The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History

by Peter Heather

  Either way, Bagaudae plus barbarians spelt trouble. By the summer of 432, the threat was widespread and imminent: in north-west Gaul there were the Bagaudae; in south-west Gaul, Visigoths; on the Rhine frontier and in the Alpine foothills, Franks, Burgundians and Alamanni; in north-west Spain, Suevi; and in North Africa, the Vandals and Alans. In fact, much of Spain had not seen proper central control since the 410s. Given, too, that Britain had already dropped out of the western orbit, the only places in decent shape from an imperial viewpoint were Italy, Sicily and south-east Gaul.

  To shed some light on Aetius’ extraordinary achievement in dealing with this mess in the 430s, we have a few sparse entries in chronicles, which typically devote no more than two or three lines to an entire year’s events. But we also have one extraordinary manuscript: the Codex Sangallensis 908, a rather tatty book from the ancient monastery of St Gall in Switzerland, just to the south of Lake Constanz. Dating from about AD 800, it contains an extensive Latin vocabulary list – just the sort of thing you’d expect to find in a good Carolingian monastery where the monks were being trained in classical Latin. But parts of the list were written on reused pages; and close inspection (in 1823) revealed that one of the palimpsest texts underneath consists of eight folios from a fifth- or sixth-century manuscript of a Latin rhetorician by the name of Merobaudes. Born in southern Spain, he was descended from an imperial general of Frankish origins who went by the same name in the 380s. His work, apart from one short religious poem, survives nowhere else, so we can thank a Carolingian monk who did a lousy job of rubbing out for the fact that any of Merobaudes’ writings survive at all. Unfortunately, though, to make these few pages fit their new book, the monks trimmed them down from their original 260 by 160 millimetres to 200 by 135. All that scholars have managed to extract therefore is four short poems and the fragments of two longer panegyrics: about a hundred lines of one and two hundred of the other. (Contemporary examples of similar texts weigh in at around six hundred lines.)

  As the virtuosity of his work shows,55 our Merobaudes went through a full Latin education, then made his way to the western imperial court in Ravenna. Here another survival allows us to pick up his trail. Not only a scholar, he was also, like his ancestral namesake, a soldier, and became a devoted henchman to Aetius, serving him in his wars and afterwards singing his praises in public speeches. For all these services he was honoured, on 30 July 435, with a bronze statue at Rome, in the forum of Trajan no less.56 That same year he was made a senator as a reward for an early panegyric to Aetius (one that hasn’t survived), and fought with distinction in the Alps. He was subsequently awarded the epithet ‘Patrician’, and eventually became senior general (magister militum) commanding the Roman field forces in Spain. Not only does the case of Merobaudes show that Romanitas, the concept of Romanness, could still win over individual barbarians to the glories of Latin literature, but also his proximity to Aetius gives us privileged insight into how the latter wished his achievements to be viewed.57

  The earliest of the surviving works, the hundred or so lines of the first panegyric, probably dates from the summer of 439. Not enough survives to recover anything much of its underlying argument, but its presentation of Aetius speaks for itself:58

  Your bed is a barren rock or a thin covering on the ground; you spend your nights in watchfulness, your days in toil; furthermore, you undergo hardship willingly; your breastplate is not so much a defence as a garment . . . not a magnificent display but a way of life . . . Then if there is any respite from war, you survey either sites of cities, or mountain passes, or the broad expanse of fields, or river crossings, or distances on roads, and there you seek to discover what place is more suitable for infantry and cavalry, more suited for an attack, safer for a retreat, and richer in resources for a bivouac. Thus even the very interruption of war is advantageous for war.

  The image of the breastplate as a way of life is magnificent PR, as is that of Aetius using any respite from war to extend his strategic and tactical grasp of potential battlefields. But it wasn’t just spin – it was reality. The 430s saw Aetius conduct one campaign after another, many of them successful, and all directed towards putting the western Empire back on its feet again, very much as Constantius had done two decades before.

  Many of these campaigns find brief mention in the chronicles, and Merobaudes’ second panegyric, written in 443 to commemorate Aetius’ second consulship, lists them in order. From Aetius’ accession to power in 432 to the end of the decade, the record is impressive. The run of victories had started, in fact, well before the elimination of Felix and Boniface, and was one contributing factor to Aetius’ success in the struggle for power. In Gaul, from 425 to 429, he was general commanding Roman field forces, and fought successful campaigns against the Visigoths in 425 or 426, driving them away from Arles, and regained some land from the Franks near the Rhine in 427. In 430 and 431, having succeeded Felix as commander in Italy, he defeated the Alamannic Iuthungi and extinguished some kind of rebellion in Noricum,59 then wiped out a band of Visigothic freebooters near Arles; in 432 he again defeated the Franks.

  From 433, his political dominance now secure, Aetius was in a position to take more comprehensive action to stabilize the Empire. Cold reason told him that the armies of the Roman west, while still powerful, were not up to tackling every problem at once. In particular, he was facing simultaneous conflict in two different theatres: on the one hand against the various parties inside Gaul and on its frontiers, and, on the other, against Geiseric and the Vandal-Alan coalition in North Africa. Rather than dividing his forces – always a dangerous move, and one that offered little hope of success – he extracted help from Constantinople. It came in the form of the general Aspar, one of the leaders of the army that had put Valentinian on the western throne in 425, at the head of a substantial force. Aetius had learned from Constantius’ one mistake. Rather than making any move on the purple himself and incurring thereby the displeasure of the dynastically minded eastern emperor Theodosius, he contented himself with exercising power in fact, but not in name, thus retaining the favour and assistance of Constantinople. On what followed, we have practically no information. We do know that, basing himself in Carthage, Aspar launched a war of containment against the Vandals and Alans, which was successful enough to force Geiseric to negotiate. A treaty was declared on 11 February 435: the Vandal-Alans received parts of Mauretania and Numidia, including the cities of Calama and Sitifis (map 9); but Aspar had managed to protect most of Numidia by the terms of the treaty, together with the two richest North African provinces, Proconsularis and Byzacena.60

  With one flank covered by Aspar, Aetius was free to take on the problems in Gaul. Such was their severity that he needed yet more help. Constantius had used the Visigoths to help bring other invaders back under control. But the Visigoths’ ambitions were now running wild, and they were anyway a part of the overall problem: too many armed foreign groups on Roman soil. What Aetius needed was military aid from outside, at least until the Visigoths could be brought back into line. It couldn’t come from Constantinople because the eastern Empire was already embroiled in North Africa. His only recourse was the Huns, a force that may also have been drawn upon by Constantius. The Huns had already played a crucial role in Aetius’ career. Securing their departure from Italy in 425 had saved him from certain death for supporting the usurper John, and a Hunnic army had helped him regain power in 432 after his defeat by Boniface. So his first move, as the opening lines of the surviving section of Merobaudes’ second panegyric tell us, was to do another deal with them: ‘[Aetius] has returned with the Danube at peace, and has stripped the Tanai¨s [the River Don] of madness; he orders the lands, glowing hot with blackened upper air, to be free of their habitual warfare. The Caucasus has granted repose to the sword, and its savage kings renounce combat.’

  Aetius’ powers, of course, ran nothing like as far as Merobaudes’ language might imply. What he was trying to evoke here was the notion that Aetius had estab
lished order within the land of Scythia, north of the Danube and east of Germania. This area, as we saw in Chapter 5, was dominated by the Huns from about 420 at the latest. What Merobaudes doesn’t tell us is that they forced Aetius to pay a heavy price for their support. Previously they had served in Roman armies for cash. This time, it’s possible that the west was simply skint – so many expensive wars had been fought and so much of its old territory was no longer producing revenue. Or perhaps the Huns now wanted something different. For whatever reason, Aetius was forced to cede to Hunnic control Roman territory along the River Save in Pannonia. Merobaudes never refers to this, although all of his listeners must have known what had happened. The best strategy for dealing with embarrassments is often not to mention them at all. Anyway, in return for the ceded territory, Aetius won sustained Hunnic military support, and this enabled him to do much good in Gaul.61

  As Merobaudes tells us, the threats to the frontier regions of Gaul were duly nullified: ‘The Rhine has bestowed pacts making the wintry world Rome’s servant, and, content to be guided by western reins, rejoices that the Tiber’s domain swells for it from either bank.’

  In one case, Aetius took particularly drastic action. Fed up with the incursions of the Burgundians into Belgica in 436, he again negotiated Hunnic assistance. The next year, the Burgundian kingdom suffered a series of devastating attacks (one source, Hydatius, reports twenty thousand Burgundian dead), and Aetius resettled the survivors, now chastened Roman allies, in the vicinity of Lake Geneva. The frontier secure, he then turned his attention to the Gallic interior. Roman forces with Alanic allies did a similar job on the Bagaudae of Armorica, who had revolted under the leadership of a certain Tibatto in 435. Thus by 437 the integrity of Roman rule had been restored throughout the north-west. As Merobaudes commented: ‘A native dweller, now more gentle, traverses the Armorican wilds. The land, accustomed to conceal with its forests plunder obtained by savage crime, has lost its old ways, and learns to entrust grain to its untried fields.’ Aetius also took steps to ensure longer-term stability in the area, settling Alans across the region in a line from Orléans to the Seine basin.

  The way was now open to bring the Visigoths to heel. While he was dealing with the Burgundians in 436 a second Visigothic rebellion broke out, more dangerous than their earlier move towards Arles of the mid-420s. Again they moved south, but this time besieging Narbonne. And again, Aetius was up to the challenge. Recruiting more Hunnic auxiliaries, he launched a massive counterattack which forced the Visigoths back to Bordeaux. The violence was brought to a halt in 439 – not without some significant Roman losses – but the treaty terms of 418 were reaffirmed. The relevant section of the second surviving panegyric of 443 is missing, but the defeat of the Visigoths was evidently a recent event when Merobaudes delivered the first in 439. Its surviving fragment details Aetius’ defeat of the Visigoths at Snake Mountain (‘which the ancients as if by premonition called Snake Mountain, for here the poisons of the state have now been destroyed’), and the ‘sudden horror’ of the Visigothic king when he viewed ‘the trampled bodies’ of his dead followers.62 This barbarian people hadn’t been destroyed, but they had been checked, and with a bit of help from his Hunnic friends, Aetius had done wonders to stabilize the region after more than a decade of conflict.

  Similar events were unfolding in Spain. The situation there had been significantly eased by the departure of the Vandals and Alans, which left only the Suevi at large in the north-west. Where before, Merobaudes tells us, ‘there was no longer anything under our rule . . . the warlike avenger [Aetius] has opened up the captive road; driven out the marauder’ – actually, they left for Africa of their own free will – ‘and regained the obstructed highways; and returned the people to their abandoned cities.’ Some of the locals, notably the chronicler-bishop Hydatius, wanted Aetius to come down over the Pyrenees with an army, but help seems to have mainly taken the form of diplomatic pressure. A political accommodation soon followed between the Suevi and the natives of Gallaecia, and the provinces abandoned by Geiseric were put back in some kind of order.

  All in all, Aetius’ achievement during the 430s was prodigious. Franks and Alamanni had been pushed back into their cantons beyond the Rhine, the Burgundians and Bagaudae had been thoroughly subdued, the Visigoths’ pretensions had been reined in, and much of Spain returned to imperial control. Not for nothing did Constantinopolitan opinion consider Aetius the last true Roman of the west.63

  BUT, JUST AS Merobaudes was putting the last full stop to his latest opus in Aetius’ praise, and Aetius was contemplating sending his trusty breastplate to the cleaners, a new storm burst on the horizon. In October 439, after four and a half years of peace, Geiseric’s forces broke out of their Mauretanian reservation and came thundering into the richer provinces of North Africa. But it was no walkover. They had to fight their way into Carthage, as a sermon given just after the action describes:

  Where is Africa, which was for the whole world like a garden of delights? . . . Has our city [Carthage] not been punished cruelly because she did not want to draw a lesson from the correction handed out to the other provinces? . . . There is no one to bury the bodies of the dead, but horrible death has soiled all the streets and all the buildings, the whole city indeed. And think on the evils we are talking about! Mothers of families dragged off into captivity; pregnant women slaughtered . . . babies taken from the arms of their nurse and thrown to die on the street . . . The impious power of the barbarians has even demanded that those women who were once mistresses of many servants, have suddenly become the vile servants of barbarians . . . Every day there comes to our ears the cries of those who have lost in this assault a husband or a father.64

  MORALIZING RHETORIC rather than straightforward account, the passage nonetheless does justice to the picture of devastation reported in other Roman sources. No other single blow could have done the Empire so much harm. At a stroke, Geiseric had removed from Aetius’ control the richest provinces of the Roman west, with the result that financial crisis loomed. How was it allowed to happen? Presumably, after four and a half years of relative peace, and thinking that Geiseric was going to keep to the treaty made in February 435, people took their eyes off the ball. There was, I suspect, simply too much instability in other parts of the Empire for troops to be left in Carthage on a ‘what if ?’ basis. The Visigothic war in particular, brought to an end just before Geiseric made his move, had probably demanded every available man. So with the Carthage garrison at minimum strength, the cunning Vandal had taken full advantage.

  But autumn 439 wasn’t the time for recriminations, let alone commissions of inquiry. What was needed was decisive action to return Carthage and its provinces to Roman control. At around this time, in a short poem to commemorate the first birthday of Aetius’ son Gaudentius, Merobaudes commented that Rome’s ‘fierce leader . . . was worthy of the staff of retirement’ and might one day pass on the baton to Gaudentius.65 But now was not the moment – and again, Aetius didn’t shirk his duty. The logistic limitations characteristic of the Roman Empire ruled out all thoughts of an instant counterstrike, and for now the advantage lay with Geiseric. A series of laws issued in the name of Valentinian III in spring 440 testify to the impending sense of crisis. On 3 March, special license was granted to eastern traders in order to guarantee food supplies for the city of Rome: the cutting off of the African bread dole to the capital was not the least of Aetius’ worries. The same law also put in place measures to rectify holes in Rome’s defences, and to ensure that everyone knew what their duty was with regard to garrisoning the city. On 20 March, another law summoned recruits to the colours, at the same time threatening anyone who harboured deserters with the direst of punishments.66 A third law, of 24 June, authorized people to carry arms again ‘because it is not sufficiently certain, under summertime opportunities for navigation, to what shore the ships of the enemy can come.’

  These, however, were merely piecemeal defensive responses to anticipated Vanda
l raiding, which duly followed when the sailing season began. In particular, Geiseric launched a series of attacks upon Sicily, including a siege of the island’s main naval base, at Panormus, which lasted most of the summer. Already, however, Aetius was thinking along broader lines, and there are allusions to his plans for restoring the situation in the law of 24 June: despite the immediate problem, confidence was expressed that ‘the army of the most invincible [eastern] Emperor Theodosius, our Father, will soon approach and . . . We trust that the Most Excellent Patrician Aetius will soon be here with a large force.’67 Aetius had been out of Italy gathering all the troops he could muster, but the key to success, given the diminution in western resources since 406, was negotiating help from Constantinople. Again, Aetius’ wisdom in not pushing for the purple is apparent.

  Late in 440, after the onset of bad weather had forced the Vandals back to Carthage, a joint imperial army began to assemble in Sicily: 1,100 ships to carry men, horses and supplies. Aetius’ ‘large force’ crossed to the island, and was joined there by a substantial expeditionary force from the east. No source puts a figure to the Roman forces gathered there, but the shipping was enough to carry several tens of thousands of men. The size of the eastern army is also indicated by the fact that its leadership was shared between five commanders: Areobindus, Ansilas, Inobindus, Arintheus and Germanus. Pentadius, the lucky Constantinopolitan bureaucrat in charge of logistics, was later promoted, his reward for dealing with the administrative nightmare of despatching the expedition.68 Everything was set for the counterstroke that would return Carthage to Roman rule. Come the end of March, when sailing to and from North Africa could resume after the usual winter break, Aetius’ greatest ever triumph would be within sight. But the armada never sailed, the troops of both east and west returned to their bases, and so much administrative effort came to nothing.