Zeno – East Roman emperor (474–91). An Isaurian general, he rose to power through marriage into the imperial family. Defeated the usurper Basiliscus (474–6) after a long struggle, and presided over the eastern response to the embassies sent by Odovacar which marked the death knell of the western empire. His later years saw Theoderic the Amal unite the new Ostrogothic supergroup on east Roman territory, and he negotiated its departure for Italy in 488/9.
Zosimus – Sixth-century east-Roman historian. Important source for the fourth and early fifth centuries because he made extensive use of the contemporary histories of Eunapius and Olympiodorus.
TIMELINE
LEADERS*1
West Roman Emperors East Roman Emperors Non-Romans
Valentinian I (364–75) Valens (364–78) Athanaric, iudex of the Gothic Tervingi (c. 360–75, d. c. 381)
Gratian (375–83) Theodosius I (379–95)
Maximus (383–8)
Valentinian II (383–92)
Eugenius (392–4)
Honorius (395–423) Arcadius (395–408) Alaric, creator and leader of the Visigoths (c. 395–411)
Constantine III (c. 406–11) Theodosius II (408–50)
Flavius Constantius (421)
John (423–5)
Valentinian III (425–55) Geiseric, leader of the Vandal-Alan coalition (427–77)
Petronius Maximus (455) Marcian (451–7) Attila the Hun (c. 440–53)
Avitus (455–6)
Majorian (457–61) Leo I (457–74) Valamer, leader of the Pannonian Goths (c. 455–67)
Libius Severus (461–5)
Anthemius (467–72) Euric, creator of the Visigothic kingdom (467–83)
Olybrius (472) Zeno (473–91) Gundobad, king of the Burgundians (474–?)
Glycerius (473–4) Basiliscus (474–6)
Julius Nepos (474–5)
Theoderic, leader and creator of the Ostrogoths (474–526)
Romulus Augustulus (475–6) Odovacar, king in Italy (476–93)
EVENTS
c.350 Hunnic attacks on Alans east of River Don and Gothic Greuthungi west of Don destabilize area north and east of Black Sea
375 autumn(?) – After death in battle of a second leader, one major group of Greuthungi moves west into territory of neighbouring Gothic Tervingi
376 late(?) summer – Greuthungi and ‘larger part’ of Tervingi arrive on Danube requesting asylum inside Roman Empire
377–82 Gothic war south of Danube
377 late winter/early spring – Initial revolt of Tervingi; Greuthungi force their way across Danube
377/8 1st phase of Gothic war, confined to eastern Balkans
378 24 Aug. – Battle of Hadrianople; death of Valens
379/81 2nd phase of Gothic war spreads to western Balkans
382 3 Oct. – Peace treaty ends the war; Tervingi and Greuthungi settled in Balkans on relatively generous terms
386 More Greuthungi try to cross Danube; defeated by Theodosius and settled on harsh terms in Asia Minor
387/8 Theodosius I defeats Maximus; Balkan Goths involved in war and some revolt
392/3 Theodosius I defeats Eugenius; Balkan Goths again involved in war and further revolt
c.395–411 Alaric reigns over Tervingi and those Greuthungi encompassed by 382 treaty
395/6 First major Hunnic attack on Roman Empire, via Caucasus (Persian Empire also heavily affected)
395–7 Alaric’s 1st revolt
397 Treaty between Alaric and Eutropius; Alaric becomes Roman general commanding in Illyricum
399 Fall of Eutropius; end of treaty
401/2 Alaric’s 1st invasion of Italy; battles of Pollentia and Verona
c.405–8 2nd wave of Hun-inspired invasions of Roman Empire, affecting areas west of the Carpathians
405/6 Treaty between Alaric and Stilicho
Radagaisus invades Italy through Austrian passes, is defeated and killed; many followers sold into slavery, elite warriors drafted into Roman army
406 31 Dec. (?) – Rhine invaders – Vandals, Alans, Suevi and smaller groups – break over Rome’s Upper Rhine frontier
407 Constantine III leads Roman forces stationed in Britain and Gaul against Rhine invaders
407–9 Rhine invaders ravage Gaul, then cross Pyrenees into Spain
408(?) Minor Hunnic leader Uldin invades eastern Empire
408–11 Alaric’s 2nd invasion of Italy; creation of Visigoths by addition of Radagaisus’ followers to Tervingi and Greuthungi encompassed by 382 treaty
410 20 Aug. Alaric sacks Rome
c.410/11(?) British provinces revolt against Constantine III (?)
411–21 Flavius Constantius dominates western Empire
411 Alaric dies, is succeeded by Athaulf; Olympiodorus goes on embassy to main body of Huns now established in central Europe(?)
Fl. Constantius suppresses Constantine III and related usurpers
412 Rhine invaders divide Spanish provinces between them
412/13 Honorius sends letter to British provincials telling them that central Roman forces can no longer defend them
413–16 Fl. Constantius undermines Athaulf (killed in coup in 415) to force Visigoths into renewed alliance with western Empire; Visigothic settlement begins in Aquitaine
416–18 Combined Visigothic-Roman campaigns destroy independence of Alans and Siling Vandals in Spain; survivors unite behind Hasding Vandals to create new Vandal-Alan supergroup
421 Promotion to the purple, then death, of Fl. Constantius
423 Death of Honorius; usurpation of John
422–9 Free hand for Vandal-Alans in Spain culminates in their transfer to Morocco; from 427 led by Geiseric. Suevi establish control in north-western Spain (Galicia)
425 East Roman army puts Valentinian III, aged 6, on western throne
425–33 Struggle for domination at court of Valentinian III, ending with Aetius’ defeat of rival generals Felix and Boniface; partial eclipse of influence of emperor’s mother Galla Placidia
433–54 Aetius dominates western Empire
435 Vandal-Alans granted land in Numidia and Mauretania
436 Aetius’ forces suppress Bagaudae in north-west Gaul
436/7 Destruction of Burgundian kingdom on both sides of Upper Rhine by Huns; Aetius’ resettlement of survivors on Roman territory around Lake Geneva
436–9 Aetius’ war with Visigoths in south-west Gaul ends in renewed treaty
438–41 Suevi under King Rechila seize provinces of Baetica and Carthaginiensis
439 Sept. Vandal-Alans seize Carthage, capital of Roman North Africa, and provinces of Proconsularis and Byzacena
c.440–53 Attila becomes supreme leader of Huns
441/2 Attila’s 1st invasion of east Roman Balkans leads to recall of eastern army sent to participate in Sicilian expedition to recapture lost North African provinces
444 Treaty between Geiseric and western Empire recognizes his control of Proconsularis, Byzacena and Numidia
445(?) Attila murders brother Bleda to take sole control of Huns
446(?) Final appeal of British provincials for central Roman assistance against Saxon and other invaders
447 Attila’s 2nd invasion of east Roman Balkans; heavy Roman defeats on River Utus and in the Chersonesus
448 Priscus participates in embassy to assassinate Attila
450 Attila grants Constantinople a generous treaty
451 Attila invades Gaul; defeated by Aetius’ coalition force of Romans, Burgundians, Visigoths and Franks at the Catalaunian fields c. end June(?)
452 Attila invades Italy, sacks cities including Milan; retreats as disease and Roman harassment weaken army
453–69 Attila’s Hunnic Empire collapses
453 Attila dies
454 summer(?) – Battle of Nedao; Gepids first subject group to reassert independence from Hunnic domination
21 or 22 Sept. – Murder of Aetius by Valentinian III
455 16 Mar. – Murder of Valentinian III by Petronius Maximus, declar
ed Augustus next day
late May – Geiseric’s forces sack Rome, Petronius Maximus killed fleeing city (31 May); Geiseric adds Tripolitania, Sardinia and Balearics to his kingdom
9 July – Avitus declared western emperor by Gallo-Roman senators with support of Visigothic king Theoderic II
late 450s(?) St Severinus starts work in Noricum
456 17 Oct. – Battle of Placentia and deposition of Avitus
457 1 Apr. – Majorian becomes emperor of west
459 Pannonian Goths of Valamer, now united and independent of Hunnic control, invade east Roman territory to extract annual subsidy of 300 lbs of gold
461–72 Ricimer dominates central imperial politics in west
461 summer – Defeat of Majorian’s North African expeditionary force in Spain, followed on 2 Aug. by his deposition and on 7 Aug. by execution; Ricimer’s domination of Italy uncontested
19 Nov. – Nominated by Ricimer, Libius Severus becomes western emperor
465 14 Nov. – Libius Severus dies
466 Euric kills and deposes Theoderic II to become king of Visigoths
467 Dengizich, son of Attila, makes war on eastern Empire
12 Apr. – After long negotiations between Ricimer and Constantinople, Anthemius declared western emperor
468–76 Western Empire unravels
468 June(?) – Defeat of final joint east-west Roman expedition against Vandal kingdom
469 Dengizich’s head publicly displayed in Constantinople; Hernac, Attila’s last surviving son, finds asylum in east Roman territory south of Danube
Euric’s forces advance boundary of Visigothic kingdom northwards to Loire
472 Apr. – Olybrius declared western emperor by Ricimer
11 July – Murder of Anthemius by Gundobad, Ricimer’s ally, after civil war
18 Aug. – Ricimer dies
2 Nov. – Olybrius dies
473–5 Sidonius and friends try to preserve Auvergne against Visigothic annexation within a rump western empire
473–89 Campaigns of Theoderic the Amal, nephew of Valamer, in east Roman Balkans, lead to creation of Ostrogothic supergroup
473 3 Mar. – Glycerius declared western emperor Euric’s forces seize Tarragona in Spain
474 pre-June – Gundobad abandons imperial politics to become joint king of Burgundians
19 or 24 June – Glycerius deposed by Julius Nepos and made Bishop of Salona; Nepos declares himself western emperor
475 28 Aug. – Attacked by Orestes, Nepos retreats to Dalmatia
31 Oct. – Orestes declares his son Romulus Augustulus western emperor
476 After executions of his father Orestes (28 Aug.) and uncle Paul (4 Sept.), Romulus Augustulus, last western Roman emperor, is deposed. Odovacar returns imperial vestments to Constantinople, telling emperor Zeno that no emperor is any longer required in the west
Euric’s Visigothic kingdom now controls entire Hispanic peninsula except for north-west corner, and annexes Arles and the rest of Provence
481/2–507 Campaigns of Clovis bring both Frankish unification and extension of Frankish control over all of former Roman Gaul
482 Jan. – St Severinus dies
489–93 Theoderic the Amal conquers Italy, defeating and deposing Odovacar
Maps
1. The Roman Empire in the fourth century
2. Germania in the Early Roman period
3. Rome’s eastern front and Persian gains in 363
4. Germanic and Germanic-dominated confederation of the fourth century
5. The Black Sea region and the impact of the Huns c.350–380
6. The Gothic War from Ad Salices (377) to the Peace of 382
7. The crisis of 405–8
8. The Rhine invaders in Gaul
9. The division of Spain (411)
10. The Vandals and North Africa
11. Balkans campaigns of Attila
12. The Empire of Attila
13. Western campaigns of Attila
14. Losses and threats to the Western Empire c.445
15. The Huns and their former subjects in c.465
16. The new kingdoms of Gaul and Spain c.490
INTRODUCTION
THE ROMAN EMPIRE was the largest state western Eurasia has ever known. For over four hundred years it stretched from Hadrian’s Wall to the River Euphrates, transforming the lives of all the inhabitants within its frontiers and dominating landscapes and peoples for hundreds of kilometres beyond. Interconnected fortress systems, strategic road networks and professional, highly trained armies both symbolized and ensured this domination, and Roman forces were not averse to massacring any neighbour who stepped out of line. The opening scenes of the 2000 blockbuster Gladiator are based on the victories of Marcus Aurelius over the Marcomanni, a Germanic tribe of south-central Europe, in the third quarter of the second century. Two hundred years later, the Romans were still at it. In 357, 12,000 of the emperor Julian’s Romans routed an army of 30,000 Alamanni at the battle of Strasbourg.
But within a generation, the Roman order was shaken to its core and Roman armies, as one contemporary put it, ‘vanished like shadows’. In 376, a large band of Gothic refugees arrived at the Empire’s Danube frontier, asking for asylum. In a complete break with established Roman policy, they were allowed in, unsubdued. They revolted, and within two years had defeated and killed the emperor Valens – the one who had received them – along with two-thirds of his army, at the battle of Hadrianople. On 4 September 476, one hundred years after the Goths crossed the Danube, the last Roman emperor in the west, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed, and it was the descendants of those Gothic refugees who provided the military core of one of the main successor states to the Empire: the Visigothic kingdom. This kingdom of south-western France and Spain was only one of several, all based on the military power of immigrant outsiders, that emerges from the ruins of Roman Europe. The fall of Rome, and with it the western half of the Empire, constitutes one of the formative revolutions of European history, and has traditionally been seen as heralding the end of the ancient world and the start of the Middle Ages. Like the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution, it changed the world for ever.
Starting with Gibbon’s multivolume epic published during 1776–88, there have been the odd hundred or two studies devoted to the subject, or to particular aspects of it, with as yet no sign of let-up. In the 1990s, the European Science Foundation funded a five-year project to investigate ‘The Transformation of the Roman World’, and its volumes continue to appear. As has always been the case, historians fall a long way short of general agreement, either on the big issues or – where you might more expect it – on matters of detail. Argument has always focused on what it was, exactly, that caused Rome to fall. Since they provided the military muscle behind the new kingdoms, armed outsiders – ‘barbarians’ – obviously had something to do with it. But historians both before and after Gibbon have felt that a power as great as Rome could not have been brought low by illiterates whose culture – political, social, economic, artistic – did not even begin to rival the sometimes astonishingly precocious levels of the Roman world. The Romans had central heating, a form of banking based on capitalist principles, weapons factories, even spin-doctors, whereas the barbarians were simple agriculturalists with a penchant for decorative safety-pins.1 So while the barbarians had something to do with it, they couldn’t really have caused the fall of the Empire. Surely the barbarians merely took advantage of more fundamental problems rife within the Roman world.
But did they? This book will reopen one of history’s greatest mysteries: the strange death of Roman Europe.
My justifications for doing so are both general and specific. Generally, the period from about AD 300–600, covering the fall of the western Empire and the creation of its early medieval successor kingdoms, has been the subject of some of the most innovative historical scholarship of the last forty years. Traditionally, the era was a black hole, a no man’s land between ancient
and medieval history, studied properly in neither. Since the 1960s, huge leaps have been made in our understanding of the many facets of this period, rechristened ‘late antiquity’. Many of these discoveries are now common knowledge among specialists, but have yet to feed through to the general public, whose expectations (judging, at least, by the prejudices with which some of my students still come to the subject) are still conditioned by older traditions stretching back to Gibbon. In the last forty years, teachers and students have for the first time made the acquaintance of a later Roman Empire that was not on the brink of social, economic and moral collapse, and a world beyond its frontiers that was not characterized by simple, unchanging barbarism. Two generations of scholarship since the Second World War have revolutionized our understanding both of the Roman Empire and of the wider world that the Romans knew as barbaricum, ‘the land of the barbarians’. This book draws heavily upon that scholarship.
MORE SPECIFICALLY, THE enthusiastic ‘discovery’ of late antiquity occurred in an intellectual environment in which historians of all periods were realizing that there was much more to history than the economics, high politics, war and diplomacy that had been its traditional stock-in-trade. Late antiquity, with its wealth of written and archaeological sources, generated not least by the highly sophisticated literary culture typical of educated Roman elites, has proved a fruitful area for research in many disciplines: gender and cultural history, and the history of popular belief, for instance. It has also provided a rich vein for study in tune with recent trends in historical writing which have sought to challenge the unspoken prejudices which inform the ‘great narratives’ of traditional history. The image of the ‘civilized’ but ever declining Romans implacably at war with ‘barbarian’ outsiders is a prime example of one such narrative at work. Recent thinking has rightly tried to escape the clutches of this tradition, pinpointing the many instances that our sources provide of barbarian–Roman cooperation and nonviolent interaction. An emphasis on reading individual texts with a view to understanding the ideological visions of the world that underlie them has also had a dramatic impact. This type of interpretation requires historians to treat ancient authors, not as sources of fact, but rather like second-hand-car salesmen whom they would do well to approach with a healthy caution.
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