162- Opening the Floodgates

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Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome,

episode 162, Opening the Floodgates.

On New Year's Eve, 406 AD, a massive horde of barbarians crashed across the lower Rhine and began spilling into the interior of the Roman Empire.

The mixed group included Vandals, Alans, Burgundians, and Alamani, and their combined strength overwhelmed the local Roman defenses.

Well, local Roman defenses isn't entirely accurate.

For the most part, the legions proper had been pulled south, either to bolster the defenses of the upper Rhine or to augment Stilico's Italian army as he faced off against Radagisus' invading Goths.

The northern section of the frontier was thus protected only by the Allied Franks.

The Franks fought hard to to stop the invasion, after all, the lower Rhine was now as much their territory as it was the Romans, but they were simply unable to hold the line.

So the hordes poured in, and when they did, they triggered a series of upheavals that completely remade the political map of the Western Empire.

Stilico, as I mentioned at the end of last week, got this news while he was in the middle of rattling his saber at Constantinople and demanding the return of Illyria to the Western sphere of influence.

Sitting at the head of an army that had been reinforced by troops from the Rhine and some 12,000 Gothic warriors from Radagysis' group, Stilico was feeling pretty confident about his military position and wanted to press home his advantage.

Now, there are some good long-term reasons for Stilico being so obsessed with the return of Illyria.

For starters, it was the gateway to Italy, and with Constantinople showing little interest in using its resources to defend the eastern ends of the Alpine passes, the leaders of the Western court needed to take matters into their own hands.

Beyond that was the fact that Illyria was a prime recruiting ground for soldiers.

Stilico had taken a lot of flack from the Senate for his reliance on barbarian mercenaries, but at the same time, they had consistently resisted all efforts to draft young men from their estates into service.

So Illyria promised to be a nice answer to the conundrum.

But though these were noble and legitimate reasons for Stilico's eastern focus, there was no escaping the fact that the decision to use his newly enlarged army as a political tool to menace Constantinople necessarily meant leaving the northern Rhine frontier dangerously undergarrisoned.

Though the particulars are different, this all reminds me a great deal of the Empire round about 260, when Gallianus chose to prioritize the Danube frontier over the Rhine frontier.

Rather than playing the role of posthumous and adopting a purely western-centric political and military posture, Stilico instead decided to play the role of Gallienus, turn his attention east, and essentially leave Gaul to its fate.

The Romans had defeated Radagysus in August of 406, which left Stilico plenty of time to send the Rhine legions back north, possibly even reinforced by the new Gothic recruits before winter set in.

But he was so intent on the east that he kept his forces united in Italy.

Gaul was overwhelmed by invading barbarians, permanently, I might add, just six months later.

Then again, Italy had been invaded twice in the last five years, so Stilico's decision to focus on his eastern flank rather than his northern flank is somewhat understandable.

But in choosing to follow Gallianus' lead, Stilico all but guaranteed that someone would step in to play the role of posthumous.

And as soon as the barbarians crossed into Gaul, that someone stepped up.

Right on Q, Flavius Claudius Constantius, the senior commander on the island of Britain, and the man history will come to know as Constantine III, was hailed as Augustus by his troops in early 407.

So now the West was not just under attack, it was in revolt.

Super

Constantine III was in no way related to his namesake, nor was he related in any way to any existing noble family.

He was a common soldier who had risen up through the ranks and he attained his senior command by way of a military coup.

The Roman occupation of Britain was gasping its last in the early 400s, and one of the symptoms of its fatal affliction was a breakdown in the solidarity of the occupying forces themselves.

In 406, a series of of coups and counter-coups threw up and then threw out senior generals at a frightening clip.

When the invasion of Gaul began, a man named Gratian, about whom we know nothing, happened to be in charge.

As the reports came in describing the barbarian flood, Gratian hesitated over whether to respond, irking the patriotic Roman element of the British army, who wanted to immediately cross over to Gaul and help turn back the hordes.

Ambitious and capable, Constantine exploited Gratian's inaction, promised that if he were in charge, they would have sailed for Gaul yesterday, and then successfully ousted Gratian from power.

Good to his word, after being hailed as Augustus, Constantine gathered up all the mobile Roman forces on the island, put them on ships, and sailed them for Gaul.

To which the people of Britain said, Wait, what now?

All of the Roman mobile forces?

Can't you just

But it was too late.

The Romano-British citizens could only watch them go.

Okay,

but um what about us?

Hello?

Are you leaving for good or what?

Hello?

As soon as he arrived in northern Gaul, Constantine set about winning the loyalty of every Roman garrison in the area.

Glad just to have someone around who seemed interested in doing something about the barbarians, the local troops were easily won over, and pretty soon Constantine had a decent-sized force behind him.

But though his army was growing, it was still in no shape to head off into battle just yet, and so the invading barbarians were free to roam northern Gaul unimpeded.

They sacked city after city, including the fairly important city of Mainz, before turning their attention to Trier itself.

But the old capital of Gaul was too heavily fortified, and after a bitter but unsuccessful siege, the barbarians peeled off in search of easier targets.

Constantine, meanwhile, identified an isolated group of Saxons as a good place to start his campaign, and attacked them as soon as his army was ready to fight.

Though the battle itself couldn't have been more than a glorified skirmish, when Constantine defeated the Saxons, it was a huge propaganda boon to his cause.

To the citizens of Gaul, and eventually Spain, Constantine became a man worthy of their loyalty and their taxes, unlike those imperial do-nothings down in Ravenna, who sucked them dry and then left them to die.

Stilico's response to the invasion of Gaul was clearly not all that it should have been.

But in his defense, I would like to note that he was up against one of the all-time great obstacles to adequate responses, lack of information.

With winter raging and the local Gallic ministry now headquartered down in Lyon, dispatches from the northern front were few, and the descriptions they contained were vague.

Oh, by the way, some barbarians have crossed over the Rhine and you should probably send reinforcements.

But a hostile tribe crossing the Rhine was a regular event these days, and everyone always wanted reinforcements.

Given his immediate reaction to the crisis, and then his later reaction when spring came and much more detailed reports came in, it is difficult to conclude that Stilico thought something huge was underway in Gaul and simply chose to ignore it.

Because, though he had spent the winter positioning his army for a potential war with Constantinople, even after reports of the invasion had come down, as soon as spring came and Stilico discovered how bad things really were, he wheeled them around and pointed them toward Gaul.

Unfortunately for everyone, Astilico's only immediate response to the crisis was to send a group of Allied vandals who had been settled in Pannonia up into Gaul to reinforce the local defenses.

You can imagine the reaction of the leaders of Trier when this new horde of vandals showed up on their doorstep, claiming that Stilico had sent them and let us in because we're hungry.

I wouldn't believe that line in a million years, not after I had just spent a week fighting tooth and nail against some other other horde of vandals,

so these reinforcements were predictably denied access to the city.

But without supplies of their own, the Allied vandals did the only thing they could think of to survive.

They had joined in the plundering.

Stilico's reinforcements thus wound up reinforcing only the enemy.

Whoops.

Come the spring of 407, the lines of communication thawed out, and the full extent of of the chaos became apparent to the court of Ravenna.

But if you thought hordes of barbarians running amok and a Roman general who claimed an imperial title trying to turn them back was chaotic, well, just wait, because the lines between those two are about to become super blurry.

See, what we have here is not one monolithic barbarian horde, so much as dozens of smaller groups, all with independent motives swirling around in independent directions.

In the middle of the swirl was Constantine and his regular Roman forces.

He was aware that he had no hope of restoring order to Gaul solely by way of the sword, so Constantine opened negotiations with the various barbarian kings and chieftains.

For their part, these barbarian leaders recognized that they would not have the upper hand forever, and that it might be better to deal with the Romans than fight them.

After all, who wanted to be sent back east to face off against the Huns?

So when Constantine's envoys came round saying that their general had assumed imperial title and was in a position to make a deal, they listened.

Not all of them listened, but enough of them did that pretty soon Constantine's ranks were swelled by the very barbarians he had come down to fight.

Having successfully co-opted swaths of the barbarians, Constantine was then further bolstered by the defection of most of the Spanish nobility to his cause.

The self proclaimed Augustus was, after after all, the only thing standing between the remaining loose barbarians and Hispania.

Down in Ravenna then, Astilico was left to sort through a very complicated mess.

Over here you have barbarian intruders.

Okay, they need to be fought off.

Over there, you have Constantine fighting them off, but only after illegally donning the purple, and we can't have that.

But over here, you have barbarians who have joined with Constantine Constantine and his Roman forces.

Are they allies because they're fighting the unrepentant barbarian invaders, or are they enemies because they're fighting for an imperial usurper?

In what order do you prioritize your response to all this?

Stilico surveyed the mess and ordered his priorities, and in the process sowed as many of the seeds of his own downfall as his enemies would ever need to take him down.

Stilico decided that the first priority would be Constantine.

There is absolutely no way you can tolerate self-proclaimed emperors, so all of Stilico's subsequent preparations were aimed at battle with the usurper rather than battle with the still loose barbarians.

There was a practical element to the decision, as Constantine had moved south and taken control of Lyon.

The majority of the loose barbarians were still running amok in northern Gaul.

So Stilico was going to have to go through Constantine to get to them anyway.

Might as well settle family business along the way.

But the senatorial aristocracy of Italy and southern Gaul was mortified at Stilico's decision.

The Empire has been overrun by no good smelly barbarians, and you're going to use our precious military resources to attack the one guy who's actually been doing something about the invasion?

This did not sit well at all.

But that would not be the half of it.

As Stilico was remustering his army at the city of Pavia, just on the Italian side of the Alps, he sent word to Alaric that there would be no war with Constantinople that year, and that as such, the Gothic king's services would not be required.

But the thing is that just a few months before, Stilico had ordered Alaric to move south and occupy Epirus, a clear violation of a number of agreements between Ravenna, Constantinople, and the Goths, and it was a move clearly designed to set up Stilico's crossing of the Adriatic.

But now it was just an extremely provocative maneuver that was just sort of hanging out there.

Having footed the bill for, well, let's call it what it was, the invasion of Epirus, Alaric was less than enthused to hear that there would be no further campaign, because that meant there would be no further capture of booty to offset his expenditures.

Plus, now he faced potential reprisals from the east for his unprovoked aggression.

So Alaric sent a note back to Stilico, demanding four thousand pounds of gold to cover Gothic expenses.

Now it was Stilico's turn to be less than enthused, but Alaric had him over a barrel.

The Italian army couldn't march on Gaul with hostile Goths threatening their rear, a fact that both sides could plainly see.

So Stilico recommended to the Senate that Alaric be paid.

He was able to force the measure through, and the Senate approved the funds, but no one was very happy that a Vandal general was making them hand over gold to a Gothic king so that said Vandal general could go off and fight a Roman army currently engaged in operations against hostile barbarians.

With his rear secured, Astilico was finally able to launch a counterattack, but by then the campaign season had drawn to a close, so everything was put on hold until early spring 408.

As soon as the passes thawed out, though, the Italian army was marching north, led by Sarus, the Goth general who had defected to Rome following the Battle of Verona in 402.

Stilico, his political power eroding, stayed behind in Ravenna to ensure that his enemies did not get a hold of the easily manipulated emperor Honorius.

Sarus met an advance guard of Constantine's army almost the minute he crossed over the Alps, but after a fierce fight Constantine's men were broken and driven off.

Sarus followed this victory by pushing hard to the city of Valentia, where Constantine himself had taken up residence.

Sarus besieged the city, but before he could capture the self-proclaimed Augustus and bring a swift end to this rebellion, reinforcements that Constantine had recruited from the lower Rhine suddenly appeared and drove Sarus off.

The timing of this relief army was excellent, but their arrival was more a matter of coincidence than anything else.

Assembled to put down a nascent counter-revolution brewing in Spain, the troops just so happened to already be on the way south when Sarus began the siege of Valentia, and so Constantine wound up saved, and Sarus wound up driven off.

Now outnumbered locally, Saris deemed it prudent to withdraw back to Italy and regroup.

But as his army approached the Alps, he discovered just how low the prestige of the Italian imperial regime had been laid.

An armed and organized band of locals, part freedom fighters and part brigands, had occupied the passes after Sarus passed through the first time, and they were now demanding that the Romans pay a ransom for passage.

Although Sars probably could have forced the issue, the rebels were entrenched, and it would have cost time and resources that the Gothic general didn't have time to spare.

So he paid the ransom and carried on.

The optics of a Roman imperial army paying a toll to pass through their own backyard was terrible, and lost on exactly no one.

In May of 408, Astilico was preparing the troops for another invasion, this one to coincide with a Theodosian family led uprising in Spain that's the nascent counter revolt I just mentioned when a bombshell dropped in from the east.

The Emperor Arcadius was dead.

He was thirty or thirty one years old, and had been Emperor of the East for thirteen years.

I'm going to circle back around and cover the last few years' worth of events in Constantinople next week, and for now I'm just going to focus on the implications of Arcadius' death for the West,

specifically the implications for Stilico.

The Vandal general had never gotten over his desire to control both halves of the Empire, and Arcadius' death opened up what would probably be his last best chance to unite East and West under his personal control.

The logical heir to the throne was Arcadius' seven-year-old son, Theodosius II,

but with Honorius now the senior Augustus in the Empire, Stilico argued that the West ought to have some say in how the regime change played out.

The last thing Stilico needed was his enemies in Constantinople, of which there were legion at this point, dominating some new child emperor.

Honorius was keen to travel himself to Constantinople and oversee the transition of power, but Stilico was worried that Honorius too would fall under the sway of the Eastern ministers should he be allowed to leave Italy, and so, citing a number of convenient reasons that the trip would cost too much, that it would leave Italy open to invasion from Constantine, Stilico convinced Honorius to stay in Ravenna.

Instead, he, Stilico, would go and represent Honorius's interests.

Now this course of action was not without its own dangers.

After all, while Stilico was gone, his enemies back in Italy, of which there were also legion at this point, could worm their way into Honorius' ear and turn the emperor against him.

But the opportunity to put his stamp on the imperial court of Constantinople proved too alluring, and in the summer of 408, Stilico made preparations to leave.

When Honorius and Stilico parted ways in August, a devious minister, an arch foe of Stilico's named Olympius, swooped in and started spinning a treacherous tale to the emperor.

Stilico, he said, was not going to Constantinople to ensure that Honorius' interests would be protected.

He was going to push aside young Theodosius II and install his own son, Eukarius, on the eastern throne.

This was not necessarily an implausible accusation.

After all, Eukarius, by way of Stilico's wife Serena, was the lawful and acknowledged grandson of Theodosius the Great.

No one these days believes that that this was actually what Stilico was up to, but at the time it was an easily believable rumor.

Malleable Honorius listened intently to these accusations and decided to buy into them hook, line, and sinker.

Before Stilico was even out of Italy, his enemies in the west had already turned the emperor against him.

In August 408, Honorius and his court, San Stilico, traveled to Pavia to inspect the troops.

Upon their arrival, Olympius set to work spinning more treacherous tales of Stilico's treachery to the rank and file soldiers.

Added to the rumor that Stilico was neglecting his responsibilities because he was busy trying to take over the Eastern Empire, was the more immediately offensive rumor that Stilico planned to put Alaric in charge of the war against Constantine, which was too much for the Roman troops to bear.

When everyone was good and riled up, Olympius gave the signal and a full-blown mutiny broke out.

Honorius fled to the safety of his imperial residence, but most of the high-ranking officers in the army, all allies of Stilico, were tracked down and killed by the mob.

Stilico was in Bologna when the mutiny broke out, and he immediately recognized what had happened.

Olympius had turned the regular Roman forces against him, which meant that Olympius was now almost certainly in control of Honorius.

At that moment, Astilico only had auxiliary forces available to him, a Hunnic bodyguard, and the Goths who had come over after the Battle of Verona.

If he contemplated using them to reassert his power, he didn't contemplate it for long.

Using barbarians to attack regular Roman forces, who were under Honorius' personal banner no less, wasn't going to win him any friends.

When it became clear that Stilico was hesitating and that this might be the end for the Vandal general, the Gothic general Saurus withdrew with his forces to see how events played out, a move that likely saved his own life and position in the post-Stilico purges.

Now thoroughly isolated, Stilico traveled to Ravenna to await the return of the Imperial Court.

If he was able to meet with Honorius, he might be able to talk sense to the boy.

But if he could not, and this really was his time, he was apparently determined not to make a messy play for his life.

The Empire was weak enough.

Another civil war wasn't in anyone's interest.

Stilico took refuge in a church, but pretty soon imperial soldiers came knocking.

They had a letter stating that Stilico was to be taken into custody.

After being promised that their refugee was not going to be harmed, the priest stepped aside and Stilico was led away.

But as soon as the company passed the threshold of the church, the captain of the guard pulled out another letter, this one stating that for crimes against the state, Stilico was to be executed at once.

The few retainers left with the vandal general tried to protest, but their master waved them off.

He knew that his time had come.

On August 22, 408, Stilico was beheaded.

He was 49 years old, and had more or less been the ruler of the Western Empire for the last thirteen years.

Stilico was among the last truly capable leaders of the Western Empire, and though his policies were at times controversial, they should all be seen as the work of a man trying to hold together a disintegrating empire with limited resources and enemies in every direction.

Aside from his obsession with controlling the eastern court, Stillico scrupulously maintained a pragmatic approach to war and politics, and he succeeded for more than a decade while his counterparts in the east rose and fell with the seasons.

He was not a perfect leader, and I don't think his actions were always as noble and idealistic as some have made them out to be.

But if you're going to to have a guy utterly dominating a weak emperor the way that Stilico utterly dominated Honorius, oh man, you could do so much worse.

Next week, we will see just how much worse you can do.

Because the minute Stilico's head was separated from his body, it became clear to everyone just how many balls the vandal general had been personally juggling.

Anti-barbarian racism that Stilico had kept in check is about to rise to the surface, which will drive all those carefully cultivated auxiliary forces into the waiting arms of Alaric.

Petty personal squabbles will then lead to a breakdown of civility between Ravenna and the Goths, which will lead to another invasion, which will then lead to the first sacking of Rome in 800 years.

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