Alaric was the leader of the Visigoths when they sacked Rome
on AD410 and is therefore considered a key figure in Rome’s eventual fall. But
who was he, and how did he become so powerful?
He was born on what was probably Roman territory, which
would make him a Roman citizen. The territory was the island of Peuce in the Danube Delta; the island no longer
exists, having been destroyed by changes to the distributaries of the river in
the middle ages. But the Roman idea was that the empire included the river and
Gothland began only north of it.
Alaric’s birth date was somewhere between 370 and 375,
probably nearer 370. His father is unknown, but was probably Atharid, a Gothic
troop leader and a son of Rothestes. The Gothic troops had entered the empire
to back the claim of Procopius, the cousin of the late emperor Julian (d.363)
to the throne; to them, the agnate kinship system meant Procopius was rightly
the emperor. This system, often used by Germanic kings, meant that the next
eldest member of the royal family succeeded, as long as he was male,
legitimate, not handicapped and not otherwise barred from succession. Procopius
met those criteria.
The usurper Procopius |
The defeated Goths lost the ability to have their youth join
the Roman army, from which they were unlikely to return to Gothland, and if
they did, they’d be at least 42. Valens also closed the riverfront markets
which had helped the Gothic economy, and ended the Roman system of gifts, which
had ensured loyalty to the Gothic king. This mad policy of Valens was hugely
popular in the empire. An oration of Themistius proclaimed in Greek before the
emperor (who only spoke Latin) hailed Valens as the first emperor in a hundred
years to cut taxes.
This massive destabilisation of the Goths coincided with the
arrival of the Huns in Gothland, a backlash against Christianity, which had
been introduced in the 350s by Wulfilaz (Ulphilas) and internecine strife.
In April 372, the Gothic Christian Sabbaz (Sabbas)was
murdered near the Danube on the orders of Atharidaz (Atharid), a noble (kunja)
of the Tervingi tribe, son of Hrothestaz (Rothestes) a sub-king of Athanaric,
leader of the Tervingi. Around the same time the other main Gothic leader,
Ermaneric of the Greuthungi, killed his Tervingian wife, SvanhildR, because of
her alleged adultery with his son. While this story is a mainstay of medieval
German romance (and with her being torn apart by horses seems to echo the
deaths of Phaedra and Hippolytus in classical myth), it is reported as a
contemporary event by Ammianus Marcellinus, where she is called Sunilda. Her
brothers later killed Ermaneric. One of them, Sarus, may be the Sarus who later
led the Roman army, or his father.
The Huns arrived in Gothland in about 375, so Alaric’s
father, Atharid, may be part of the Tervingi already within the Roman Empire by
370, displaced by religious conflict, tribal disputes and the Huns. The death
of Sabbas may have been a contract killing rather than strictly religious.
What we get from this is that Alaric was probably born in
Roman territory before the Tervingi moved with imperial permission into Moesia
in 376. His father, probably Atharid, was probably in exile, and perhaps
involved with the emigration of Goths to the city of Adrianople, where they
worked as smiths and farmers.
The two rival dynasties were the Amali and the Balthi, the
bold ones. Alaric first appears as a leading soldier in 391, which suggests he
is unlikely to have had much first hand knowledge of Gothland. He commanded a
group of Goths for Theodosius in the Battle of the Frigidus in 394, so he was certainly a
Roman officer by then, very young to be commanding troops at the age of 22 or
23. If he was born in 375, as has been suggested, he would have been only 18 or
19. His dynastic prestige may have carried him forward. As his name means
‘all-king’ (Ala-reiks), it is likely that he was the sole surviving member of the
Amal royal family.
The Emperor Theodosius I |
Throughout his career, Alaric juggled two identities: Roman
commander and king of the Visigoths, using whatever worked for him. After
Frigidus, he left the Roman Army and was elected head of the Visigoths in the
Roman Empire. Left to his own devices, he invaded Greece and sacked Athens in
395, going on to destroy Corinth and Sparta, before the advisors of the eastern
emperor Arcadius (who seems to have been of low intelligence and run by his
Frankish wife) had him made Magister
Militum per Illyricas, based in what is now Serbia. Alaric had received his
senior command at the age of at most 25.
The group which Alaric led within the empire was not
composed of Goths, nor was it commanded in the Gothic language (his men called
him ‘Alaricus’, suggesting he commanded them in Latin, a language all could
speak). It wasn’t a people, but an army. The huge distances travelled by the
‘Visigoths’ between AD400 and AD415 could never have been accomplished by a
force that could only move at a speed of its womenfolk, children and elderly.
The food and fodder required could not have been bought or otherwise obtained
for non-combatants.
Roman officers tried to negotiate with Alaric, starting with
Rufinus, Master of the Offices in the East (and target of two vicious poems by Claudian) in 395 before
his murder, and then with Stilicho in 401.
The East in 399 had been under the control of the Gothic
general Gainas. He seems to have been connected with a Gothic group called the
Gaini. There is a reference in the Goth Jordanes’ book Getica to Goths in Britain, and in the Life of Alfred and in charters there was a group called the Gainas
in the English Midlands; Alfred married Elswitha, the daughter of one of their
aldermen. They may have given their names to Gainsborough, near Lincoln. Gainas
had been Alaric’s commander at the Frigidus in 394, and it was the failure of
Gainas to reward or promote Alaric that caused the latter to revolt in 395.
In AD400, the eastern Consul, Aurelianus, clashed with
Gainas, whose cousin Tribigild was marauding in Asia Minor. Gainas exiled
Aurleianus and took over Constantinople. However, Aurelianus, former urban
prefect or the city and former praetorian prefect of Orients, was behind the
murder of a significant number of Goths in the city. The legend is that 7000
were burnt to death in an Arian church they’d been locked into, although there
were no churches that large other than the Hagias Sophia cathedral. Perhaps 700
is nearer the mark. Gainas was away from the city at the time and when he
learnt of the massacre, he rebelled and sailed his troops into Asia Minor.
Another Visigothic leader, Gravitas, married to a high-ranking Roman, attacked his
fleet, sank it and got made Consul of the East in 401.
In 401, Alaric attacked Italy, the first of three times he
attempted that. He was blocked by Stilicho, with a pitched battle at the
Piedmontese city of Pollentia (modern Pollenzo) in April 402. Rome sent another
Germanic general, Rumoridus, who had been in senior command posts since at
least AD384, so he would have been quite elderly. He was also a believer of the
ancient Germanic gods, so Rome was sending a pagan German to defeat a Christian
German. However, Rumoridus was commanding regular imperial troops, not spears
for hire as Alaric did. Rumoridus defeated Alaric, kept him out of Italy, and
was made consul for 403.
Until Pollentia, the Alaric force had been accumulating
wives and dependents, but a lot of them, including Alaric’s wife, were seized
and enslaved. Another battle, outside Verona in 403, led Alaric to withdraw
from Italy, presumably without their wives and kin. Alaric’s wife was
presumably the sister of Athawulf, later king of the Visigoths, who is described
widely as Alaric’s brother in law.
The failed invasion of Italy was taken seriously; the
imperial capital was moved from Milan to Ravenna in the marshes of the River
Po, and Legio XX Valeria Victrix was withdrawn from Britain to consolidate
Italy. That would have taken many months to communicate and implement, so it
may have been the trigger that led to the collapse of Roman rule in Britain in
AD405. The Twentieth Legion had been stationed in Britain since it arrived as
part of the invasion force in AD43, 362 years before.
Bearing in mind that Stilicho, the emperors’ uncle (and
father in law to Honorius) was half-Germanic and he was consul in 400 and 405,
and it does seem that anyone who defeated a Germanic, possibly Gothic leader
would be made consul for his pains. Although Stilicho was later claimed as a
Vandal, his name (Stilichonas in Greek) sounds more Gothic than Vandal.
The Roman commander Flavius Stilicho |
Alaric at that time held a Roman command in Illyricum, and
sat on his hands while the empire was badly shaken. He was mobilised by
Stilicho to push for a Western imperial claim on Illyricum, then stopped in his
tracks, with troops to pay. He demanded 4,000 pounds of gold to pay off his
troops, and Stilicho agreed to pay this. However, a few months later, Stilicho
and his supporters were overthrown and killed, so Alaric invaded Italy and was
bought off with 5,000 pounds
of gold, 30,000 pounds of silver, 4,000 silken tunics, 3,000 hides dyed scarlet
and 3,000 pounds of pepper, rather more than the Romans could have settled for.
He also
received 40,000 Gothic slaves, formerly connected with Radigaisus. He sought to
have the Senate vote a homeland for his groups in Dalmatia, but Honorius
blocked it, so he invaded Italy a second time in AD409. This time, the scared
Senators voted that the urban prefect of Rome, Priscus Attalus, should be made
emperor.
By AD410 the Romans had run out of Germans to lead their troops,
and so the consul of that year was Varanes, a career soldier and from his name,
a Persian, which must have caused ripples in the eastern empire. However,
Varanes seems to have been loyal and to have helped steady the empire after the
murder of Stilicho by Olympius and to have suppressed food riots in
Constantinople in 409.
The Sack of Rome in AD410 is justly famous, but less
spectacular than it might have been. Alaric again trumped up a grievance and
besieged Rome. Alaric had dumped Attalus and sought to negotiate with Honorius,
who was in the city at the time, but he escaped and left his sister, Galla
Placidia, to her fate, possibly at the behest of Sarus, his Gothic commander
and a member of the Amal dynasty.
The Sack of Rome, painting by JN Slyvestre, France 1890 |
By the way, the Sylvestre painting looks remarkably like the
posed footage of pulling down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad a few
years ago.
Pulling Down Saddam Hussain, Baghdad. |
The Sack was for three days, and focused on pagan temples.
These had been closed by law for over fifteen years. They did contain gold and
silver objects and settings of jewels. Clearly the Romans wanted them gone.
Theodosius had closed the Temple of Vesta and extinguished the eternal flame in
394. The Altar of Victory, in and out of the Senate building between 364 and 394,
vanished forever. In AD405, Stilicho had burnt the Sibylline Oracles, allegedly
because they predicted his overthrow. Nor did the Romans much object when the
Mausolea of Augustus and Hadrian were looted. But private houses, churches and
monasteries were generally left alone. Only the Basilica Aemelia was burnt,
something we know because coins dated to AD410 conveniently melted into the
floor. The building was fronted by shops, which may have been looted (not
necessarily by Alaric) and the wooden roof burnt well too. We saw in the 2011
riots in Britain that opportunist thieves took the opportunity afforded by
political riots to rob high street shops.
Shortly after the Sack, word arrived at Rome that the
Governor of Africa Proconsularis, a loyalist of Honorius, was blocking the
transfer of grain to Portus. With no grain dole, the poor of Rome would riot,
so Alaric marched his forces south to Calabria, where he sought to set sail to
Carthage to force the required transfer. However, his ships were caught up in a
storm off Taranto with many lives lost. He marched back up the peninsula
towards Rome, but died at Consentia (Cosenza), an established stopover on the
way to the capital. This is described as fever, but it may have been malaria.
The city stands on a plateau and is bounded by the rivers
Bucentius (Busento) and Crathis (Crati). We do not know what happened to
Alaric. There is a myth – first peddled by Jordanes 140 years after the event –
that the Goths moved the Bucentius, with hydraulic engineering skills that no
barbarian force could have mustered and that even a crack Roman legion would
have baulked at, dug not only the grave of Alaric, but also all the wealth that
they had sought for years and spent three days sacking Rome to acquire. They
then backfilled everything and killed the slaves used to do all this work.
Entertaining, but pure tosh. It smacks of a Germanic myth.
Now, real people such as Ermaneric and (later on) Theodoric were used to form
new myths (Theodoric the Amal became ‘Dietrich of Bern’, which was Verona). But
this is clearly a mytheme. What happened to the loot? It was probably fenced to
Roman thieves for cash. There may too have been some link to the Pietroasele
hoard found in Romania in the 1830s. This has been linked to the Gothic ruler
Athanaric, a generation before Alaric’s death. Half-remembered legends of one
such deposit could readily be retold about another imagined hoard. Likewise the
Vinkovci Treasure, found in a fifth century context in Croatia, may have been
hidden to prevent someone like Alaric getting their hands on it.
They say that all political careers end in failure. Alaric’s
was no different. The future of the Roman Goths lay with his brother in law
Athawulf in Gaul and Spain, not in the Balkans and Italy.
Warfare is a fascinating subject. Despite the dubious morality of using violence to achieve personal or political aims. It remains that conflict has been used to do just that throughout recorded history.
ReplyDeleteYour article is very well done, a good read.
Many thanks for your comments and appreciation. Is this something your might retweet to fellow readers? If so, thank you.
ReplyDeleteFor more on the Goths, Peter Heather (who I used to know) is your way in.
Thanks for your work
ReplyDeleteI hope yo will have time to examine the move to Toulous by the Goths after Alaric died.
This episode established the Goths in Gaul and Spain and later contributed to the demise of the Western Roman Empire. It should be a good topic.
Thanks
Dane Arr