169- Huns and Vandals and Goths, Oh My

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Hello, and welcome to the history of Rome.

Episode 169,

Huns and Vandals and Goths, oh my.

As you know, the Huns have been playing a major role in Roman politics for the last 50 years at least.

Arriving on the Hungarian plain back in the 370s, the Huns sparked a multi generational migration of the former native tribes of the region into Roman territory, which led to, among other things, the Battle of Adrianople, the mass invasion of four oh six, the sack of Rome, and now the Vandal takeover of North Africa.

This is to say nothing of the endless revolts, civil wars, and assassinations all this demographic unrest had forced the Romans to deal with within their own ranks.

But for for the most part, the Hun impact on the Roman world had thus far been indirect.

Aside from the brief abortive thrusts of Olden in the early 400s, the Huns had basically stayed on the north side of the Danube River.

Their arrival in the west was an epoch-defining event for the Romans, sure, but mostly in a domino-toppling sort of way, rather than a I'm punching you directly in the face sort of way.

But that was all about to change.

New leaders were about to take over the Huns, and new leadership meant new policies, and new policies meant new headaches for the Roman Empire.

Headaches caused by repeated Hun punches to the face.

When Olden died in 412, you'll recall that his coalition split into three major factions.

Each pursued its own course and was led by its own leaders for the next decade or so, but by the the mid-420s they began recoalescing around a pair of brother kings, who I introduced briefly last week, Oktar and Rua.

This recentralization of Hun power naturally led the brothers to think up ways to use their new strength to their advantage, and they hit upon the idea of making the Romans pay for the privilege of not being attacked.

I don't know if they ever actually planned to follow through on the threats they began issuing to Constantinople, but I kind of like to think that they didn't.

That Rua and Oktar were fine with just sitting around doing nothing, and were like, hey, the Romans don't know that we're fine with just sitting around and doing nothing, so let's see if we can trick them into forking over a bunch of gold.

At some point in the mid-420s, they sent envoys down to Constantinople demanding an annual payment of 350 pounds of gold, or we will invade your empire.

Yeah, that's the ticket.

Do you think they bought it?

The Romans did indeed buy it.

350 pounds of gold was a lot, but not backbreaking, and the Huns were awfully menacing, what with their ridiculous horsemanship and crazy accurate archers.

So Theodosius II's ministers agreed to the terms, and for the next decade sent along the gold every year, and in return the Huns kept right on on doing nothing.

Which is pretty good work, if you can get it.

This new status quo endured through Octar's death around 430, and continued unchanged until the end of Rua's life in 434.

Now, it is fairly easy to draw a line in the sand between Rua and Octar on one side, and Bleda and Attila on the other, and say, well, on this side, the Huns were content to indirectly influence Roman politics, and on this side they dove headfirst into direct action.

But it's not quite that simple.

For one thing, when you get right down to it, granting Aetius' request for a field army to go drive Bonifacius from power isn't exactly indirect influence, but you could make the case that it really was.

But what is less debatable is the fact that Rua almost certainly died on the Roman side of the Danube.

And what was he doing on the Roman side of the Danube?

Was he on some diplomatic mission, doing some sightseeing?

No, he was leading a Hun invasion of Moesia.

So the aggressive posture of the Huns in the middle fifth century cannot be solely attributed to Attila.

Clearly, they were moving in that direction already.

But that said, Attila and his brother Bleda were definitely more aggressive than Rua and Octar had been.

This most recent campaign into Roman territory, for example, was mostly a case of hot pursuit taking the Huns across the border than it was an attack on the Romans per se.

A few subject tribes had tried to break free of Hun domination by fleeing into the Empire, and rather than let them go, Rua had launched a pursuit, international borders and treaties be damned.

So when he died, and Bleda and Attila succeeded him, they and a Hun army were actually in Roman territory,

which the court of Constantinople was not at all happy about.

But when imperial envoys went out to remind Rua that, hey, this is exactly the sort of thing we've been paying you not to do, they were greeted instead by the newly ascended kings Bleda and Attila, who were looking to flex their muscles politically.

The brothers were happy to leave, they said, but only after the Romans agreed to double the annual indemnity to 700 pounds of gold, and open up Roman markets to Hun traders without barrier or restriction.

Seven hundred pounds of gold was a lot more than three hundred and fifty pounds of gold, but given the circumstances and a cold calculation of how disastrous a prolonged war with the Huns would be, the envoys agreed to the terms, and the Huns withdrew back to their side of the Danube.

Satisfied with the barrel they had just laid the Romans over, Bleda and Attila let the Empire alone for the time being, and instead turned their attention to the other great gold egg-laying goose, the Sassanids.

And though it would be five years before the Huns turned their attention back to Rome, Attila had learned a very specific lesson from this first encounter with the Romans.

They could be pushed around, and fairly easily at that.

Now one of the circumstances that had led led Constantinople to so readily agree to pay the Huns rather than fight them was the fact that they had recently dispatched a good chunk of their available forces to take care of a problem that technically wasn't really their problem at all.

But given how depleted and at each other's throats the Western forces were, somebody had to do something about the Vandal invasion of North Africa.

So in 431, Theodosius II had sent troops to North Africa to deal with what was really his cousin Valentinian's problem.

The eastern expedition was led by the general Aspar, who was the son of Artabor, the general who had gotten Valentinian onto the throne in the first place.

Aspar and his men were not able to roll back the Vandal tide, but they were able to stabilize the situation and pave the way for a treaty between Ravenna and the Vandals.

Brokered by Aspar in 435, the treaty ceded the Vandals control of Numidia.

In exchange, the Vandals agreed to stay out of the province of Africa, thus preserving, at least for now, Italy's access to the grain it so badly needed.

Deal with this Vandals in hand, Flavius Aetius, now the dominant general and statesman in the West, was able to turn his attention back to Gaul, which he was intent on reimposing order upon.

If he could get a permanent handle on the myriad independent tribes who now form the core of the region's population, he might be able to turn his attention more fully to North Africa and expel the vandals once and for all.

But despite his best efforts, the provinces of Western Europe would remain a slippery snake that would defy Aetius' attempt to turn his back on them time and time again.

This time it was the Burgundians in northern Gaul who raised Aetius' blood pressure.

Having been granted lands by Honorius in the settlements following the fall of Jovinus, the Burgundians were now looking to extend their territory westward and began menacing their neighbors in Gallia Belgica.

Aetius led a Roman army against the Burgundians in 436, and the general succeeded in pushing them back into their agreed upon place in the world.

The victory was complete enough that the Burgundians agreed not only to stay put, but also to pay what amounted to a fine for breaking the peace.

Thinking that this was the end of it, the Roman army withdrew, and the Burgundians got to work hustling up the cash they had agreed to pay.

But that was not the end of it, at least not for Aetius.

Agreements were nice, but agreements could be broken.

Aetius wanted a more permanent solution to the problem of Burgundian aggression.

So he contacted some old friends in the Huns and asked them if they wanted to make a quick buck.

The job was simple ride into the territory of the Burgundians and slaughter them, every last one of them.

The Huns agreed because it's not like they had scruples about this sort of thing, and in 437 a horde of them rode into town at high speed and commenced a slaughtering.

Some twenty thousand Burgundians were killed in the ensuing massacre, including the old king Gundahar, who, you'll recall, was once upon a time one of the major powers backing Jovinus.

The Huns did not succeed in snuffing out every last man, woman, and child, but as you can imagine, it would be a while before the Burgundians caused any trouble for the Romans again.

While this slaughter was unfolding, Aetius, Galliplacidia, Valentinian the Third, and the rest of the Western court were off on a holiday to Constantinople.

You may not have noticed, because, like his uncle Honorius, Valentinian the Third isn't really much of an emperor, so he gets properly relegated to the background of his own reign

but the boy has grown up, and just celebrated his eighteenth birthday.

So the family traveled to Constantinople to consummate the agreement made by Galla Placidia and Elia Pulcheria way back in the early 420s.

In mid-437, 18-year-old Valentinian III married his 15-year-old cousin, Licinia Eudoxia.

With the two halves of the Theodosian family reunited, everyone could rest easy, knowing that the future of the dynasty was in safe hands.

What's that you say?

Valentinian III and Theodosius II are actually destined to be the last blood emperors of the the Theodosian dynasty?

Surely not.

We've got two of them, teenagers, mind you, all set to keep this thing in the family.

It's not going to work out, huh?

Well, okay, that should be an interesting and bloody transition when we get to it.

Staying in the East for the moment, the next year saw the publication of Theodosius II's One True Contribution to World History, a contribution that was apparently undertaken of his own initiative.

Though the Theodosian walls that bear his name are undoubtedly more famous, the walls are his in name only, as he was just a kid when they were completed by the Praetorian Prefect Anthemius.

But with the publication in 438 of the Code of Theodosius, the Eastern Emperor finally had something he could point to and say, That was me, I did that.

The code was the culmination of nearly a decade's work.

In 429, Theodosius had appointed a commission to track down and compile every single law, decree, edict, or opinion issued by Roman emperors since 313 AD.

Why 313?

Well, if you'll recall, that was the year after Constantine defeated Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge, an occasion now understood to mark the beginning of the Christian Roman Empire.

Concerned that the Empire's laws had become unwieldy and disorganized, Theodosius wanted to create a single source that would define the Empire politically, economically, religiously, and culturally for generations to come.

Most especially, the personally pious Theodosius wanted to establish once and for all that Orthodox Christianity and imperial rule were inseparable, two sides of the same coin.

Published in 16 volumes, the code was immediately useful to jurists, but still led to complications and confusion.

Focused almost exclusively on compiling a century's worth of scattered laws, Theodosius' commission declined to include any sort of explanatory commentary to help lawyers interpret the raw decrees.

The Commission further declined to even make editorial decisions about which of two contradictory laws to include in the code, throwing both in if each was found to be independently authentic.

As a result, the main legacy of the Theodosian Code was not that it in itself became a lawyer's Bible, but rather that it forms a huge chunk of the Code of Justinian.

Compiled and written a century later, the Justinian Code did become a lawyer's Bible.

It included helpful commentary and a rationalized set of laws that eliminated as many contradictions as they could find, all tasks made infinitely easier by the initial work done by Theodosius' commission in the 5th century.

So good work, Theodosius II.

You alone, among your fifth-century imperial brothers, have managed to do something useful, and dare I say beneficial for your people.

While Theodosius was basking in the glow of his own usefulness, Aetius was back in Gaul in 438 trying to keep a handle on the anarchic mess that was the Western Empire.

Suffice it to say, the Theodosian code is not going to be minded much around these parts anytime soon.

For the rest of the year, Aetius campaigned against one of those still loose tribes that had come over in 406 and still held on to some territory in Hispania,

and the Goths, who were once again trying to break out of the confines of Aquitaine.

More than anything else, the Gothic king Theodoric wanted to seize the lands to the south of Aquitaine and win control of a Mediterranean port for his people,

and he must have figured that eventually the Romans would be spread thin enough that he'd be able to break through.

But Aetius himself faced off against Theodoric and once again defeated the Goths in battle.

Theodoric offered terms of peace, but these were apparently rejected by the Romans as being too lenient.

So in 439, the Goths went back on the offensive.

This time, however, with Aetius back in Italy, the Roman counterattack was led by a subordinate general, who was beaten, captured, and who then died in Gothic captivity.

The Romans were then forced to agree to terms with the Goths that were even more lenient than the terms they had rejected as too lenient just the year before.

A Gallo-Roman senator named Avetus brokered a deal that likely involved the Romans recognizing the official independence of the Goths.

That same Avetus would later play a key role in swinging Theodoric and the Goths to the Roman side during the Hun invasion of the early 450s, and then a few years after that, ascending to the imperial throne, as a part of that interesting and bloody post-Valentinian III transition I just hinted at.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

That same year saw the Western Empire dealt another setback.

Watching as the Romans continued to be tied down with conflicts in the north, the Vandal king Genseric decided that he had nothing to gain by adhering to the terms of the treaty he had signed with Rome four four years earlier.

Staying put in Numidia would just make him a chump, because after all, the rest of North Africa was just there for the taking.

No reason not to go for it.

It's not like the Romans are going to be able to do anything about it anyway.

So in 439, Genseric crossed the border into the province of Africa.

Taken completely by surprise, the thoroughly inadequate African garrisons proved no match for the Vandals, and the barbarians barbarians were able to waltz right into Carthage without even putting it to a siege.

With the entire North African coastline, from the Atlantic to modern Tunisia now under his control, Genseric's ambitions grew proportionally.

Snatch and grab sackings were fine for nomadic tribes living a predatory existence, but Genseric now fancied himself a civilized king of civilized lands.

So rather than terrorizing the citizens of Carthage, Censeric instead embraced them as his new loyal subjects and declared that Carthage would now be the capital of a great Vandal kingdom.

Surprised by this turn of events, the Romanized North Africans, well, embraced their new self-proclaimed king right back.

It's not like Ravenna had been much for worrying about their needs lately.

Despite the fact that the Vandals had been menacing their homes for the last decade, Ravenna had refused to prioritize North African interests, choosing instead to focus on the crises consuming continental Europe.

Now that the Vandals had basically won, the citizens of North Africa greeted Genseric's decision to transform himself into a civilized king who respected the civilized rights of civilized people with hope.

If the Vandal king really wanted to make a go of it, the people of North Africa were basically ready to support him.

The Romans had abdicated their responsibilities, so they were owed no more loyalty.

Genseric's occupation of North Africa may have been just that, an occupation, but it was not the most actively opposed occupation of all time.

With the help of his new subjects, Genseric began to build a massive fleet of ships to fulfill his dreams of further conquest.

Though the Vandals had no real experience with seafaring, Genseric was determined to use the ports of North Africa as a launching pad for the maritime conquest of the Mediterranean Sea.

In less than a year, Vandal ships launched from Carthage and landed on Sicily, where they began a systematic seizure of the island.

From there, they continued to branch out over the next few years, taking control of Sardinia, Corsica, and the Balaric Islands.

The ease with which the Vandals were able to control the Mediterranean is impressive, given, as I just mentioned, they were not exactly a seagoing people.

The Phoenicians, they were not.

But their exploits should not be too overblown.

It had been centuries since the Romans had had to deal with a hostile power roaming our sea, and the Imperial Navy was not the most built-up or well-trained branch of the armed services.

The sudden emergence of Vandal pirates swarming over the islands of the Mediterranean was unprecedented, and no one quite knew how to deal with them.

In a very real way, Rome was right back where it was before the Punic Wars, with a hostile power based in North Africa, controlling the seas and menacing the Italian coastline.

Except that instead of being on the rising tide of the bell curve, the Romans are now on the receding side.

I'm sure the ghost of Hannibal looked on with approval, as this time the North African maritime power would not be turned back, and instead overwhelmed the Romans and eventually sacked the eternal city, fulfilling the centuries gone dream of the Barker clan.

But that too is for another busy day.

Just as had happened after the Vandals initially crossed over into North Africa, their entrance onto the waterways of the Mediterranean caught the attention of Constantinople, and in 441, Theodosius II ordered an expedition to try to stamp them out.

But after getting as far as Sicily, this expedition was recalled to the east.

After five years of fighting in and around Armenia without making any appreciable gains, the Huns decided that Rome was a far easier target than Sassanid Persia, and returned to to the Danube frontier thirsty for blood and treasure.

And as if that wasn't bad enough, the removal of the Hun threat freed up the Sassanid forces, who, possibly acting at the prompting of Vandal ambassadors, started attacking Roman positions along the eastern border.

With the Persians attacking in the far east, Bleda and Attila decided that the time was ripe to squeeze a little bit more juice out of the empire, and so they began attacking Roman positions positions along the northern border.

Next week, this will all come to a head.

Though the Sassanid threat will quickly dissipate, the Vandals were still growing strong, and the Hun threat was just getting warmed up.

Indeed, next week we will see the first major successful Hun invasion of the Empire.

Previous attempts had been half-hearted and short-lived, but this time the Huns meant business, and their ravaging of Moesia and Thrace in the early 440s will firmly cement the legend in the mind of every Roman that the Huns were as horrifying as they were invincible.

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