy. Theodoric knew how skilled the Eastern Empire could be at setting Goths at one another’s throats. Zeno might prise their fragile new federation apart. Most of all Theodoric feared that Zeno might connive in having him assassinated.
In 488, Zeno and Theodoric agreed on a solution that suited both sides. Theodoric should lead his Ostrogoths to Italy. As far as Zeno was concerned, it was up for grabs. A decade earlier, in 476, Odovacar, the Germanic leader of the remnants of the imperial army in Italy – an army that was now almost entirely made up of barbarians – decided that the Western Roman Empire, which was largely a dead letter, should finally be laid to rest. With Zeno’s tacit approval, Odovacar deposed the last Western Roman Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, and sent him into retirement near Naples. Zeno now proposed that Theodoric oust Odovacar and rule what he could seize of the Western Empire as his, Zeno’s, viceroy. As Alaric had done eighty years earlier, Theodoric organized his people in a vast convoy of wagons, and they trekked across the Balkans, fighting another barbarian people, the Gepids, who blocked their path, to reach the Julian Alps and then the Po valley. Getting rid of Odovacar did not prove easy, but after besieging him in Ravenna for three years Theodoric eventually settled matters by negotiating a truce and then, at a celebratory banquet, personally slicing him in two. For the next thirty-three years Theodoric ruled Italy and an expanding list of territories, which he did more efficiently than any Roman emperor had done for centuries, as king of the Ostrogoths and viceroy of the Eastern Empire.
Theodoric, though, had a problem. He had two daughters but no sons. Germanic peoples were more open to the idea of female rulers than the Romans, but only just. Theodoric did what he could. He made sure his daughters were well educated – Amalasuntha became fluent in Gothic, Latin and Greek – and well married. Amalasuntha’s husband was a high-ranking Ostrogothic warrior, Eutharic, by whom she had soon had a son, Athalaric. Unfortunately, Eutharic, who might have acted as a stand-in leader till their son came of age, then died. In 526, so did Amalasuntha’s father, King Theodoric. Amalasuntha was evidently an able politician. For eight years she ruled as regent on behalf of her young son, countering the plots of disgruntled Ostrogothic nobles, and also of her cousin, Theodohad, who had political ambitions of his own. Then in 534 disaster struck. Amalasuntha’s son Athalaric, who was now fourteen years old, died. Her position as the kingdom’s ruler was gravely undermined.
The blow could hardly have come at a worse moment. Having come close to collapse the previo
us century, the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire was finally experiencing better times and was stronger than it had been for generations. Its emperor, Justinian, decided it was time to rebuild the old empire, at least in part, by reconquering its lost, western lands. In 533 he sent his ablest general, Belisarius, against the Germanic Vandals in modern Tunisia, whom Belisarius overcame with surprising ease. Encouraged, Justinian turned his eyes to Ostrogothic Italy.
For all that happened next we rely heavily on one account: A History of the Wars, by Procopius of Caesarea; so much so that we should know a little about the man. He is the same Procopius who told us that Alaric entered Rome by means of a commando unit of beardless youths. Fortunately, he is far more plausible when it comes to great events of his own time, many of which he witnessed at first hand. Having worked as a lawyer and rhetorician in Constantinople, he then accompanied Belisarius as his private secretary during his campaigns in Africa and Italy. Later, Procopius returned to Constantinople, where he wrote a highly sycophantic account of the emperor Justinian’s building campaign in the city, Buildings. The sycophancy proved effective and he was raised to the high rank of Illustris. Procopius, though, was living dangerously. He had written a third book, which, wisely, he kept secret. In the Anecdota, better known as The Secret History, he vented his frustrations with the elite of the Eastern Empire, and especially the emperor and empress.
In Procopius’ clandestine account Justinian is depicted as ‘insincere, crafty, hypocritical, dissembling his anger, double-dealing, clever, a perfect artist in acting out an opinion which he pretended to hold’ and, ‘a fickle friend, a truceless enemy, an ardent devotee of assassination and of robbery’. Yet Justinian gets off relatively lightly compared to his empress, Theodora. According to Procopius she first came to Justinian’s notice as one of Constantinople’s most notorious prostitutes:
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