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.

Roman Cities

Roman Cities

The Roman idea of a city is civilisation; the civilised person (cives, plural civites) lives in a city (civitas), a constructed place for a human to live in. Aristotle said that those who live outside the city are gods or monsters; Romulus allegedly offered his followers a deal: follow my laws and you will be protected by me and free of all previous obligations.

We think we know what a Roman city looks like: a grid of streets, with the cardo and decumanus crossing at the place where the temple and law court denote a central square. By that token, the one city which fails that is, of course Rome. It had grown up long before the idea of planning a town had reached Italy and around several cores.

Three groups, two of them incomers, had settled on the seven hills above the marsh. The incomers were the Rhames, a bunch of runaways and malcontents led by a small core group of young men who’d recently left the village of Alba Longa to prevent overpopulation; the second group was a contingent of Sabines looking to populate the coastal region. They both kept themselves to themselves away from those who’d settled there, the so-called ‘aborigines’. Where they had to work in common, the three groups voted by threes, tribus; that ablative plural became a noun, giving us ‘tribe’.

As Andrew Wallace-Hadrill has recently pointed out, few Romans lived in villas or even town houses which presented a blank face to the street, but which surrounded a beautiful atrium in the centre. The vast majority lived in an insula, a multi-storey block of flats, often hundreds of years old. There would be shops on the ground floor, including cook shops for those who had no ability to cook for themselves. The poor maintenance led to innumerable court cases and to several spectacular collapses. Don’t think of a modern western block, but more of the jerry-built blocks still being out up in places like Bangladesh and Nepal with poor building standards and backhanders to officials to turn a blind eye. Fourth century estimates cite up to 46,000 insulae and only 1790 houses. This must mean that, even though the city of Rome had a declining population, everyone who was not a senator or senior member of the imperial or city bureaucracy must have lived in one.

Remains of insulae from Ostia Antica, second century AD

Pliny the Younger brought a case to the attention of Trajan in Book 10 of his collected letters: the city of Nikapolis in Bithynia-Pontus had erected an arena as a showpiece for the city, hoping to raise its status in Asia Minor. But they had built it without foundations and it soon collapsed, prompting Pliny to ask Trajan to endorse an official investigation as to how this had happened.

The truth about the layout of cities and towns in the Roman era is that the central concept of a regular planned urban space was perhaps an ideal, but many cities already existed and had to be accommodated. Nevertheless, the ideal was that the city you were born in was your citizenship: they used the same word: civitas. We might call this a city-district, since it comprised an urban core in which a number of higher-function activities took place (justice, religion, politics) along with different types of industrial activity. Dirty and noxious industry was often moved to the outskirts, downstream from the places where people drew water to drink, cook and clean themselves and their clothes, and ideally down the prevailing wind from the city is foul-smelling (rendering animal fats and fulling cloth being good examples).

People who lived in dependent communities outside the city would come there in the spring to bring animals to sell, and again in early autumn with grain. The political control of the city would extended to their journey inbound and going home, with the laws and gods invoked to depend the honesty of the market. Mis-selling goods and short measure were forbidden and the safety of all was protected. While in the city, the area’s farmers would look for any additional farmhands in a hiring fair, hear the latest news and gossip, eye up potential spouses for their children, ask the elders to settle any local disputes and perform for the gods what they had promised in the event of good fortune.

Such things have happened in many sorts of cities all over the world from the earliest days and still do. Rome’s rising cities fulfilled the traditional function.

When Augustus rebuilt Rome and other cities, he filled in the democratic spaces some had made use of. At Rome, he built a memorialised quarter over the Field of Mars; the Campus Martius had been the mustering place for the citizen army each spring; many places had a March field. It was also the area where citizens went to vote, through stalls like those used for some horse races. Now Rome’s wars were elsewhere, the legions stationed for hundreds of years in provicial cities, and democracy was dead. So how better to obliterate that apace than by building over it.

In Athens, the historic agora, where citizens had voted, was filled up with temples transferred their from across Greece. The democratic space in Athens was killed, as in Rome, by religion.

Around each city was a dead zone. It was considered unhygienic in a hot climate to bury the dead within the urban area; the idea of burying the dead near a sacred place only arrives with Christianity, so the burial of early Christians are the Vatican (Mons Vaticanus) is possible because it was ‘trans Tiber’; to this day the area is called ‘Trastevere’; curiously, this was a place where vates, Gaulish priests, performed their rituals. Circling the zones of the living and dead at Rome was a sacred belt, the pomerium, where religious and legal restrictions were enforced. These included forbidding the use of arms within the urbs under Augustus’s’s law (lex julia de vi privata).

Rome was divided into a number of districts, each named for a notable feature such as a monumental fountain, a particular temple or a theatre. Modern cities often do this (Charing Cross, Unter den Linden, Temple Bar, Opéra, Tivoli Gardens, etc.).  We also know that different districts had different status levels; the Subura at Rome is described as a red light district, a working class district (not that Romans had class structures as we would understand the term)

Surviving structures from Rome’s Subura district

However, areas then as now changed over time and it should be noted that Julius Caesar was born in a house in this district. The district lies in a dip between the Viminal and Esquiline Hills at the north side of the city. Then as now, the higher the altitude, the higher the status; the imperial palace was on top of Palatine, one of Rome’s seven hills; the Italian royal palace was atop the Quirinal Hill; today the Italian President lives there.

Walls set boundaries and were obviously available for defence. Rome’s original wall dates back only to the fourth century BC, but was credited to Servius Tullius, Rome’s penultimate king. Clearly, this wall, which survives in places, was not extant when the Gauls seized Rome in c380BC, so the name may have been traditional, or maybe the plans for it were approved by Servius but it was never built.

A section of the Servian Wall, near to Rome’s railway station

The much larger Aurelian Wall, the one which survives today, is built completely outside the Servian Wall, and encloses an area some three times as large. This was built c270–5 for utterly changed political circumstances. Before that, the outer parts of the city must have been entirely extramural.

Aurelian Wall section near Via Veneto

The wall was improved by Maxentius by improvements to forts and again by Stilicho in AD401. This shows that it was in fine condition when Alaric’s Gothic Army turned up in AD410 and that they must have been invited in, as they could hardly have broken through.

It is well known that eventually Constantinople developed a triple ring of walls, which is why it survived till AD1453, when the cannon of Sultan Mehmet II, known as The Prophet and built for him by the Venetians, blew a hole in it.

However, walls could be decorative, and as such might be part of civic eurgetism by social competing citizens. Those of Le Mans in France (Cenomanum) are particularly pretty, with at least four rows of contrasting designs.

The third century AD walls of Le Mans, Maine, France

These are walls designed for display more than four defence. By contrast, the walls of Arverna (modern Clermont-Ferrand) were ruinous in the fifth century when they needed to be strong; they fell down through great age and the city’s bishop, the celebrated letter writer Sidonius Apollinaris, conducted Christian rogations, beating the bounds of the city in a hope that magical thinking would stop the forces of King Euric from seizing it.

Le Vasso Galate, a surviving section of the imperial city wall of Arverna (Clermont-Ferrand)

It the later parts of the empire, cities everywhere shrank and became less multi-functional.

It would be useful to consider the link between cities and early Christianity. In every town where there was a Roman presence, there was a priest; in every city with a governor, a bishop; in cities which were seats of vicarii, there was a metropolitan, what we’d call an archbishop. In imperial capitals and cities of high standing, there were senior metropolitans with overarching authority; some were termed patriarchs, great fathers, a term used civicly for men of high authority just below the emperor: Stilicho, Aetius and Theodoric held such a title. Thus it can be seen that the Christians shadowed the urban authority of the empire. Once legal, the network of clergy stepped forward. Constantine allowed bishops to run their own law courts in parallel with the civic ones. In the late empire, towns generally survived if the bishop stayed; if he left, the city was eventually abandoned, such was his network of patronage. There were no rural clergy at that time, so Christianity was professed as an urban religion and those who had no priest to instruct them were termed pagani – country people.

We discussed before the straight Roman streets of many cities; these remained while there was a city authority of decurions to prosecute anyone who impinged his shop or house onto the public highway. In the earlier empire and before, local nobles had wanted to be on the city council. Latterly, however, they had to be compelled. The praetorian prefect and governor set the tax expectations of the emperor as a precept and it was the job of the decurions to collect it; they therefore were loaned the money by a tax farmer, who then forced locals to pay, skimming off the surplus collected.

In the countryside taxes were harder to collect and there were no Christian clergy to demand a tithe and attendance at church. The fact that being outside the walls with the gods and monsters and at risk of seizures by brigands (Bacaudae) did not stop removal from the city to a country retreat suggests that there was an impetus to leave the city.

The fifth century comic play Querolus (the Complainer) refers to a man fed up with paying taxes is offered a chance to join the ‘free men of the Loire’ who live under the trees and pay no taxes. He refuses because he is civilised.

Research on the city of Antioch shows that the straight, Romanised streets were becoming deviated in the 300s AD, centuries before the Islamic conquest of Syria in the 630s. Shop owners had built out into the city streets, possibly with shaded awnings, narrowing the road and making it crooked.

In Britain, there was a forced removal of skilled artisans after the regime of Carausius and Allectus was defeated. A Latin panegyric poem to Constantius Chlorus from the people of Autun (Augustodunum) in Gaul refers to such people being transported to repair Autun because they were so numerous in Britain. It should be recalled that by the time of St Wilfrid the Anglo-Saxons had to import glass-makers from the kingdom of the Franks because nobody in Britain knew how to make glass. Archaeologists tell us that for a while watermills, a common sight in the Roman world ceased to exist in Britain.

There are curious burials associated with urban buildings at Wroxeter, Shropshire (Viroconium), where high-status buildings were turned into forges and city houses were partly demolished to be turned into cattle pens. However, a change in function need not be read as a social collapse; today we find people living in oast houses, old windmills, maltings, converted stables and barns, even old factories and warehouses, as in the US, and we don’t consider any of that to be a sign of social collapse; if anything some may think it cool.

Climate change in Britain may have exacerbated many other problems. We read in Gildas about severe famines, which would have hastened departures from cities. A typical small town like Ixworth, Suffolk (Sitomagus) may have suffered from earthquakes; in the 19^th century the town underwent severe quakes, and people may  have left the Roman town of Sitomagus for similar reasons. It is quite clear across Britain that there were no resources to repair dilapidated buildings, that urban life with its high taxes, controlled labour, nosy clergy and the possibility of being transported to Gaul on a whim would not have been attractive to building workers. The rise of rural villa life in Britain in the fourth century, something that is well attested, may have been a way for pagans and discontented people to supply skilled labour to others who had opted out of the Roman system.

In some places, cities retreated back into their cores, with a barrier built across exit roads. Populations shrank away, but as long as the priest stayed there and the ruler at least went there to administer ritual and justice, the community might survive. The Anglo Saxon Chronicle records kings with British names losing the Battle of Dyrham in AD577; their kingdoms were the towns of Gloucester, Cirencester and Bath, which suggests highly local rule, based solely on a town.