Despite Roman attempts to treat the Goths fairly and equally, the Goths suspected that their improved status in Roman eyes was only a temporary measure. Indeed, they believed that the Romans were secretly looking for any excuse to undo the peace agreement. Their suspicions centred on the one clause in the treaty that made the peace so uneasy: should the emperor call upon them, significant parts of the Gothic army were required for service in the Roman army. Might the Romans use this to weaken the barbarian allies? In the minds of many Goths those suspicions were about to be resoundingly confirmed.
In early September 394, by the river Frigidus in modern-day Slovenia, Theodosius I had amassed a huge Roman army. The ranks of soldiers were lined up to face the rebellious forces of Eugenius, a usurper of the western empire. Before attacking, Theodosius placed the Gothic contingent, several thousand men strong, in the vanguard of the assault. When battle was joined, the Goths inevitably suffered the worst of the casualties on a calamitous first day of fighting. Although Theodosius eventually won the battle, for the Goths it was an overwhelmingly pyrrhic victory: approximately 3000 of their men are understood to have died. What further proof was needed, the Goths asked themselves, of the plain truth that the Romans considered them nothing but expendable, second-rate citizens?
One of the Gothic leaders who voiced the widespread discontent had been a mere boy when the Goths first crossed the Danube in 376. In 394, at the battle of Frigidus, he was the young general in charge of the Gothic allies fighting alongside the Romans. In the following year, when Theodosius I died, he was appointed leader of the united Tervingi and Greuthungi tribes. His name was Alaric and his message was clear. The Goths would avenge their catastrophic losses at Frigidus; they would fight until the treaty of 382 was rewritten; they would fight for a better, more secure future.
The very same force that was once at the service of Rome and that had secured the key Roman victories at the end of the fourth century, was now about to be turned against it. But there was one man who would stand in Alaric’s way. He was a Roman general who had also fought at the battle of Frigidus – as Alaric’s colleague. Intriguingly, however, Flavius Stilicho would become not only Alaric’s great nemesis, but also his lifeline and ultimately his ally.
ALLIANCE OF ENEMIES
Before he died at the start of the year 395, the emperor Theodosius I wanted to establish a new imperial dynasty. He made his two sons, Arcadius and Honorius, emperors of the east and west. However, Arcadius, the ruler of the east, was only seventeen years old, while Honorius, the emperor of the west, was just ten. The man Theodosius turned to on his deathbed and asked to act as the boys’ guardian was his most successful and distinguished general – Flavius Stilicho. Stilicho, however, was not a typical Roman.
While his mother was Roman, his father, a cavalry general, was a Vandal. The Vandals were a Germanic people who possibly came from the Przeworska culture located in modern-day Poland. Through his extraordinary achievements on the battlefield under Theodosius, Stilicho had risen to the highest ranks of Roman politics, had become the emperor’s chief adviser and had married his niece. His official title was magister militum – commander-in-chief of the Roman army. At the end of the fourth century the people who had risen to the top of the army were also the top politicians of the day and the most influential figures in the imperial court. So when Theodosius died, Flavius Stilicho, a soldier of Vandal origin, became the most powerful man in the entire Roman world. In both east and west, he was the empire’s effective ruler.
Although we don’t know much about his character, one incident suggests that he was a man of considerable tenacity and ambition. While his regency over Honorius, the emperor in the west, was accepted, Stilicho claimed that he was also regent to Arcadius in the east. We have only Stilicho’s word that this was Theodosius’s dying wish because he alone was present at the old emperor’s deathbed.8 It is possible that Stilicho made it up in order to maintain the unity of the empire that Theodosius had brilliantly but briefly resurrected. If that was Stilicho’s ambition, it was short-lived. As soon as Arcadius was settled in Constantinople, the imperial court officials in the east refused to be ousted by a mere Vandal in the west, and intrigued for control of the young man. Stilicho was forced to shelve his ambitions in the east and to focus, for the time being, on guiding Honorius and governing the west. Within a few years of his charge’s accession, he married Honorius to his own daughter. Over the next thirteen years Stilicho would become like a father to the young emperor. Indeed, the young man on the throne was going to need Stilicho’s firm grip to retain it. The rumble of war was building once again to a crescendo. Alaric had begun his rebellion.
Under Alaric’s leadership, the Goths first set their sights on forcing the eastern empire into a new deal. To help encourage Arcadius’s court to come to the negotiating table, Alaric decided to apply some pressure. Departing from their base in Bulgaria, the Goths ransacked their way through the Balkans, into Greece and along the Adriatic coast. The display of violence paid off and a deal was soon forthcoming, but it did not last. When the conciliatory court official responsible for brokering the deal with Alaric was toppled by more hawkish colleagues, the agreement was torn up. Reaching a dead end, Alaric decided to exploit the division in the Roman empire, to play one side off against the other. He turned the full firepower of his army on the west, and in 402 invaded Italy. Perhaps, thought Alaric, force would prove more fruitful there.
Alaric’s demand was simple: long-term legal recognition for his people. This he wanted to achieve in two ways. The first step was his appointment to magister militum because he hoped that this high-ranking military position would help him make the Gothic allies legitimate and equal partners in the Roman army. The second step was a food subsidy. He wanted Stilicho, his former comrade in arms, to grant the Goths part of the agricultural produce from the region they had settled. It was to be levied as a tax dedicated to the Goths. Stilicho, however, had other ideas. He was not about to give in to these demands; he was not prepared to stake his entire political career on a peace with the Goths just because they were prepared to put a knife to the western empire’s throat. It was not a political gamble he wanted to take.
As a result, the armies of Stilicho and Alaric clashed on two occasions, but in both battles there was no decisive outcome. Negotiations by war seemed to have reached stalemate. Cut off from his food supplies and with no victories to his name, Alaric was forced to make a weary, miserable retreat from northern Italy back to the Goths’ base south of the Danube in modern-day Bulgaria. His policy to get a better deal from Rome seemed to be going nowhere fast. He could not then have imagined how, within a few years’ time, all that would change. In 406 Stilicho was prepared to make a pact with the devil.
Stilicho sent his negotiator, Jovius, to Alaric: the regent ruler of the west had a message for him. It revealed that, far from thinking the Goths were a thorn in his side, Stilicho now saw them as the key to fulfilling his plans. He wanted to kill three birds with one stone. First, he wanted to grant the Goths the legal rights to the land they occupied. If he did this, he would achieve his second aim, which was to use the Gothic army to secure the northeastern Roman frontier from further invasion. However, there was a problem. The lands where Alaric and the Goths were settled – Dacia and Macedonia (east Illyricum) – belonged not to the western empire, but to the eastern half. If Stilicho were able to remove that province from the eastern imperial court through a display of military muscle, he would gain a third advantage – an excellent and much-needed recruiting ground for soldiers for the western army. And so, on behalf of Stilicho, Jovius proposed the following: in exchange for granting Alaric’s demands, the Goths would join forces with Stilicho and together they would march on the eastern empire. Alaric agreed.9 But just when peace between Romans and Goths was at last in sight, all prospect of it was hopelessly shattered.