Arranged in neat columns around the city wall was the most extraordinary sight: an army of 40,000 men, the equivalent of eight old Roman legions. The city had last been sacked by the Celts in 390 BC. Now, some eight hundred years later, a new force of soldiers thronged outside. The more senior commanders and noblemen wore helmets, body armour and short capes of wolfskin or sheepskin. Their swords would have been carefully engraved with herringbone patterns, sheathed in scabbards of wood or leather, and lined with fur. The ranks of Gothic soldiers had only the protection of their short tunics and trousers, and their armoury of shields, barbed javelins, bows and throwing axes.
The tall, graceful Athaulf felt vindicated. With his brother’s policy of reason utterly destroyed, he was in belligerent mood, urging on the ranks as they beat their weapons against their shields. The clatter that greeted Alaric as he left his tent to take command built to a crashing, unstoppable crescendo. Rome was utterly hamstrung, on its knees. Nearly two years earlier, Alaric had first raised the sword over the city’s neck. Now he let it fall. But when he gave the signal to attack, on 24 August 410, the proud, ambitious Alaric knew that he had failed.32
The city was easy to overpower. On the night of the assault somebody opened the Salarian Gate for the Goths. According to a later account, a noblewoman had taken the action out of a desperate desire to put the city out of its prolonged misery. More probably, whoever invited the Goths in had been bribed.33
Inside too there was little resistance: Rome had no army – only a small, ramshackle ceremonial guard. There is no detailed account of what happened over the next three days. What is clear is that in all the chaos there was a surprising level of order and restraint. This was not quite the uncivilized act of savagery by a barbarian horde one might have expected.
Alaric was not only a Christian, but a Christian who had been helped over the previous two years by bishops. Out of respect for them and his faith, the basilicas of St Peter’s and St Paul’s became places of sanctuary. With the exception of a massive silver Eucharist cup donated by Constantine, Christian treasures and the churches that housed them were respected and preserved.34 In contrast to the infamous Roman sacks of Carthage and Corinth in 146 BC, in which wholesale destruction, mass slaughter, enslavement and looting were the standard, the sack of Rome was very un-Roman indeed. Nonetheless, although Alaric and his Goths may have been Christians they were not saints. They had come to plunder, to exact revenge.
Perhaps guided by the slaves who had defected to Alaric, Gothic squads searched the streets for the houses of the rich. When they found them they put the sharp blade of an axe at their victims’ heads and demanded all their gold, silver and treasures. The pagan temples were looted for movable statues and precious objects, and the treasures from the Temple of Jerusalem, the victims of a Roman sack some 350 years earlier, were stolen once again. Some Romans escaped to the places of asylum, but the many who resisted or could not flee were killed, tortured or beaten up. The stories of defiant heroic women who resisted rape, or who were battered but mustered the courage to protect another (found in the writings of Orosius, Sozomen and Jerome), suggest that for widows, married women and virgins quite the opposite was true.35
On the third day the Gothic army, its efficient and horrific work complete, reassembled. Some grand houses and public buildings – notably the mansion of Sallust, the Basilica Aemilia and the old Senate House – were set on fire. With the thick black smoke of this last act rising above the Salarian Gate, the Goths abandoned the battlefield of their ‘victory’ over the Romans. The army was laden down with loot, but Alaric, with no homeland and no peace, came away empty-handed.
EPILOGUE
The after-shock of the disaster reverberated across the breadth of the Roman world. In Jerusalem St Jerome lamented how, ‘In one city the whole world perished’.36 Pagans and Christians alike used the destruction of the Eternal City to score points. For pagans the sack was proof that once the traditional gods had been rejected and had left the city, so too had its protection. To St Augustine in North Africa, however, the lesson to be learnt was quite different. He met eyewitnesses who had fled to that province to escape the Goths, and what he learnt from them confirmed only one thing: Rome had been on a slippery slope of moral decline ever since the sack of Carthage in 146 BC. Without the fear of that Mediterranean power to keep it in check, Rome had free reign to indulge in the selfish passions of greed and domination. Now, in the sack of Rome, that process had come to its logical, revolutionary conclusion. All human, earthly cities – even the new Christianized Rome of Constantine – were transitory and ephemeral, concluded St Augustine.37 Only the City of God in heaven was eternal and supreme. The natural order of the world, the ancient scheme of things, anchored in the city that had dominated the Mediterranean world for hundreds of years had gone topsy-turvy.
The Gothic invasion of Italy, its culmination in the sack of Rome, and the western emperor’s utter inability to find a solution to the crisis had dealt the western Roman empire a critical death blow. But it was not knocked out yet. Certainly the facts painted a bleak picture. The barbarian grouping of Vandals, Alans and Suevi still occupied territories in Spain; Constantine III still had his ambitions and controlled Britain, Gaul and the rest of Spain; and Alaric’s Gothic nation was still in Italy. Yet the Roman state in the west had by no means fallen.
Indeed, against the odds, the western Roman empire would be pieced back together again. The architect of this extraordinary resurgence was a brilliant general and politician who took on the dual role of magister militum forged by Stilicho; he was the commander-in-chief of Roman forces in the west and, overshadowing the weak emperor Honorius, effective ruler of the western empire. Indeed, Flavius Constantius, an utterly ruthless career soldier born in Naissus (modern-day Nis in Serbia), was one of the last great leaders of the Roman world, an individual in the mould of Julius Caesar, a man who, by the mere fact of his existence, could turn the course of history.
First, Constantius’s hands were significantly freed when the Goths eventually left Italy. After the failure to negotiate a peace with Honorius, Alaric planned to make a home for the Goths in North Africa. However, before this could occur, the man who had promised so much met an anticlimactic end. Seized by a violent fever, Alaric died in 410 perhaps without having reached even his fortieth birthday. He received a Gothic burial fit for a king: the Busento river in Cosenza (in modern-day Calabria) was diverted, and in the river bed was dug a grave. Once Alaric’s corpse had been laid to rest in it, the dam was broken and the waters rushed over his dead body. The Roman captives who had carried out the burial were afterwards executed to keep its precise location a secret for ever. Athaulf now succeeded his brother, abandoned the plan for North Africa and, plundering Italy along the way, moved the Goths to southern Gaul in 412. In the hopes of coming to an alliance with the western court, Athaulf had brought with him a bargaining chip. The Roman princess Galla Placidia was still a hostage of the Goths and would soon become Athaulf’s wife and mother of his son. Should Athaulf succeed in winning a place at the imperial court, that child would be a potential emperor in waiting.
With strategic room to manoeuvre, Flavius Constantius finally moved the Roman army in Italy against Constantine III and defeated him. The usurper was captured, executed and his head taken to Honorius at Ravenna. With the Roman armies of Britain, Gaul, Spain and Italy united once more, Constantius now had the military muscle to seek a permanent settlement with the Goths – but on his terms. In particular, Constantius refused to make Athaulf an equal partner in the Roman administration. For Athaulf this was a deal-breaker. His obstinacy proved very unpopular when Constantius applied force and tried to starve the Goths into an agreement by blockading them at Narbonne (southwestern France). The Goths eventually toppled their leader, and a moderate successor agreed terms with Constantius. In 418 Alaric’s dream of a homeland for his nation was realized. The Goths were finally settled in Aquitaine in the Garonne valley of southwest Gaul (modern-day Bordeaux). In keeping with the return of advantage to Rome, Galla Placidia was handed back to Honorius and married off, against her will, to Flavius Constantius. Her son by Athaulf having died prematurely, she would, in due course, bear her new husband two children.