This chapter will focus on one of those critically decisive moments: the sack of Rome in August 410. It will tell the story of how the greatest city of the ancient world, the city-state that ruled a massive empire for over seven hundred years, fell to barbarians and was ritually sacked. The destruction of the ancient city is an enlightening, pivotal moment because the forces that brought about the sack epitomize the shock waves that shattered the western Roman empire between 376 and 476. Perhaps the greatest of these forces was the motivation of the barbarians. Their invasions came down to a single belief – that the Roman empire was an El Dorado that offered a chance for a better life. They came not to destroy Rome, but to become part of it. However, in trying to win acceptance within the empire, to win peace terms and a slice of that prosperity, destroying the empire is exactly what would happen.
The man who led the sack of Rome was a Goth by the name of Alaric. Almost everything about him and his vast number of followers subverted the Roman concept of a ‘barbarian’. He was no mindless, irrational thug, but a Christian and a man of his word. His troops were no hot-headed, marauding horde, but an organized and efficient army. They besieged Rome not for immediate, smash-and-grab looting of gold and treasure, but with foresight, with a view to executing a long-term plan. In short, Alaric the Goth, the barbarian, the sacker of Rome, was much more of a Roman. Extraordinarily, he had fought and trained in the Roman army and showed a strategic thinking and determined, calculating mind that resembled not barbaric invaders but the greatest Roman generals – a Caesar or an Augustus, a Vespasian or a Constantine. In one respect, though, he was very un-Roman. The sack of a foreign city would not, for him, rate as a success or victory, but as a complete and utter failure.
This is the story of how ambition, betrayal and internecine conflict felled the greatest city of the ancient world. The same themes on which Romulus had founded Rome some 1200 years earlier would come back to haunt the city once again at the very moment of its destruction.
BREACHING THE EMPIRE
AD 376. The Roman empire had for over a decade been unofficially divided into two halves. The emperor Valens ruled in the east from Constantinople, and the emperor Gratian ruled from the imperial capital of Milan. In that year, however, Valens was not to be found in his eastern seat of government. He was closer to the frontier of the Roman east, in Antioch, trying to put out a fire: King Shapur, the leader of a resurgent Persian empire, was threatening the eastern Roman border. Valens was channelling all the resources he could to face the threat. Huge numbers of the eastern army at his disposal were being deployed, and to feed them, Valens was taking a bigger cut of the agricultural tax. In the mid-fourth century the economy and manpower of the Roman empire were robust enough to sustain such demands. What the empire was not prepared for, however, was a dramatic chain of events taking place on its border in the northeast. On the river Danube, at some point between modern Bulgaria and Romania, the Roman empire was about to witness the greatest refugee crisis of the ancient world. It would also find itself fatally exposed.
Facing the rushing expanse of the Danube, perhaps as many as 200,000 Goths had gathered on Rome’s northern frontier. They were not an invading army, but a nation of Gothic families – men, women and children seeking asylum en masse. They had come in their wagons, with their livestock, ploughs and whatever possessions they could carry – chairs, hides, wheelmade pottery, silver drinking vessels and utensils of bronze and iron. On reaching the border, they had camped out on the northern bank of the broad river, and their leadership had sent an envoy humbly asking permission from the emperor Valens to cross the frontier and live in his dominions.2 They had come because they had been forced to: life outside the empire’s northern borders had become too dangerous. They had been hounded out of their lands along the northwestern shores of the Black Sea and south of the Carpathian mountains (see map, page 373). These were lands that they had occupied because it was here they could settle, establish their farms and benefit from the economies of the client-states of Rome – the communities in the regions bordering the Roman empire who traded with the Romans. However, in the year 376 the wealth of the lands the Goths had adopted had come under the envious eyes of others who wanted a slice of the action.
The people who had set the crisis on the Danube in motion, the people who were ‘the seed-bed and origin’ of the crisis, were the Huns. The best Roman historian of this period, Ammianus Marcellinus, describes them as abnormally ‘savage’, possessors of ‘squat bodies, strong limbs and thick necks’, a people ‘so prodigiously ugly and bent that they might be two-legged animals’.3 A less partisan, more modern view, however, reveals that they were a nomadic people, expert in the use of the bow, who came from the Eurasian steppes. This was territory that stretched from Mongolia to the eastern margins of Europe. The poor quality of the land and the unfriendly weather conditions there dictated the people’s roaming way of life. Perhaps spying the wealth of the Black Sea region, the Huns had moved west, causing havoc by raiding and destabilizing Gothic territories en route. This was the ‘big bang’ moment – the moment that forced the Goths off their lands and on to the Roman empire’s frontiers.
In approaching Rome, however, the Goths, a nation of farmers, were taking a huge gamble. Seeking asylum was a decision they had pondered for a long time. It was true that the Roman empire represented a stable, developed economy, that life within its frontiers offered the chance for a better, more protected future than life outside. That old life was now overshadowed by the constant threat of assault from the Huns. Yet at the same time, in crossing the frontier they were putting their entire nation at the mercy of Rome; they were exposing themselves to a new potential threat – that of slavery or death. The Gothic leaders had eventually made up their minds: life under Rome would be the lesser of two evils. Cautiously they sent their request to Emperor Valens. Little did they know that they were not the only ones to handle the crisis tentatively.
In the east Valens should have been delighted by the news of the Goths’ arrivaclass="underline" they represented the prospect of raw recruits for the Roman army. Indeed, by filling the ranks with them, said the flatterers in Valens’s court, the empire would stand to make more money from the provinces. In place of the usual levy of troops, the eastern Roman court could ask the provinces to contribute gold instead. The truth, though, was very different. Valens and his advisers were more probably thrown into a complete panic over the situation on the Danube. With the bulk of the Roman army on the eastern frontier, the troops in the west were spread very thinly along its northern borders. The shortage of soldiers meant that far from being in control of the situation, the Romans were in no position whatsoever to police the refugee crisis. Nonetheless, Valens gave permission for one of the Gothic tribes to cross the Danube. Transported in Roman ships day and night, the Tervingi tribe was ferried across the dangerous rapids of the river, and poured over the frontier like ‘lava from mount Etna’. Meanwhile, the Roman forces available patrolled the river, keeping out the Greuthungi tribe. To those who made it over the border, however, it would quickly become apparent just how unprepared the Romans were for their arrival.4