161- The Swamps of Ravenna

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Hello, and welcome to the history of Rome,

episode 161: The Swamps of Ravenna.

It wouldn't be fair to come down too hard on the successors of Theodosius for their failure to maintain even a semblance of cooperation between the eastern and western halves of the empire.

After all, as two civil wars fully attested, it's not like Theodosius' reign had been a shiny beacon of collegiality.

But still, as the year 400 dawned, it was clear that the leaders of the empire were simply not up to the task of maintaining imperial unity.

In survey history books, the year 395 is often labeled as the year when the two halves of the empire became legally separate entities, when they split into being constitutionally independent political apparatuses.

And though that is technically inaccurate, as a matter of understanding the transformations of late antiquity, I would say that, sure, that is more or less correct.

From here on out, the East and West will act as rivals and enemies, at least as often as they act as friends and allies.

Officially, of course, there never was a legal divorce, and right up until the bitter end, everyone paid lip service to a unified Rome.

But unofficially, off the record, yeah, they've been living in separate houses for years.

That unofficial official separation was still in its infancy, and there really was a reasonable hope that the growing rift might be bridged.

And so Stillico, dominant statesman and general of the West, focused a huge amount of time and effort trying to build that bridge, the keystone being himself, naturally.

But in the end, he wound up spending so much time and effort on the project that he neglected like half the provinces that it was his sworn duty to protect.

And this neglect eventually had catastrophic consequences, not just for Stillico's own life and career, but for the Western Empire as a whole.

For the moment, however, Stilico was about as strong politically as any non-emperor had ever been.

He had successfully parried the dangerous thrusts of Alaric and his Goths, and then quickly restored order in North Africa after Gildo revolted and cut off the grain supply.

Meanwhile, his rivals in the east had been having a hell of a time staying in power, as ministers and generals picked each other off one by one in a series of palace coups.

For a brief moment in 400, the ethnically Goth general Ginas was ascendant, but after he returned to Constantinople with an army mostly composed of his own countrymen, he discovered that the citizens of the capital were not too psyched about these barbarians occupying their city.

After a series of escalating incidents, in midsummer, Constantinople broke out into a full-scale riot, forcing Ginas to pull his men out of the city and flee, leaving behind some 7,000 Goths who were cornered by the mob and ripped to pieces.

Over the course of these riots, the imperial palace itself was, if not totally burned to the ground, at least heavily damaged by fire.

Ginas fled north to the Danube, and after crossing the river he sought out the most powerful of the Hunnic kings, a man named Olden, and attempted to forge an alliance.

But Olden, who was in the process of methodically consolidating his domination over the lands north of the Danube, took the opportunity to make a showing of friendly good faith to the Romans, and he sent Ginas' head in a gift-wrapped box back to Constantinople.

With the East in a semi-sort of disarray, and the Empress Eudoxia now standing as the only real political leader of consequence, Stilico was about ready to start re-pushing his claim to regency over Arcadius, but he was sidetracked by a barbarian invasion, and then really sidetracked when when Alaric and his Goths invaded Italy.

As we've already seen, the Hunnic migration into the Danube region led to massive population shifts among the existing barbarian populations.

This process got started, of course, when Fritigern and his Goths came knocking back in the three hundred seventies, but that was just the opening round.

In 401, a combined force of Vandals and Alans, fleeing from Olden's aforementioned attempts to subjugate them, reached the borders of the Roman Empire in the provinces of Radia and Noricum, and, deciding that they stood a much better chance fighting Romans than fighting Huns, just kept right on moving west.

Stilico marched up from Italy at once and, through his usual brand of deft maneuvering, was able to turn this horde back.

But his deployment of the Italian army north of the Alps meant that the home province was now wide open to any threat that might happen along.

Q Alaric

As soon as Stilico advanced out of Italy, Alaric saw a golden opportunity to gain some much-needed political and military security.

His elevation to an official position within the Roman army had never been popular, nor were the subsidies that fed his people, who were now settled in Illyria.

When his patron Eutropius was toppled, Alaric knew that his position was now shaky at best.

When the people of Constantinople successfully drove Gynas and his Goths out of the capital, Alaric could see the writing on the wall.

Pretty soon the supplies would stop coming in, he would be stripped of his command, and then very possibly toppled from power by his own angry countrymen.

So in late 401, Alaric decided to go on the offensive, move west, and try his luck at extracting concessions from Milan.

It was a risky bet because by crossing the Alps, Alaric was breaking his contract with Constantinople.

So this was an all-or-nothing sort of play.

He was preemptively burning his political bridges to the east.

But while a risky bet, it was not necessarily a bad bet.

With the bulk of the Western army engaged along the upper Rhine, Alaric was able to enter Italy completely unchallenged and then pretty much do whatever he wanted.

The Gothic king initially got bogged down besieging the key fortress city of Aquilea, but he quickly and wisely gave that up and decided to turn his attention to lower hanging fruit.

For the rest of the winter, the Goths ran amuck throughout northern Italy, while the Roman authorities could only look on helplessly.

Honorius and his house guard at Milan could do nothing about Alaric, and Stilico, his campaign against the Vandals at Al pretty much wrapped up, was trapped on the wrong side of the snowed in Alpine Passes.

As the spring of 402 approached, Alaric still had not gotten the concessions he wanted, and so he decided it was time to play his last card before things were complicated by Stilico's return.

He marched on Milan and laid siege to the capital city.

Now, he never really had a hope in hell of taking Milan, but he wanted to spook the young emperor Honorius into authorizing subsidies to the Goths that would make up for the subsidies from Constantinople Alaric had given up by crossing the Alps.

Honorius was indeed spooked and almost fled to Gaul, but he was convinced to sit tight and wait for Stilico to come back and save the day.

The Emperor did not have to wait long.

The minute the passes thawed out in March of 402, Astilico was riding back into Italy at top speed to save the day, helpfully backed by an even stronger army than he had left with.

Knowing that he would immediately be engaging the Goths upon his return to Italy, Stilico had ensured that part of the settlements of the previous year included barbarian troops promising to enroll as auxiliaries in the Roman army.

When this even stronger Roman army entered Italy, the disappointed Alaric was forced to withdraw from Milan, having gained no concessions from the Western court.

Alaric and Stilico then picked up where they had left off and proceeded to dance around each other in the countryside southwest of the capital.

But unlike their two previous encounters, this time they would actually meet in battle.

On Easter Sunday, Stilico attacked the Goths near Palentia, a city a little east of modern Torino.

The timing of the attack was a bit scandalous, as it was understood by all sides that Easter was a holy day, and not a day for for fighting.

But Stilicoe did not want to squander an opportunity.

However, being a devout Christian himself, Stilico was wary of leading the attack personally, so he put an ethnically alon and religiously pagan general in charge of the assault.

The pagan barbarian general, as you can imagine, had no qualms about attacking on Easter Sunday, and the regular soldiers under his command, flush with the victory of the previous year, seemed eager to continue stomping the enemies of Rome, Easter Sunday or no.

The Goths were taken by surprise, and after some fierce fighting they were forced to make a run for it up into the mountains, losing control of their baggage train along the way.

Stilico opened negotiations with the treed Alaric, and in exchange for the Gothic king withdrawing from Italy for good, the Goths appear to have been granted some limited subsidies, and Alaric was allowed to maintain an official Roman command, this one bestowed by Milan rather than Constantinople.

In the early summer of 402, Alaric then led his people on a slow march east back toward Illyria.

And not to get off on too far of a tangent, but I have seen it noted a few places that this all took place in June of 403, a full year after the Battle of Palentia, but in other places that it all took place in June of 402.

Since the 402 date makes way, way more sense, that's the chronology I'm going with, because otherwise we'd have to explain why Alaric and his defeated army just sort of sat around in the mountains for 14 months.

On his way back east, though, Alaric inexplicably decided to halt his march and make camp near Verona.

There are a few different theories about why Alaric stopped, but all of them are purely speculative.

He wanted to regain his honor by defeating Stilico in a rematch battle.

He He wanted to try to cut a better deal with the Western court.

He knew that, having broken his pact with Constantinople, there was a very good chance he was going to be attacked by the Eastern legions when he showed his face there again.

Maybe it was a bit of all of these things, and maybe it was something else entirely.

Whatever the reason, Stilico apparently decided that enough was enough.

It was time to crush Alaric once and for all.

Potential asset or no, the Gothic king was proving to be way more trouble than he was worth.

We have almost no details about the subsequent Battle of Verona, except that it turned out to be probably the worst defeat in Alaric's long and illustrious career.

Stilico's victory was so complete that a significant element of the Gothic high command defected to the Roman side in the aftermath of the battle.

The most important of these defections was of course that of Saurus, a bitter rival of Alaric's, who would become a key ally of Stilico's, and then play a major role in the events surrounding the sack of Rome in 410.

But noticeably absent from the victory was Alaric's head on a pike.

The wily barbarian king had taken flight when the battle became clearly lost, and was now racing headlong for the Alps.

Those in his army who did not defect raced after him.

The chattering classes could not help but notice that once again Stilico had let Alaric escape with his life.

Probably the most important legacy of the brief Gothic invasion of Italy was Stilicoe's decision to move the seat of Western imperial power from Milan to Ravenna.

Though Alaric had never truly threatened Milan, his advance on the capital had proven that the city was vulnerable to attack.

What would happen the next time an enemy decided to invade Italy while the Western legions were occupied elsewhere?

Given the times, this was not a hypothetical question.

It was a very real strategic dilemma.

Milan may have been heavily fortified, but it was still easily approachable.

Ravenna, on the other hand, was surrounded by a ring of dense marshlands that rendered any overland approach a logistical nightmare.

Hidden away behind these swamps, the Western emperors would now be safe from the inevitable enemy invasions that Stilico could see looming on the horizon.

The move to Ravenna is a depressing reminder of how far the Empire has fallen.

When Rome was at its height, no one thought twice about the capital being located in, well, Rome, which was stuck inconveniently down some random peninsula.

No threat was so great, no enemy so dangerous, that the extra time and energy it took to run the Empire from Rome really factored into anyone's thinking.

With the arrival of the crisis of the third century, though, that extra time and energy began to loom large, and the imperial court was moved to Milan, which put the emperors on the front line and allowed them to move quickly from crisis point to crisis point.

The move to Milan was an admission that the Golden Age was dead and gone, but at least it it was an aggressive response to an extremely difficult situation.

The move to Ravenna, however, was an admission that the Empire was becoming helpless.

Its emperors no longer commanded the world from a recliner on the Palatine Hill, nor did they sit perched atop the walls of Milan, armor donned, ready to spring into action.

No, instead they now cowered behind a ring of marshes, play acting as if they really still were were the kings of the world.

It made sense strategically for Stilico to tuck Honorius away in a safe little pocket given the limited resources at his disposal, but still,

oh, how the mighty have fallen.

At around this same time, it appears that Stilico made another key decision that while making perfect sense given the geopolitical realities he was facing, would have profound consequences for the Empire.

Since the foundation of the Tetrarchy, the Roman capital of the Gallic frontier had always been Trier, located along the lower Rhine.

But at some point in the early 5th century, the capital was shifted some 500 kilometers south to the city of Lyon.

This shortened the supply and communication lines between the imperial court and its Gallic satellite, which was necessary given the insecurity of the Rhine frontier, but it was also a clear signal that Rome was repositioning itself for a tighter defense of the inner empire at the expense of its northern territories.

The citizens of Britain and the lower Rhine were now basically on their own, and it would not take them long to wake up to the fact that they were still paying taxes to an empire that had given up trying to protect them.

The main beneficiaries of this withdrawal turned out to be the Franks.

Going back to the days of Constantine, the Franks had slowly but steadily migrated and settled their way into becoming the dominant political and military force along the lower Rhine.

Their territory straddled both sides of the river, and as the emperors of Rome dealt with difficulties elsewhere, it became convenient to sign treaties with the Frankish kings, granting them de facto independence in exchange for a promise to defend the frontier from other barbarian groups.

When the Roman authorities began to withdraw from the north, the local landed nobility was understandably worried about what this meant for them, and so they too turned to the Franks, cutting deals with them to protect the nobility's property in exchange for food and cash.

This alliance between the increasingly non-Roman aligned nobility of northern Gaul and the increasingly disinterested in ever-becoming Romanized Franks would form the backbone of the Frankish kingdom that would one day rename Gaul and give give us Charlemagne.

But that is still an upheaval or two away, so let's get back to what happened next.

In late 405, perhaps a bit sooner than Stilico would have hoped, one of those inevitable invasions of Italy inevitably came crashing down into Italy.

The man behind the invasion was a new player on the board, but he was driven by what should now be a familiar reason, the continued expansion of the Huns.

Said new player was a Gothic king named Radagisus, who ruled the pagan Goths who still lived on the north side of the Danube river.

He had managed to hold his own against the Huns thus far, but Olden's push to subjugate all local nations to the Huns finally became intolerable, and Radagysus led his people across the Danube, into Roman territory, and then into Italy itself.

Exaggerated sources sometimes claim the total number of Goths under Radagisus' leadership was some 400,000 men, women, and children, but modern estimates figure it was more like 100,000 with about 20,000 men in fighting shape.

Radagisus' lightning invasion just before the onset of winter took Stilico off guard, and he was forced to sit tight for months until the spring allowed necessary reinforcements to arrive from Gaul.

In the meantime, Eratagis divided his followers into three groups and set them to plundering.

Now, this was a reasonable idea, given that having all those mouse to feed in the same place at the same time was a liability, but come the spring of 406 when Stilico was reinforced, having the Gothic forces divided turned out to be the biggest liability of all.

Backed by troops from the Rhine frontier, as well as Hun forces sent sent with the compliments of Olden, who not only wanted to continue courting the friendship of the Romans, but also wanted to send a message that you couldn't run from the Huns, Stilico moved directly against the division of the Goths led by Radagysis himself.

The Gothic king was engaged in a nearly successful siege of Florence when Stilico arrived on the scene.

The Goths, taken by surprise, were dispersed and unprepared, and so the Romans were able to easily scatter them, so easily, in fact, that it is reported that not a drop of Roman blood was spilled.

Radagysis and his people fled up into the Apennines, where, though safe from further attack, they were trapped and cut off from their compatriots.

Pretty soon the Goths were in dire straits, and Radagysis, either selfishly trying to escape or selflessly trying to make contact with the other two groups, was captured trying to make a run for it.

He was brought before Stilico, who had the Goth king executed without delay.

The rest of the trapped Goths simply gave up.

When the news that Radagysus was dead and his warriors captured reached the other two groups, they too simply gave up the fight and surrendered to Roman forces.

About twelve thousand of the best Gothic fighters were promptly enrolled into the Roman army, while the rest were sold into slavery, collapsing the slave market in the process.

Anyone left over headed back from whence they had come, most likely dreading the reception Olden had planned for them.

Though circumstances never seemed to allow Stilico to immediately deal with these invasions into Italy, no one could deny that when he finally was able to act, that he brought a swift conclusion to the crisis.

In August of 406 then, Stilico was at the high watermark of his his career, twice now the savior of Italy, and he took the political capital he had earned and decided to spend it on his long-standing pet project of unifying the east and west under his personal control.

The claims to regency over Arcadius were now a bit absurd.

After all, the emperor was now in his late twenties, but that did not stop Stilico from pressing for territorial concessions from Constantinople.

Specifically, he demanded the return of the eastern half of Illyria, which, as you'll recall, had been ceded over to the east to create a unified theater of command for Theodosius right after the Battle of Adrianople.

Stilico thought it right and proper that it be returned to the purview of the Western Augustus, immediately.

His saber-rattling on the issue included a threat to go to war to protect Honorius' claim to the territory, and possibly messages sent to Alaric pressing the Gothic king to once again go out of plundering in Thrace.

But all this saber-rattling was brought to a dramatic halt on New Year's Eve 406.

Remember those Vandals and Alans who had been stopped in 401?

Well, they were back on the move, this time joined by Burgundians and Alemanni.

On the last day of 406, they crashed through the line that had been weakened when Stilico brought down troops to deal with Radagisus.

Unpacified barbarians were now spilling across the border.

Next week, we will deal with the deep consequences of this invasion.

For starters, no, they never will be turned back.

These vandals are the same vandals who will eventually wind their way down into North Africa and set up an independent kingdom for themselves.

But more immediately, the invasion will lead to the complete political breakdown of the Northwestern Empire.

Revolts and counter revolts will lead to havoc far beyond the presence of a few barbarians, most dramatically demonstrated by the Roman withdrawal from Britain in four ten.

The end times are upon us, and the walls are crumbling down.

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