157- Only the Penitent Man Shall Pass

If you thought goldenly breaded McDonald's chicken couldn't get more golden, think colder!

Because new sweet and smoky special edition gold sauce is here!

Made for your chicken favorites!

I participated in McDonald's for a limited time.

Video as

you obtain Wi-Fi in Mazrin with the local con ATNT Fiber with Alpha, ATT connected location.

ATT Fiber has been living in the middle of the 2000s.

Requires visits to the Wi-Fi extended ATNT concerned at the mes.

Hello, and welcome to the history of Rome.

Episode 157: Only the Pentitent Man Shall Pass.

In late 387 AD, the twelve year old Emperor Valentinian II, his mother Justina, and the rest of the Milan court, showed up in Thessalonica begging Theodosius for asylum.

The Eastern Augustus, aware that his brother Emperor had been put to flight by the usurper Maximus, had travelled down to the port city in advance and received the exiled court with open arms, promising to do everything he could to restore Valentinian to power.

But not just out of the goodness of his heart.

The price for Theodosius' help was the hand of Valentinian's sister Galla in marriage.

The Eastern Augustus' first wife Elia Flacilla, mother of the two future emperors Arcadius and Honorius, had died in 385, and Theodosius was looking for a marital alliance that would bind his clan to the Valentinians, forming a single intertwined dynasty.

The price seemed reasonable enough to the Empress Justina, and the marriage was hastily arranged.

Emerging from the wedding ceremony as a single political unit, the Theodosian Valentinian dynasty then prepared for war.

Maximus had timed his attack on Italy perfectly, waiting until the last minute before winter sent in to pounce.

By the time Theodosius learned of the attack, it was too late in the year for the Eastern Augustus to do anything about it.

He would have to wait until spring, which meant that Maximus had bought himself six months to get his house in order and ready his troops for an inevitable counter-attack.

The general had already laid the groundwork for defending Italy during his initial invasion, as it is assumed that bribery and induced defections had been the main reason he had penetrated the Alpine passes so easily.

When these Italian forces were combined with his Gallic legions, Maximus's army was, at least on paper, equal to just about anything Theodosius would be able to put in the field.

After all, we are still just a few years removed from the devastating Gothic war.

It's not like the legions of the Middle Empire had a lot of men to spare for a civil war.

But Theodosius had been laying some groundwork of his own.

We saw last week how the peace treaty with the Sassanids freed up at least some Syrian border troops for the campaign.

But the Eastern Augustus' main source of recruits for the coming civil war would actually come from the ranks of the very barbarians he had spent his first few years in office fighting.

In these turbulent times, alliances were formed, broken, and reformed with dizzying speed.

Theodosius had not stopped working after successfully bringing an end to the Gothic War with a combination of attrition and diplomacy, and throughout the mid-380s he continued to focus his attention on winning over as many barbarians as he possibly could to his side.

And that did not just mean Goths, that meant factions of Huns and Alans from beyond the Danube frontier who were more than willing to sell their cavalries into imperial service, if the price was right.

Nothing about the armed conflicts of late antiquity make them easy to paint in stark black and white terms, and the war that is about to break out between Theodosius and Maximus is a great example of why it's so hard.

Theodosius' top field generals, Rickomirs, the general who had come east at the outset of the Gothic War, and Rickomers' nephew Arbogast, were both ethnic Franks from the lower Rhine.

They would be leading a mixed band of Roman legionaries drawn from the Danube provinces, Gothic auxiliaries called up according to the terms of their settlement agreement, and Hun and Alon mercenaries, who were paid to serve as Theodosius' cavalry arm.

They would be fighting against Maximus, who hailed from the same region of Spain as Theodosius, but whose army consisted mostly of Gallic legionaries, who were basically just ethnic Germans living on the west side of the Rhine, and Alamani auxiliaries, who answered Maximus' call to arms after years of friendly patronage from the general.

In other words, when looked at from a few miles up, this Roman civil war resembles nothing so much as a giant squabble between rival barbarian tribes.

Take out Maximus and Theodosius, and really how many Romans in this Roman civil war are left?

Not many, I can tell you that.

When spring came, Theodosius went on the offensive and ordered a two pronged assault on the Italian peninsula.

Ground forces would march west through the Alps, while a naval force would simultaneously sail up the Adriatic and attack by sea.

Maximus, using Aquilea as his base of operations, worked quickly to counter both threats, pulling a force down to deal with the naval invasion, while directing the bulk of his forces to block up the mountain passes.

But unfortunately for Maximus, the winter had worked both ways, and he too had been forced to wait until spring to make many of these moves.

So, when an advance guard of his army occupied the small city of Sischia in what is now Slovenia, they were unable to complete the defensive fortifications necessary to hold Theodosius off.

With the lightning fast Hun cavalry leading the way, Theodosius' land army made contact with Maximus' forces at Sischia and easily ran them off.

But this was just the opening skirmish.

The real test would come a hundred miles to the north in the fortified city of Poetovio, where Maximus' main army, led in person by his brother, was stationed.

Details are scarce, but it appears the two sides met in battle in mid-summer 388, and after an intensely fought back and forth battle, Theodosius emerged victorious.

With his armies guarding the mountains defeated and his southern flank failing in the face of the naval assault, Maximus called for reinforcements from the north and then fled back to Aquileia to await relief.

But with Theodosius' forces breathing down Italy's neck, the powers that be in Aquilea decided that standing behind Maximus was suicide, whereas handing him over likely meant they would escape all this with their heads intact.

So, they thought it over for roughly two nanoseconds and put Maximus in chains.

When Theodosius' forces arrived, Maximus was handed over, and on August 28, 388 AD, general was beheaded.

I'll never quite be sure what his official title was, but he did rule the western provinces for five years and by all accounts did a pretty good job, and now he's dead, so there you go.

With Maximus dead, Theodosius entered Milan unopposed and then called on Valentinian and the rest of his exile court to return.

The war over, securing the peace was now the main task confronting the victorious Theodosius, and as in his dealings with the Goths, the Eastern Augustus demonstrated that he found clemency and forgiveness far superior tools to work with than hostility and revenge.

Almost no punitive action was taken against the men who had sided with Maximus, and even within the general's own family, only his eldest son, who had been named Maximus' official co-ruler and successor, paid the ultimate price for the general's transgressions.

His wife and daughters were allowed to live out their lives in peace, with their security guaranteed.

As Julius Caesar had shown so many years before, this sort of habitual blanket clemency can sometimes come back to bite you.

But Theodosius likely felt like the alternative would have been far worse.

It's not like Maximus had been unpopular with either the people or the military.

Going after his supporters would have meant, well, going after everyone, really.

Better to risk some reignited revolt later on than guarantee one now by coming down too harshly.

Aside from the people and the soldiers of the West, there was one other major player that Theodosius was keen to placate the Bishop of Milan.

Ambrose had stayed behind when the Imperial Court had abandoned the Italian capital to Maximus, and his steadfast refusal to be pushed around had elevated his popularity, and he was already pretty popular, into the stratosphere.

Not that staying took some immense amount of courage or anything.

If Ambrose felt he had a thing to fear from the devoutly Nicene Maximus, he probably would have hightailed it out of there, but he didn't, and so he didn't.

Theodosius understood that the road to a secure Western Empire went right through the bishop's church, and so he reached out to Ambrose in an attempt to bring the influential clergyman over to his side.

But Theodosius was about to discover that Ambrose was the kind of man who, while willing to make deals, was only willing to make them on his own terms.

Thoroughly empowered and not at all impressed by imperial displays of power, Ambrose had no intention of compromising with Theodosius on anything.

The emperor was going to have to come to him.

Theodosius caught his first whiff of Ambrose's willingness to go head to head with an imperial court when news came that far in the east some fanatical monks had talked themselves up into a righteous fury and then decided to go take that fury out on an ancient Jewish synagogue.

Theodosius, you'll recall, usually reserved his own religious fanaticism for intra-Christian conflicts and skewed tolerant when other religions were involved.

When he learned of the monks' crime, the emperor ordered them to pay to have the synagogue rebuilt.

It seemed like this was a routine bit of law and order.

Private property had been destroyed, everyone knew who had done it, and so the vandals,

not that we can really call them that yet, ought to pay for the repairs.

Okay, what's next?

So Theodosius was shocked when Ambrose took to his pulpit and denounced the emperor's decision in extremely harsh language.

Taken aback by the assault, the emperor modified his decision, ordering the whole civic community in question to help rebuild the synagogue rather than focusing solely on the monks.

But Ambrose continued to take offense, asking his congregation why a single public dollar should go toward building a temple for sacrilegious Jews, and then asking further, hey, you know, why aren't we giving that money to the monks as a reward for the good work that they've done?

Theodosius was shocked by the bishop's demagoguing on the issue, but with the people of Milan raised up now into a mighty rabble, the emperor decided to just cut bait.

The order to rebuild the synagogue was quietly dropped.

Ambrose had once again stared down the imperial court and won.

But his best was still to come.

Despite the shot that Ambrose had just fired across his bow, Theodosius was not ready to become an anti all other religions kind of Christian just yet.

In June of three hundred eighty nine he travelled down to Rome to secure the the support of the old Roman Senate, and flashing around a bunch of extremist Christian rhetoric wasn't going to get him anywhere.

Instead, he engaged in a very low key charm offensive designed to set the senators' minds at ease.

While in the city, he made a habit of dropping the most ostentatious bits of his imperial regalia and leave behind his military escorts when he called on senators at their homes.

For a brief moment there, Theodosius seemed to return to the princeps model, and presented himself as a man, a leader, and an honorable soldier, rather than a warlord and a living god.

The charm offensive did the trick, and the Senate fell over itself praising Theodosius and promising their complete support.

The Emperor's reasonable front was so comforting that the great senator Simachus even took the opportunity to ask that the sacred altar of victory be restored, but that went a little too far, and Theodosius firmly, though politely, refused.

These happy times would not last, however, as events were about to overtake them all, giving Ambrose the leverage he needed to really bend the emperor over the cross.

The bishop had been shaving a little bit since Theodosius' arrival in Italy, because while the emperor clearly desired an alliance with the Church of Milan, he was not proving nearly as pliable as Gratian or Valentinian II.

The young emperors had been more than willing to bring Ambrose in on their inner circle discussions of policy, making the bishop practically a minister of state.

But Theodosius had his own inner circle of advisers, and ever since the defeat of Maximus Ambrose had found himself on the outside looking in, hence the need to take to the pulpit on the synagogue question, rather than just saying, in a meeting, No, we won't be doing that.

Sure he had spies all over Theodosius' court, and was kept fully briefed on what was going on, but he had lost the direct power he had enjoyed for the last decade.

The bishop didn't want to simply be an ally of the imperial court, he wanted to be indistinguishable from it.

And so what he needed was a way to drive himself back into the center of the action.

In 390, Theodosius' temper got the better of him, and Ambrose immediately recognized the resulting PR debacle as the opportunity he had been looking for.

The citizens of the key port city of Thessalonica, like most of the citizens of the Empire, loved chariot racing, and I mean loved chariot racing.

I'm not sure there is any modern sport, football included, that quite touches the salivating obsession exhibited by chariot racing fans in late antiquity.

Part of it was because racing was essentially the only sport going.

They didn't have dozens of options to choose from, so if you were the type of person who was into the thrill of competition, rooting for one team, hating another team, or had any interest at all in gambling, well, then chariot racing was going to be your thing.

Your only thing.

So one day, the biggest chariot racing star in Thessalonica gets arrested on what amounts to charges of homosexual rape.

Locked up in a cell, he is now going to miss the big race, which causes the good citizens of Thessalonica to go a little crazy.

Now, there was definitely more going on here than just the loss of a big star on race day.

Since heading west, Theodosius had left the city garrisoned by a small contingent of Allied Gothic soldiers, which did not sit well with the public, and it was the Gothic captain of this Gothic garrison who was behind the arrest, which really did not sit well with the public.

In their book Theodosius and the Empire at Bay, Stephen Williams and Gerald Friel point out that this meant there were really three factors behind the coming riots at Thessalonica.

First was general resentment over the presence of Gothic soldiers in the city.

Sure, at the top levels, alliances shifted with the winds these days, but down on the mass level, well, hadn't the Goths just been rampaging through our lands like just the other day?

Wounds did not heal as quickly down here as they did in the corridors of power.

Second was the temperamental difference between the Greeks and the Goths when it came to the question of homosexuality.

The former had no real problem with it, while the latter considered it a fairly heinous offense.

Locking up a star charioteer for homosexual activity then was an obnoxious imposition of barbarian sensibility on Greek manners, and now doubly so, given the circumstances.

The third factor was that, well, yeah, they were all pissed that the charioteer was going to be sitting in a cell on race day.

The people of Thessalonica began to get hostile, and pretty soon a riot broke out.

The Gothic garrison wasn't nearly strong enough to get a handle on the mob, and they were quickly overrun.

The Gothic captain behind the arrest and most of his fellow officers were tracked down, killed, and their bodies dragged through the streets.

News quickly reached Theodosius in Milan about what had happened, and he exploded with rage.

The Gothic captain had been a trusted and loyal officer, as evidenced by the fact that he had been given command over the key city of Thessalonica, and his murder by some race crazed mob made Theodosius furious, murderously furious.

Before he could sleep on his anger, he sent orders off to the commander of the new and large garrison being brought in in the wake of the riot.

The orders were as clear as they were evil.

When the citizens of Thessalonica next filled up their hippodrome for a big race, the new garrison came down, locked all the doors, and then marched out into the crowd, swords drawn.

Theodosius' orders had been plain indiscriminate slaughter.

The troops did their bloody work work efficiently, and pretty soon over 7,000 men, women, and children were dead.

Even in the callous days of late antiquity, a time when life was cheap, the massacre of Thessalonica appalled the citizens of the Empire.

Even Theodosius understood that he had gone too far, which is why after sending out his initial order, he sent out another countermanding it, which of course arrived too late, which meant that the emperor, author of the massacre, wound up as appalled as anyone that it had actually taken place.

When Ambrose learned of what had happened, he immediately pulled up stakes and left Milan for the countryside to consider his next move.

The bishop knew that the emperor had just committed a grievous sin, that the emperor furthermore was a religious man, and that that meant that Ambrose had an opportunity to leverage the emperor's guilt into something profitable.

But rather than climb back up onto his bully pulpit, Ambrose was savvy enough to try a different tactic.

He wrote the Emperor a personal letter, saying that unfortunately he would be unable to celebrate mass with Theodosius present until the Emperor had publicly atoned for his sin.

Ambrose was careful to say that he was not angry at the Emperor, and that this was not a punishment, instead saying that he was only doing what had to be done, and that he was in anguish over the damage it might cause to Theodosius' soul.

When Ambrose returned to Milan, Theodosius tried to call the bishop's bluff, but when he approached Ambrose's church, the bishop held fast, refusing the emperor entry.

The honestly Christian Theodosius allowed himself to be turned away, and then proceeded to go into seclusion, remorseful over what he had done, and now deeply concerned over the fate of his immortal soul.

As fall turned to winter 390, the Emperor's running display of fealty to the church finally convinced Ambrose that Theodosius could now be forgiven in the eyes of the Lord.

I'm sure that the Imperial promise to adopt stricter anti-pagan policies had nothing at all to do with Ambrose finally deciding to save Theodosius' soul from its impending doom.

The showdown between Theodosius and Ambrose was a watershed moment for church-state relations.

There had been conflicts between the two before, but up until this point, the state had always had the upper hand.

Constantine had been deferential in his handling of the Christians, but there was never any doubt that when push came to shove, the emperor was in charge.

Here now was an incident where an emperor said, I want X.

The church said, you cannot have X, and the Church, amazingly, won out.

As I said when I introduced Ambrose, had it not been for the bishop's kind of insane degree of self-confidence, it is possible that the Christian Church would have remained forever the junior partner in the Church State Alliance.

But Ambrose's resolve laid an enormously important precedent.

Emperors and kings had power on earth, but the church controlled the fate of the soul.

Now it should be noted that Theodosius' religious temperament played its own critical part in the laying of this precedent.

Had he been the kind of ruler who only paid lip service to Christianity, it would not be hard to picture him simply tossing Ambrose out on his butt and installing a more agreeable bishop in his place.

But Theodosius appears to have believed in Ambrose's power as God's representative on earth, and that it was this belief that proved decisive during the showdown over the Thessalonica massacre.

Now, did this mean that every subsequent temporal ruler ruler would now feel obligated to bow to the church?

Not by a long shot.

But it did mean that some of them would.

That in the coming conflicts between church and state, the church would have some firepower in their arsenal when they demanded fealty from the kings, and an example that they could follow should they ever feel as bold as Ambrose and decide to follow it.

Just ask Henry IV, who was presently standing barefoot in the snow outside the gates of Canosa.

Following his return to the church in early 391, Theodosius, full of new found Christian vigor, turned away from his previous policy of toleration and published a famous edict effectively banning paganism in the Empire.

This edict was not unlike previous edicts banning paganism in the Empire, so it is not quite the revolutionary piece of legislation it is often supposed to be.

But given the times, the influence of Ambrose, and the personal Christian piety of Theodosius, the edict wound up having more teeth than any of its predecessors.

In Egypt, for example, a fanatical bishop named Theophilus seized on the edict as an opportunity to destroy the five century old Serapium of Alexandria, one of the largest and greatest temples of the pagan world.

When the Serapium fell, the last remaining portion of the library of Alexandria fell with it, and the world's eyes turned to see how Theodosius would react.

The emperor did nothing, signaling to Christian extremists that in their war against paganism the gloves could now really come off.

In the summer of 391, Theodosius decided that perhaps it was time for him to be leaving Milan.

Technically, he and Valentinian still adhered to the East-West sharing system, and Theodosius' stay in Italy was always meant to be temporary.

It was time for the Eastern Augustus to return to the Eastern provinces, where he belonged.

But Theodosius, clearly the senior Augustus in all but name, had no intention of just leaving Valentinian to his own devices.

Now fifteen, the boy still needed a guardian, and the western provinces still needed a strong hand to protect them.

So Theodosius installed his old loyal Frankish general Arbogast to act as the master of Valentinian's armed forces.

Not only did Theodosius had complete confidence in Arbogast's ability as a soldier, but he also had complete confidence in Arbogast's ultimate loyalty to him rather than young Valentinian, something which might prove useful someday down the road.

Plus, as a frank, Arbogast was not eligible to ever become emperor himself, so Theodosius would not have to worry about some Maximus-esque usurpation going on.

It all added up to the same thing.

Leaving Arbagost in charge of the military meant Theodosius would never again have to worry about marching west to fight a civil war.

Next week, you guessed it, less than a year after heading back to Constantinople, Valentinian II will be dead, Arbogast will be in revolt, and Theodosius will once again find himself marching west to fight a civil war.

Cozy up with fragrance that feels like fall and smells unforgettable.

Pura's smart, app-controlled diffusers pair with premium scents from brands like Ness New York, Capri Blue, Anthropologie, and more.

Whether you're craving spiced pumpkin, warm amber, or nostalgic woody notes, there's a scent to match every mood in every space.

Discover why Pura is the go-to for premium home fragrance.

Start your fall refresh now at Pura.com.