The Romans could take some grim satisfaction from the fact that Alaric didn’t enjoy his triumph for long. A few months after his victory, the barbarian king expired of a fever, but the damage to the imperial reputation had already been done.† The legions were powerless, and no city seemed safe from the waves of barbarism engulfing the empire. The eastern emperor Theodosius II was so alarmed that he immediately ordered huge new walls built around Constantinople. Rising forty feet high and nearly sixteen feet thick, these powerful defenses of stone and brick would throw back every hopeful invader for the next thousand years. The sack of Rome may have deeply scarred the Roman psyche, but it had also created the most impressive defensive fortifications ever built in the ancient or medieval worlds. The empire would seldom know peace in the long years to come, but at least the defenses of its capital city would be secure.
The West had no such luxury. Honorius had fled the moment the Goths were spotted, and with the weakness of Rome revealed, he officially moved the capital to the more defensible Ravenna. But even in a new city, the western emperor was powerless to stop the decay and could only watch as the provinces fell away. The Visigoths and Franks overran Gaul, Spain flared up in revolt, and Saxon invaders swarmed into Britain. The anxious British wrote to Honorius begging for help, but the answer they received made it all too clear that the imperium was failing in the West. “Look after your own fates,” the emperor advised.* He could hardly do otherwise; the imperial armies were everywhere on the retreat, and Britain was abandoned to its long and futile fight against the Saxons.† Rome still had the wealth of North Africa, but by the time Honorius finally expired of edema of the lungs in 423, the Vandals had wrested most of it from his control.
The eastern government did what it could to help its dying counterpart, but it had its own problems with a terrifying new enemy. Descending from the central Asian steppe in a wild, undisciplined horde, the Huns came crashing into imperial territory, destroying everything in their path and spreading terror and death wherever they went. Unlike the other peoples the empire dismissively called uncivilized, the Huns were barbarians in every sense of the word. Wearing tunics sewn from the skin of field mice, they never bathed or changed clothes, slept on their horses under the open stars, and ate their food raw. To the people of the empire, this wild, screaming horde seemed like some kind of awful divine punishment, and their terrible leader, Attila, was known throughout Europe as “The Scourge of God.”
Brushing aside the frantic imperial armies sent against him, Attila sacked every major city from the Black Sea to the Propontis and extracted humiliating treaties from Constantinople that allowed him to cross the border at will. With the government completely cowed and promising him two thousand pounds of gold per year to maintain his good graces, Attila seemed content to leave the empire in peace, but a few months later the entire Roman world learned the frightening news that the Huns were on the march again. This time, however, the Romans only had themselves to blame. In order to escape a forced marriage to an unpleasant Roman senator, the emperor’s sister Honoria had foolishly sent a letter—along with a ring—to Attila asking him for help. Whether or not she was asking for marriage, the great khan chose to interpret it as a proposal and informed the terrified emperor that he was coming “to claim what was rightfully his.”
Crossing into Gaul, Attila unleashed his horde, while the frightened Roman army scattered, and its commanders looked on helplessly.* There was nothing now that could spare the empire’s ancient capital, and the panicked city watched the horizon and prayed that Attila would turn away. The long absence of emperors from Rome had left a power vacuum, and with no secular leaders rising to the occasion, more and more of these temporal responsibilities had been filled by the only real leader left in the city—the pope. When Attila arrived, there were no glittering troops or majestic emperors to shield the city from his fury, just the lonely figure of Pope Leo who trudged out on foot to meet him. There, in the dust of an army camp, the pontiff—armed only with his intellect—met with the barbarian to try to turn the long-expected blow aside.
There is no record of their conversation, but whatever Leo said, Attila turned his soldiers around and left Italy, leaving the city of Romulus unexpectedly intact.* He stopped long enough to add another child bride to his harem and spent the night feasting and drinking heavily. When he failed to appear the next morning, his warriors broke into his bedroom and found him dead. During the night, an artery had burst and the Scourge of God had expired from a glorified nosebleed. Singing songs to the “terror of the world,” his men buried him in three coffins—one of gold, one of silver, and the last one of iron. Howling with grief, they tore their clothes and gashed their faces, all to the glory of the man before whom kings and emperors had groveled. Far away in Constantinople, the emperor dreamed of a broken bow and knew the mighty Attila was dead. The empire could breathe again.
* The Sibylline Books were a collection of prophetic verse bought by the legendary last king of Rome, Tarquin the Proud. Though the originals were destroyed in a fire in the first century BC, replicas were kept in a vault beneath the temple of Apollo on the Palatine. At great moments of crisis the senate would consult them to determine what religious observances were needed to avert catastrophe.
*One of them is said to have remarked, “Non est ista pax sed pactio servttutts”—“That is no peace, but a mere selling of yourselves into slavery.”
*Charles Christopher Mierow, The Letters of St. Jerome (Westminster: Newman Press, 1963).
†He was buried with his loot in the bed of a river that had been diverted for that purpose. When the body had been interred, those who dug the grave were killed and the river was allowed to resume its course, forever hiding the resting place of the conqueror of Rome.
*Such advice was typical of the rather pathetic Honorius. When informed that Rome had fallen, he thought at first that something had happened to his pet rooster Roma and was relieved to find that it was only the city that had been sacked.
†The invading Saxon horde eventually extinguished classical civilization in Britain, but before it did, a Romanized British leader made a last stand to hold the darkness at bay. He failed, but the attempt inspired the legend of King Arthur.
*The citizens of the little town of Aquileia fled at Attila’s approach to the safety of the nearby lagoon. Recognizing the superb defensive position it offered, they elected to stay put, laying the foundations of what would become the mighty Republic of Venice. Its oldest island, Torcello, still has a crude stone chair dubbed by the locals “Attila’s throne.”
*Attila was known to be extremely superstitious. Perhaps the crafty Leo simply pointed out that the conquest of Rome had proved quite lethal to the last man (Alaric) who had attempted it.
6
THE FALL OF ROME
The death of their great enemy sent the Roman world into wild jubilation, but it did nothing to alleviate the true danger. Valens had let them inside the frontiers, Theodosius had allowed them to stay, and now the barbarians had turned both of Theodosius’s sons into puppet emperors. For the moment, the barbarians were content to stay behind the throne, but how long before they decided to rule on their own? If the emperors didn’t break free soon, the empire would dissolve from within into petty barbarian kingdoms.
The western emperor Valentinian III attempted to escape first. Flushed with excitement in the wake of the Hun’s departure, he rashly decided to assassinate his barbarian master, Flavius Aetius. He carried out the deed personally, naively assuming that his freedom could be purchased with a simple thrust of the sword. The barbarian yoke, however, couldn’t be thrown off so easily. The death of one man didn’t diminish the barbarian influence, and Valentinian hadn’t done anything to inspire his citizens’ loyalty. Early the next year, two of Aetius’s men angrily cut the emperor down in broad daylight while the imperial bodyguard just watched impassively.
The assassination threw Rome into an uproar, and, in the chaos, Valentinian’s widow
made the terrible decision to appeal to the Vandals for help. Only too happy to come swooping down on the beleaguered city, the barbarians immediately appeared with a large army and demanded that the gates be opened. For the third time in four decades, the old capital was at the mercy of its enemies, and though Pope Leo once again trudged out to plead for mercy, this time he was in a far weaker position. As Arian Christians, the Vandals didn’t have the faintest intention of listening to a pope, but, after an extended negotiation, they did agree to spare the lives of the inhabitants. For two weeks, they sacked the city, methodically stripping everything of value that they could find, even the copper from the temple roofs.* When there was nothing left, they departed from the shattered city with their loot, carrying off the empress and her daughters for good mea sure, to their North African capital of Carthage.†
After the reverses of the past few years, this most recent sack of the city wasn’t quite as shocking as the first, but it did convince the watching eastern court of the dangers of trying to shake off their barbarian masters. It was a lesson that Aspar, the Sarmatian general who currently had Constantinople securely under his thumb, hoped his courtiers had learned well.‡
Aspar’s Arian religion had made him far too unpopular to seize the throne himself, but he’d found a tame proxy in the person of a rather bland, safely Christian lieutenant named Leo. The general had simply had him crowned and settled down to rule the empire from his perch behind the throne.§
Leo was the perfect choice for a puppet. Somewhat “elderly” at fifty-six, he was a deferential, undistinguished man with two daughters, but he had no son to follow him on the throne. His reign would most likely be short, and with no pesky heirs to challenge the general, he would serve as the perfect conduit for Aspar’s power. The barbarian general was well connected, with a long career of service to the empire, a glittering reputation, and personal control over half the army. Even had Leo wanted to, there seemed little chance that with only a worthless title, the emperor could pose a threat to the general’s authority.
Confident in his own security, Aspar failed to realize that he had dangerously miscalculated. Leo had both the ability and, more important, the will to lead, and he didn’t intend to remain a figurehead for long. The new emperor wasn’t rash enough to move against his master at once. Assassinating Aspar—even if it were possible—would only accomplish his own early death, and in any case, where one overlord was cut down, another would inevitably rise to take his place. What Leo needed was a permanent solution to be rid of barbarian masters forever, and for that he had to strike at the true source of Aspar’s power—his control of the army.
Looking around for a military counterbalance to his overpowerful general, Leo found a perfect candidate in a man named Tarasicodissa. He was the leader of a tough mountain people from southern Asia Minor called the Isaurians, and since he wasn’t a native of the capital, he depended completely on the emperor for advancement. Traveling with a small group of men to the capital, Tarasicodissa managed to find evidence of treason by Aspar’s son, providing the emperor a perfect opportunity to publicly scold his barbarian master. Tarasicodissa was rewarded with both the hand of Leo’s daughter and a post equal to Aspar’s. The suddenly respectable Isaurian mercifully Hellenized his name to the more acceptable Zeno and soon became the darling of Constantinople’s polite society.
With Aspar humiliated and on the defensive, Leo was temporarily free to direct imperial policy on his own. Realizing that the western half of the empire was on the verge of collapse, he launched an ambitious plan to aid it by conquering the Vandal kingdom of North Africa. Returning the province to the Western Empire would go a long way toward restoring both its solvency and its prestige, and, more important, it would punish the Vandals for their sack of Rome. The fact that it would also flex his growing power and prestige was, of course, an additional benefit, and Leo was determined to spare no expense. Emptying the entire eastern treasury, the emperor liquidated 130,000 pounds of gold to muster and equip over a thousand ships with four hundred thousand soldiers.
To command one of the largest invasion forces ever attempted, Leo chose one of the worst commanders in history. His name was Basiliscus, and his main qualification was being Leo’s brother-in-law Against any other leader, the Vandals would have stood no chance; but under Basiliscus, the overwhelming odds just made for a more spectacular collapse. Landing forty miles from Carthage, Basiliscus somehow managed to wreck his fleet and largely destroy his army within five days. Panicking in the middle of a battle, the wretched general left the remains of his grand force to fend for itself and fled to Constantinople.
When he reached the capital, Basiliscus very sensibly hid in the Hagia Sophia, which was soon surrounded by an angry mob calling for his head. Leo was also in a lynching mood, but the timely intervention of the empress Verina managed to save Basiliscus, and Leo exiled him to Thrace instead of beheading him. His incompetence had left the East nearly impoverished and had extinguished the last hope of the West. His mischief, however, was not yet completed, and, though disgraced and exiled, he would return to haunt the empire again.
The only silver lining in the disaster was that it enabled Leo to finally break completely free from his barbarian master. Since Aspar was the de facto head of the military, he was quite unfairly blamed for the entire debacle, and his reputation plummeted. Seeing his opportunity, Leo lured Aspar to the palace and had him quietly assassinated, barring the doors so that no help could come.* It was a less-than-honorable solution, but Leo was at last free. Zeno was now the most powerful general in the army, and he was completely loyal to the crown. Against all odds, Leo had broken the barbarian hold on the throne.
He was not, however, to enjoy his triumph for long. Three years later, in 474, Leo died of dysentery, and the throne passed to his son-in-law Zeno. The new emperor had handled his heady rise to power well enough, but his fellow Isaurians had let it go straight to their heads and were now getting on everyone’s nerves by strutting around Constantinople as though they owned the place. As if this weren’t bad enough for Zeno, he was also saddled with rather atrocious in-laws. Leo’s family could never quite reconcile themselves to the fact that a jumped-up provincial had risen so quickly, and Leo’s wife, Verina, in particular had been horrified by her daughter’s marriage to the uncouth Isaurian. For a few years, the Empress Mother managed to maintain a cordial disdain for her daughter’s husband, but it turned to outright hatred when her only grandson—Zeno’s seven-year-old son—died of an illness. For the rest of her life, Verina blamed the heartbroken Zeno for the boy’s death and did everything in her power to under cut him.
Slightly less dangerous an enemy than Verina was her worthless brother Basiliscus, who never let incompetence stand in the way of his dreams, and who was busy scheming to seize the throne himself. He had largely destroyed his own credibility with his shameful conduct against the Vandal kingdom of Africa, but this had done nothing to damage his unshakable belief that he should be sitting on the throne. Time, he was sure, had glossed over the mistakes of the past, and though he had never been particularly close to his sister, he was quite willing to make common cause with her against their mutual enemy. The vengeful siblings somehow attracted the support of a disgruntled Isaurian general named Illus, and the three of them hatched a plan to overthrow their despised relative.
Waiting until Zeno was busy presiding over the games at the Hippodrome, Verina sent a frantic messenger to tell him that the people, backed by the Senate, had risen against him. Zeno had grown up far from the busy life of the capital, and for all his success he never really felt at home in the cosmopolitan city. He was painfully aware of how unpopular he had become, and the roar of the crowd around him was quite indistinguishable from the cacophony of revolt. Not bothering to check if his citizens were actually rising against him, the terrified emperor fled with a handful of followers and what was left of the imperial gold reserve to his native Isauria.
Constantinople now belonged to
Verina, the mastermind of the rebellion, and she planned to have her lover crowned immediately, but it turned out that toppling an emperor was a good deal easier than making a new one. The army may have not raised a finger to help Zeno, but they balked at handing the throne over to an unknown whose only qualification was that he was sleeping with Verina. Only a member of the imperial family could become emperor, and the army turned to the one candidate readily available—Basiliscus. Incredibly, the man who had almost single-handedly destroyed the military capability of the East and doomed the West with his disastrous African campaign now found himself hailed by the army as the supreme leader of the Roman Empire.
The new emperor soon proved that his stewardship was on par with his generalship. His first action was to allow a general massacre of every Isaurian in the city—despite the fact that Isaurian support had been vital in his bid for the throne. He then turned to his sister, rewarding her part in the revolt by having her lover executed and forcing her into retirement. Having thus mortally offended his coconspirators, Basiliscus sent an army to crush Zeno and secure his position on the throne. To lead this all-important expedition, the emperor made the baffling choice of the Isaurian general Illus, apparently without considering that his recent slaughter of Isaurians in the capital might make Illus a less than perfect candidate to go fight his countrymen. Indeed, Illus marched straight to Zeno and switched sides, encouraging the emperor to return to Constantinople at once and reclaim his throne.
Meanwhile, Basiliscus was busy eroding any support he had left in the capital. Appointing the dubiously named Timothy the Weasel as his personal religious adviser, he let the man talk him into trying to force the church to adopt the heretical belief that Christ lacked a human nature. When in response the patriarch draped the icons of the Hagia Sophia in black, the annoyed emperor announced that he was abolishing the Patriarchate of Constantinople. This action proved so offensive that it touched off massive riots and caused a local holy man named Daniel the Stylite to descend from his pillar for the first time in three decades.* The sight of the saint wagging his finger frightened Basiliscus into publicly withdrawing the threat, but that did little to restore his popularity.
Lost to the West Page 7
