173- The Broken Bow

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Hello, and welcome to the history of Rome.

Episode 173, The Broken Bow.

After laying waste to Aquileia in the spring of 452, Attila and the Huns moved west across northern Italy, sacking every settlement they passed along the way.

Though the imperial capital had moved to Ravenna forty years earlier, the city of Milan remained the richest, largest, and most powerful city in the region, and that's exactly where Attila was headed.

Aetius and what forces he was able to muster gamely tried to harass, hinder, and trip up the Hun advance, but there was only so much they could do.

Though they made Attila's life difficult, and in time the constant harassment would wear the Huns down, but it was not enough to stop the Huns from reaching Milan.

The former capital's defenses were impressive, but once again insufficient to hold off Attila.

The only feather in the city's cap was that it held out long enough for the siege to become called a protracted siege.

But in due time, the Huns once again prevailed, and Milan was sacked.

Down in Rome, a Valentinian and his exiled court could do little more than tremble tremble behind the Aurelian walls.

It was clear that no army or wall was going to stop Attila's inevitable march on Rome.

So maybe it was time for some good old fashioned high diplomacy.

It was worth a shot.

It's not like they had anything to lose.

So a deputation of a few distinguished senators was sent north, famously led by the Bishop of Rome, Leo I.

The diplomatic mission travelled north, crossed the the Po River, and located the Hun camp.

What happened next is the stuff of legend.

Attila met with Leo, heard what he had to say, and then, amazing, wondrous, miracle of miracles, decided to withdraw from Italy.

This immediately became a watershed moment in the history of the Catholic Church, and a key step in the process that saw the popes emerge as dominant political figures in the post-imperial West.

Now, this is not to take anything away from Leo, or to ignore the guts it must have taken to walk up to Attila unarmed and ask him to please leave Italy, but it was going to take a lot more than the request of a single priest to move Attila.

So, what was it?

The Huns had just run roughshod over all of northern Italy.

Nothing could stop them, so why were they pulling back?

If it wasn't the personal diplomacy of Leo, then what was it?

A few things immediately come to the surface.

First of all, Leo's words were almost certainly backed with a large quantity of gold, which will get anyone interested in listening to what you have to say.

Second, as had been the case with the campaign in Gaul, Attila was having trouble feeding his army.

The Huns did not have the kind of supply network the Romans enjoyed, and instead lived off the land as they moved from place to place.

But in 452, Italy was suffering from a famine.

There was just very little food to be had.

Third, the Huns were victims of their own success.

Sacking city after city had left them laden with treasure and far less mobile than they had been at the beginning of the year.

In other words, they needed to go home and make a deposit.

Fourth, according to reports, the new Eastern Emperor Marcian was taking advantage of Attila's absence and launching raids north of the Danube.

So just as the campaign in Italy was starting to bog down, reports started coming into the Huns that their families were under attack.

And that's not something that you can just ignore.

Fifth, and this one was probably the decisive factor, disease had begun to sweep through the Hun camps.

The old historians describe it as a divinely ordered blight to punish Attila for his transgressions, but whatever it was, it was quickly thinning the Hun ranks.

You add all this up, and you get a Hun king ready to consolidate his gains and mitigate his losses.

So before winter set in, Attila withdrew back to his homeland north of the Danube River.

He would never return to the west.

In early 453, Attila had already decided that as soon as spring arrived, he was going to turn his attention back to the East.

While the Huns had been occupied in the West, Constantinople had decided to make another play at cutting off the indemnity payment.

That, coupled with Martian's attacks during 452,

equaled a guaranteed Hun invasion of the East in 453.

Maybe this time they could crack those Theodotian walls.

But Attila would never get the chance.

Marcian was himself preparing for the inevitable confrontation with Attila, when, according to legend, he dreamed that he saw Attila's bow broken at his feet.

Less than a week later, messengers arrived with the stunning news.

Attila the Hun was dead.

There is absolutely no reliable account of his death, but two standard versions exist.

The first is offered by the contemporaneous Greek historian Priscus, who reports that Attila got blind drunk while celebrating his latest marriage and then choked to death in his sleep.

The other, more scandalous account, is that he was actually murdered by his new bride on their wedding night.

An even more scandalous account is that Attila was assassinated at the order of Martian, who obviously wanted no part of facing Attila in the field.

However, he died, Attila the Hun, the so-called scourge of God, was dead, and the Roman world slept a little easier.

With the sword of Damocles no longer hanging directly over their heads, the imperial courts of East and West were able to step out into the light, survey the damage Attila had wrought, and maybe entertain the idea of of planning for the future again rather than simply trying to react to the present.

But though no one could have known it, Attila's would not be the only momentous death to hit the Empire in the early 450s.

In just a few short years, the men and women who had led Rome for the last generation would all be gone, replaced by a new slate of leaders, who, for better or for worse, would lead Rome for the next generation.

Now, I I already accidentally blew by the first momentous death of the early 450s, because I got a little too caught up in Attila's invasion of Gaul.

But in October of 450, just a few months after arranging the fateful marriage between her daughter Honoria and boring old senator Herculanus, the great matron of the West, Galla Placidia, died.

Given how long she was a central figure in Western politics, I mean, she first rose to prominence back when she was kidnapped by Alaric during the first sack of Rome, which was what, like 40 years ago?

It is kind of shocking to think that Placidia was just 58 years old when she died.

Not a young woman by any means, but certainly not some ancient relic.

She had been the wife of a Gothic king and given birth to a boy who might have led the Goths and Romans into becoming a single people.

She was the daughter of an emperor, the brother of an emperor, the wife of an emperor, and the mother of an emperor.

Intelligent and self-confident, she herself has served as regent of the West for some fourteen years.

And though the ascension of her rival Aetius had curtailed some of her influence, Galla Placidia remained a towering figure until the moment of her death in late 450.

A remarkable woman, to be sure.

Three years later, the next great imperial death hit, as Placidia's counterpart in the East, Elia Pulcheria, died at the age of 55.

When you get right down to it, these two women, Placidia and Pulcheria, perhaps define the first half of the fifth century better than any emperor, king, or general.

Pulcheria, daughter, sister, and wife of successive emperors, had strode boldly onto the stage of world history at the tender age of 14, asserting her authority over the Eastern Empire, challenging and then besting God knows how many ministers and generals who were getting ready to have their way with the underaged Theodosius II.

Though we didn't get too much into it, as an utterly devout Orthodox Christian, Pulcheria was responsible for building up entire quarters of Constantinople dedicated to housing and servicing the poor.

though her religious devotion also led her to promote far less laudatory persecutions of pagans and Jews.

For forty years, Bulcheria stood at the center of the imperial court of Constantinople, acting as a rock of continuity as the ministers and generals of the East came and went.

And in her last great act, she stepped into the power vacuum that opened when her brother died in 450, keeping the East from slipping into civil war.

A book detailing the parallel lives and times of Galla Placidia and Elia Pulcheria would make for great reading, if anyone feels like knocking one out for us.

The deaths of Placidia and Pulcheria were acutely felt, but the bony finger of death was just getting warmed up.

As I mentioned two episodes back, the question of who was going to marry Valentinian III's youngest daughter was fast becoming a hot topic in the court of the West.

The rising officer Majorian had been put forward, but as you'll recall, Aetius had stepped in and exiled Majorian before the young man's nomination could get off the ground.

Clearly, Aetius wanted no one to stand in the way of his own son, Gaudentius, and it appears that in 453 the general got his way.

Valentinian agreed to an engagement between Gaudentius and Placidia the younger.

But though the engagement put Aetius tantalizingly close to becoming patriarch of the next imperial dynasty, it also likely sowed the seeds of his own destruction.

Valentinian had spent his entire life under the thumb of the powerful Aetius, and the betrothal of his daughter to the general son very likely put a simple thought into Valentinian's head.

I wonder how long it will be before Aetius kills me and declares his own son emperor.

Will it be on the night of the wedding itself, or will he wait a few days?

And if Valentinia didn't actually come up with this thought himself, two members of the Imperial Court almost certainly conspired to put it there the Imperial Chamberlain Heraclius and the wealthy senator Petronius Maximus.

Now, as Imperial Chamberlain, Heraclius needed no specific motivation.

Imperial Chamberlains are apparently a uniformly sneaky and conspiratorial lot.

But Maximus is a different story.

A longtime Aetian loyalist, he apparently turned on his patron as a part of a larger project to take revenge on Valentinian.

Revenge he knew would be impossible as long as Aetius stood in his way.

According to a convoluted story related by 7th century historian John of Antioch, Valentinian had won one of Maximus' family rings in a bed, then used that ring to lure Maximus' wife to court, and then proceeded to rape her.

And this is not a pretty story, but it is also one that may have been invented later to give a more emotional explanation for Maximus' actions.

Throughout 454, Heraclius and Maximus worked steadily to erode Valentinian's faith in Aetius and replace that faith with intense fear and distrust.

Once they had the now 34-year-old emperor on the hook, they began broaching more intense subjects.

Aetius is a threat to you, became shouldn't you get rid of Aetius?

Became shouldn't someone kill Aetius?

Became finally, shouldn't you kill Aetius?

Now there is no way to know whether Valentinian's fear of Aetius was legitimate.

That is, whether Aetius would have actively conspired to murder the emperor and elevate his son to the throne, or whether he would have been content to just let nature take its course.

But given Aetius' history of ambitious backstabbing, Valentinian's fears were, I think, at least justified.

This all led up to one of the most dramatic assassinations in Roman history.

In September of 454, Aetius was in Ravenna, briefing the emperor and his ministers on the state of the army's finances, when,

after the general turned his back for a moment, the emperor himself pulled out a dagger and stabbed Aetius to death.

Valentinian obviously felt that killing the general was necessary, and that this was the only way to get to him.

But still,

usually emperors enlist underlings to assassinate their enemies, rather than the other way around.

Aetius was fifty eight years old, and had more or less held the Western Empire together for twenty one years.

Shortly after the murder, Valentinian was confronted by the bishop Apollinaris, who allegedly said, I am ignorant, sir, of your motives.

I only know that you have acted like a man who cut off his right hand with his left.

Which just about sums it up.

Aetius may have been treacherous and ambitious, but he was a damned effective general and administrator.

Killing him may have been an act of preemptive self defense, but it certainly didn't do anything to help the disintegrating Western Empire.

And ultimately it didn't do anything to save Valentinian either, because it's not like Aetius didn't have allies who would happily avenge their patron if given the chance.

They would be given the chance less than a year later when it turned out that the conspiratorial marriage between Heraclius and Maximus was a marriage of convenience.

They were not allies, so much as enemies of the same man, and now that that man lay dead, they divorced almost immediately.

Maximus was expecting to succeed Aetius to the position of Commander-in-Chief of the Western Legions.

He may have had a deal with Heraclius to that effect, but it's also possible that he was just making assumptions, and we all know how rotten assumptions can be.

In the immediate aftermath of Aetius' death, Maximus attempted to step into the dead general's boots, but he found himself blocked by, that's right, Heraclius, who feared a loss of influence if his co-conspirator Maximus was able to grab that much power.

So he whispered in Valentinian's ear and killed Maximus' shot at the job, which, as you can imagine, ticked Maximus off something fierce.

Here he had gone to all this trouble to get Aetius killed, and he wasn't even going to reap any kind of reward.

So, murderous conspirator that he was, Maximus began to murderously conspire with some of Aetius' old confederates to murder the emperor.

And this is when the rape story begins to ring a bit hollow.

When discussing Aetius' murder, John says that the whole thing was about Maximus avenging his wife.

But when it comes time for him to kill the rapist emperor, John merely talks about Maximus' bitterness over having been passed over for promotion.

And that just seems like a really weird disconnect.

Anyway, keeping his own role in Aetius' death a secret, Maximus enlisted two Hunnic bodyguards who had served the late general loyally for years.

While visiting Rome in March of 455, Valentinian, accompanied by Heraclius, decided to go out riding and maybe practice some archery.

So out went the imperial entourage, which naturally included the two Hun bodyguards.

As soon as Valentinian dismounted from his horse, the two bodyguards charged forward, one targeting Valentinian, and the other targeting Heraclius.

Both were stabbed to death.

Valentinian was thirty five years old, and having ascended to the throne at the age of six, he had technically been Emperor of the West for twenty nine years, though for most of that time, real power lay first with Galloplacidia, and then with Flavius Aetius.

as had been the case in the East just a few years before, the death of the heirless Valentinian III left a gaping hole in the political hierarchy that the Western Empire had not dealt with in more than half a century, going all the way back to the civil wars that had followed the death of Valentinian II in 392.

Remember that?

Yeah, that was a long time ago.

Petronius Maximus was no dummy, though, and he had timed the assassination to take place in Rome while he was there, so that he could be Johnny on the spot.

Because remember, this time there was no imperial sister around to marry some stooge and make him emperor.

The wayward Honoria had been exiled shortly after her wedding proposal to Attila, and then she simply disappears from the historical record.

Maximus, banking on the ironclad law that fortune favored the bold, and the fact that he was the only one even remotely prepared for the death of Valentinian, since he, you know, planned it, was the first one to step forward and declare his willingness to rule the Western Empire.

But though he was the first, much to Maximus's great annoyance, he was not the only one to step forward.

A now wealthy former bodyguard of Aetius's named Maximianus was backed by the old Aetian faction of the imperial court, while the soon-to-be emperor Majorian, who had returned to favor after the death of Aetius, was being backed by the army.

Petronius Maximus had the support of the Senate, though, and with it the support of the Senate's wealth.

He lavishly distributed bribes throughout the upper reaches of the imperial bureaucracy, and in short order found them spontaneously backing his claim to power.

And so Maximus became emperor of the Western Empire.

To legitimize his claim, he quickly married the Emperor's widow, Eleodoxia, which, as I noted when Aetius married Bonifacius' widow, must have been pretty gross for her.

The death of Valentinian III marks the end of an era in Roman history, and it's a pretty big era at that

the end of imperial dynasties, at least in the West.

For 500 years, we've had the Julio-Claudians, and then the Flavians, and then the Antonines, and then the Severans, and then, well, everything went to hell for a little bit, but eventually we got to the Constantinians, and then the Valentinians, and then the Theodosians.

But with the death of Valentinian III, all we're left with now is a random grab bag called the final emperors of the Western Empire.

Weak, disjointed, increasingly powerless, a list of names without real authority or even a real empire to rule that finally winks out of existence at Romulus Augustalus, whose name brings us full circle back to the founder of the Empire and to the founder of Rome itself.

Though the exile of the puppet boy emperor was considered an unremarkable afterthought at the time, it soon began to designate the official fall of the Roman Empire in the popular imagination.

This designation is, of course, arbitrary and forced.

In many ways, the Roman Empire died when Maximinus Thrax overthrew Alexander Severus.

In many ways, it died when Diocletian reformed its structure, and then again when Constantine replaced its religion.

Then again, in many ways it would not really die until the passing of Justinian, the last of the Latin emperors, and the man who nearly bankrupted the East trying to reclaim the West.

In many ways, it would not die until the Turks blasted a hole in the side of the Theodosian walls in 1453.

And then there's Philip K.

Dick.

He said that the Empire never ended.

But these two are all artificially imposed divisions, invented by historians to help keep the past manageable.

Because without those artificially imposed divisions, every book, every class, and every podcast would have to be called the history of the world, 4.5 billion BC to the present.

After all, it really is just the one long narrative, drifting seamlessly from one briefly held form to the next.

Which brings me to what I now need to say.

The history of Rome will be ending with the exile of Romulus Augustus, last emperor of the Western Roman Empire.

I know that is not what many of you want to hear, and in many ways it is not what I want to be telling you, but it is what is going to happen.

The time is right for me to let it end.

To let it end while it is still good and strong, rather than dragging it out until it dies in some obscure corner of the internet, long since abandoned by everyone who once loved it, because it has degenerated into an endless string of weddings and births and contrived romances, like the crappy 14th season of some sitcom you can't believe is still on the air.

I would like to be better than that.

But more importantly, the time is right because in about two months, I don't think I'm going to have the time or the energy to make the show as good as I expect it to be.

You see, Mrs.

The History of Rome is seven months pregnant with our first child.

And by all accounts, babies pretty much change the whole equation.

Sometimes I'll get emails from people that read like, How do you find the time to produce the podcast?

You must not have kids,

which has been true, and is still true right now, but won't be very, very soon.

That the pacing seems poised to land the show on 476 AD just at the moment when my son is going to be born, seems too auspicious a portent to ignore.

So, I'm not going to ignore it.

We're at 455 AD right now, so we have about 20 years left.

It's an action-packed 20 years, so it's not like I'm signing off tomorrow.

But the life of the history of Rome can now be measured in weeks.

I'm not sure exactly how long it will take to get from here to there, because things always seem to pop up that I want to talk about, but I would reckon that the number of episodes left is now in the single digits.

Which is a crazy thing to think about.

The history of Rome has been my life day in and day out for almost five years now.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do when it's over.

Oh, wait, that's right.

I'm going to have a baby to take care of.

I'll thank you all again when the time comes, but I would like to thank you now too, because I really can't thank you enough.

Thank you for letting me do the history of Rome.

Okay,

next week, just to really drive home the depressing point that this is all coming to an end, Rome is going to get sacked again.

The aftermath of Valentinian's assassination is going to be a very confusing time for the Western Empire.

And attempting to consolidate power, Petronius Maximus is going to piss the Vandals off something fierce, leading them to sack Rome in August of 455.

Which, just for the record, is yet another arbitrary point some historians use to designate the official fall of the Roman Empire.

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