Alaric- The Man who Burnt Rome

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

 The most powerful and toughest invasion of the empire was the attack on Italy by the troops of Radigaisus. This was a purely pagan force, intent on killing the Christian elite of Italy, including senators. Rome took six months to drum up enough forces to defeat him. Radigaisus tried to besiege Florence (Florentia), but lost a large number of his troops, fled to nearby Fiesole (Faesulae), abandoned his troops, which were close to mutiny, but was captured and killed by the Romans under Sarus and Uldin, a Hunnic commander (who five years before had cut off the head of Gainas and sent it to Arcadius). His best soldiers were conscripted into the imperial army, yet so many were enslaved that the slavery market collapsed.

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

 The Sack was not a random looting, as is often portrayed, such as in this painting by Sylvestre in the late 19^th century. Alaric and his troops are portrayed as Redskins out of a Wild West Show, popular at the time. They were of course (excluding Radigaisus’s troops) Christians, disciplined soldiers, and Roman citizens, not half-naked savages.

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.

 Alaric and his partially Gothic force entered Rome through the recently strengthen Porta Salaria in the north east, next to the Gardens of Sallust. The Redshirts blew that apart in 1870 at the end of the Risorgimento.

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.

A Refuge in the Roman Empire (Part 2)

Moving forward to the early second century AD; Trajan fought and defeated the Dacians (101-106 AD), following an earlier campaign by Domitian, and raised a column about it in 109AD. This was the last expansion of the Empire, and proved a war too far. Immediately north of the Dacians were the Goths, who had moved upriver on the Vistula and found themselves at the Carpathians. They expanded into the northern parts of Dacia. By around 250AD this had become a threat to Rome, and its new emperor, Decius, led an army into Dacia to repel the Goths.

It didn’t work. Decius was killed in the marshes on the north bank of the Danube. The Goths went on to raid various parts of the empire, even crossing into Asia Minor and abducting Roman citizens in Cappadocia as slaves. Rome had removed a buffer state when they’d have been better advised to strengthen it.

Amongst the captives from Cappadocia were Christians, and whilst they had started as slaves of the Goths, their offspring gradually became Goths (while still able to speak Greek and Latin). About a hundred years after being abducted, one of those new Goths, Wulfilaz, turned up in Constantinople. His name is recorded variously as Ulphilas or Wulfila, and he was a Christian priest. We will catch up with him later on.

When Constantine took control of the eastern empire, he established a treaty (foedus) with the Danubian Goths, the group later known as the Visigoths. This was something very much to their advantage; the right to trade with Roman Moesia at any point along the Danube; the ability to absorb all and any young men the Goths could spare into the Roman Army, where they would spend twenty years as a soldier; if they came back it would be as  men in their late 30s or above, and if they chose not to return there was the offer of a cash sum, Roman citizenship and the ability to marry a Roman citizen girlfriend and settle as a burgher of the town. The third advantage of the foedus was a regular ‘gift’ of high quality Roman pottery and metalware, of which the king would keep some and give the rest to his higher nobles and so on down the line, securing loyalty in this way.

This pact served both Romans and Goths well. The Romans had to pay for the ‘gifts’ (i.e. bribes) to the Goths, but that was a lot cheaper than fighting them. The real damage was to Roman egotism. The bribes also provided a structure of chieftain generosity and reciprocal service typical of a Germanic war band.

 The Emperor Decius

Wulfilaz appeared in Constantinople in 340, and was allowed to create a translation of the Bible into Gothic, using a mix of Latin and Greek letters with some Gothic runes. By his own admission, he omitted the Book of Kings in the Old Testament because the Goths were warlike enough without encouragement. He returned to Gothland under the protection of Fritigern, but later took a community of Gothic Christians back within the empire in about AD347/8 under the protection of Constantius II; who was an Arian, and so Wulfilaz’s group adopted Arianism, which was legitimised at the Church Council of Rimini; it was probably close to the Christianity they’d practised in Cappadocia when it was still underground.

The Goths ran into difficulty because they were drawn into a dispute over who should be eastern emperor; Valens, the brother of Valentinian, who had been picked by his brother, who had been appointed and acclaimed by the army, rubberstamped by an obliging Senate, was unpopular with Procopius, a cousin of the former emperor Justin. Somehow Procopius persuaded the Gothic leadership that he was the rightful emperor.

Procopius (also claimed as Valens, but probably too young to be him)

In the Germanic system of royal inheritance, Procopius might have succeeded, because that system established a royal pedigree, and anyone within the royal lineage could seek to be king. The principal targets were stability and legitimacy. It was obviously necessary to avoid children, the ill, mad and illegitimate inheriting, and (as was later shown) women were best placed as ‘peaceweavers’. The next one down the age range was usually best, so brothers and cousins often inherited ahead of sons, particularly ones of dubious mental health, which is why Hamlet was sidelined for Claudius in the myth Shakespeare took from Saxo Grammaticus.

Procopius put his case to the Tervingi Goths, under their leader Athanaric, in terms they used and understood, but which was never used by the Romans once the Julio-Claudians had exterminated themselves.

It would have been smart for Valens to have told the Goths to do what their foedus required and rewarded their renewed loyalty, but he was exceptionally dumb, so he punished them, ending the open trading along the Danube, cutting it to one place, and closing the army to Gothic recruits, thereby trapping youths of fighting age in Gothland kicking their heels resentfully. By doing this he impoverished the Gothic farmers and built up a reservoir of young men who blamed their rulers. By ending the bribes, Valens was able to cut taxes in the Eastern Empire, the first emperor to do so in a century, and was praised for it by the orator Themistius, although he may not have known about it, since Themistius spoke Greek by no Latin and Valens the reverse, so they probably smiled politely at each other as the Empire destroyed itself.

The struggles of Christian Goths and the adverse reaction of the ‘pagan’ Athanaric towards Rome is seen in the martyrdom of Sabbaz (St Saba) in AD374 by drowning. Within two years, this 38 year old Arian Goth had been made a Roman saint, another cause of war with the Arian emperor Valens. An official hagiography The Passion of St Saba has been discussed by Peter Heather in his book The Goths in the Fourth Century (1991). No doubt such murders by Athanaric eased the decision of Fritigern’s Goths to emigrate to the Roman Empire in AD376, less than two years later, at just the moment that Bishop Basil of Caesarea in Moesia. We can see some similar push factors to the murders by ISIS of Christians and Yazidis in recent times in Syria and Iraq.

Unknown to Valens, the Huns had parked themselves to the north of Gothland, having found a way across the Pripet Marshes at the mouth of the Volga. The Goths had a new power to crawl to, so some of them, under Athanaric, asserted that they no longer needed the Romans, now they could get what they wanted by offering services to the Huns. Other Goths – those nearer to the Danube, possibly no further than 30 miles from the river – thought if they offered themselves as even more dogged than before in devotion to Rome, they might receive their old favoured position once more.

Those southern Goths were led by Fritigern, and they sought refuge within the Roman Empire.  It sounded reasonable, but it was the beginning of the end.

They petitioned Valens to let them enter the empire, and this was permitted. The numbers – perhaps 50,000 – were rather more than had been intended, These were however not all men of fighting age, and included women, children, the elderly and the sick. In that respect, they resembled the sort of migrants fleeing conflict seen in the movements of 2014.

Valens allowed them to be placed in transit camps, where they were ripped off and half-starved for some time by the local governors, Lupicinus and Maximus, who sold them food at high prices, claiming there was a famine. They led their menfolk out to acquire illegally what they could not legitimately obtain. They hoped to get to Adrianople (modern Edirne on the Turkish-Greek border), where some Goths had already settled (echoed by modern migrants desire to get to Britain or Germany because they have relatives there). But Valens had already killed their relatives in the city. With some irony, as I write, the Turks are stopping astern migrants at Edirne from entering Greece.

On 9 August 378, Valens led Roman troops against the local Goths and lost, possibly burning to death in an agricultural worker’s hut as he fled the battlefield. Fritigern lived on for some time, and over time, the successful Goths were settled in Thrace and many of the young men joined the Roman army, helping Theodosius I win the Battle of the Frigidus on 8 September 394; by doing so, they showed the Western Imperial Army could be beaten, as the army of Valens had been.

Most of those who followed Alaric in the early fifth century were born within the empire and were therefore full Roman citizens. We have no evidence to say that any of those ‘Visigoths’ spoke a word of anything except Latin and Greek. They had been absorbed and transmitted their energy to the Romans.