155- The New Bishop of Milan

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For For the final trivia question, what is the largest mammal in the world?

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Hello, and welcome to the history of Rome, episode 155,

the new bishop of Milan.

Last time, we left off with the Empire ever so temporarily at peace.

The Sassanids had made no sudden moves while Theodosius had been occupied with the Goths, and the Germans of the Rhine frontier had been laying low since Gratian had swooped in and bought the Alemanni in the head right before the Battle of Adrianople.

For the briefest of moments the Roman Empire was free from the burden of armed conflict.

But sadly, it was inevitable that somebody, somewhere, was going to be unable to handle the sheer tranquility of it all and snap.

And indeed, it took all of about ten minutes before somebody, somewhere, snapped.

That somebody?

A senior general named Magnus Maximus, who was the highest ranking officer on the island of Britain.

Seizing the opportunity that quiet frontiers and dissatisfaction with the Western Augustus Gratian provided, Maximus stormed down off Britannia in 383 and lit a big new fire where just moments before it looked like the coals were about to finally burn themselves out.

Such is life.

There is not much to go on about why Maximus decided to suddenly revolt in 383.

All we have to go on is vague hints that Gratian was not popular with the soldiers, and that the Roman occupation of Britain was in bad shape morale-wise.

To take the last part first,

it had been a good 15 years since the great barbarian invasion had nearly knocked the Romans off the island for good.

If you'll recall, far from busting their humps fighting the barbarians off, disgruntled legionaries had actually joined in the plundering.

You'll recall that when he arrived to take hold of the situation, Theodosius the Elder had been forced to rely on some pretty serious clemency to get the wayward troops back in their barracks.

In the decade that followed, Britain was calm, but it does not appear that any of the underlying issues that had led all those soldiers to so readily switch their allegiance had been addressed.

The bottom line was that serving on the island was an unglamorous gig with almost no opportunities for glory or enrichment.

Though, yes, one does wonder if the British soldiers would have preferred getting annihilated at Adrianople.

The more immediate motivation for the revolt, though, was a specific dissatisfaction with Gratian.

We've already touched on the fact that the now 24-year-old emperor had never been a soldier's soldier, and that his father had intentionally kept him out of the camps as a a young man so that the soldiers wouldn't notice just how not a soldier's soldier the future emperor was.

But now that Gratian was emperor, it was hard not to notice that he really wasn't one of them.

I would like to point out, though, that it's not like he was a disaster or anything.

He had, after all, delivered an impressive victory over the Abamani in early 378.

So this was not so much a matter of failure undermining his authority, as it was temperament undermining his authority.

Gratian, and can you blame him, preferred the luxuries and comforts of civilian life to the rough hardships of military life.

From grunt to general, then, the soldiers never really formed a bond with Gratian, and so when it came time to defend him or overthrow him, well, as we will see, Gratian died alone.

The last specific detail we have about why the troops disliked the emperor was the fact that Gratian seemed to favor his elite Alan bodyguard at the expense of everyone else.

In a story reminiscent of Constance and his archers, so reminiscent, in fact, that I wonder which, if either, story is actually true,

Gratian appears to have grown so enamored with his Alan guards that on top of lavishing them with wealth and honors, he took to acting like them and dressing like them.

Now, the troops up in Britain never would have witnessed this first hand, but disgruntled stories would have been passed around and done their dirty work to undermine Gratian's reputation anyway.

I think the real impact of this favoritism, though, was most likely felt as Maximus's army was approaching Paris.

The troops nearest Gratian would have seen it all for themselves, and so when it came time to fight or desert, they decided to desert.

After all, if the Elon Bodyguard is so awesome, well, let them protect the emperor.

The other small bit of information we have about Maximus' motivation comes from the general's resume.

See in particular that under previous work experience, we have him down as serving in North Africa under Theodosius the Elder during the revolt of Firmus.

And before that, we have him down as very likely serving on the campaign to re-secure Britain after the barbarian invasions of 367-368,

also under Theodosius the Elder.

In other words, Maximus was a longtime friend, ally, and compatriot of the Theodosian family.

His relationship with the younger Theodosius, 15 years his junior, would have gone back to the earliest stages of the now emperor's career.

And given the tone of his correspondence with the Eastern Augustus immediately following the demise of Gratian, Gratian, it is clear that not only did Maximus expect Theodosius to recognize him as the new Augustus of the West, but he expected Theodosius to be happy about it.

When weighing the pros and cons of revolt, the fact that an old friend was now emperor of the East had to have been seen by Maximus as a huge, possibly decisive pro.

But before we get into the revolt of Maximus, I want to back up a little bit and introduce a man who was going to be right smack dab in the middle of it all.

And not just right smack dab in the middle of the revolt, mind you, though he was right smack dab in the middle of the revolt, but right smack dab in the middle of everything that happens in the last quarter of the fourth century.

State, church, diplomacy, war, peace, you name it, there he is.

I speak, of course, of the man you just knew was going to pop up eventually, Aurelius Ambrosius, better known to us as Saint Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan.

Not to get off on too meta of a tangent, but I tend to see history as an interplay between broad socioeconomic factors and the specific actions of key individuals.

Sometimes socioeconomic factors take the lead, like say the way the potato famine drove Irish migration to North America in the eighteen forties.

Sometimes the two walk in lockstep, like, say, the way the conditions of post World War One Germany made the rise of fascism possible, but that the specific and malevolent idiosyncrasies of Hitler defined the form that it took.

And sometimes it is the key individual who takes the lead and drives the ox cart of history for a while.

Ambrose of Milan was a driver.

He was a staunch anti-pagan, he was a staunch anti-Aryan, and he believed that all men, emperors included, must kneel before God.

When he died in 397, his specific beliefs had more or less become the entrenched imperial worldview.

Even more importantly than that, had it not been for Ambrose, it is possible that a thousand years of argument over whether state was superior to church or church was superior to state might never have occurred, because the church's case never would have gotten off the ground.

Any other man serving as bishop of Milan in the late fourth century, and the whole world turns out differently, I think.

He was that big of a deal.

And even if you don't believe any of that, at a minimum you can blame him for the fact that we all have to read selected portions of the City of God for the umpteenth time for the test on Friday.

And I can't tell you how much I'd like to shake his hand for that.

Ambrose was born in the late 330s AD in the imperial capital of Trier and was the son of a Praetorian prefect.

So the future bishop's life is not a rags to riches story, so much as it is a riches to more riches story.

Given the hereditary laws in place at the time, the fact that his father was such a high-ranking civil servant meant that Ambrose was destined for a career in the imperial bureaucracy.

Which leads us to one of the more interesting facts about Ambrose for someone who knows nothing about him.

He never was a priest.

He had no intention of ever becoming a priest, and when he was elected bishop of Milan, he had never served in the church in any official capacity.

He hadn't even been baptized yet.

Young Ambrose was sent to Rome to get the full classical education, and he excelled in every subject he touched: grammar, rhetoric, law, philosophy, whatever.

We don't have good records for what he did after he came of age, beyond the fact that he established a reputation for himself of being a brilliant orator and an excellent lawyer.

We next find him in the early 370s being appointed consular prefect of the northern Italian administrative districts of Emilia and Liguria.

This prefecture just so happened to be headquartered in Milan, which meant that Ambrose, now in his mid to late thirties, became well known to the court of Valentinian, and his political future looked bright.

He was popular with the people, respected by his peers, and marked for promotion by his superiors.

But then his life and career and world history took an unexpected turn.

In 374, the sitting bishop of Milan died.

Now, the sitting bishop just so happened to have been of Aryan persuasion, which had rankled the majority Nicene population of the city.

Now that the bishop was dead, this majority naturally wanted the next bishop to be chaste, moral, and above all, a staunch Nicene.

But the Aryan minority population, who just so happened to be supported by Valentinian's wife Justina, wanted the next bishop to be an Aryan, just like the old bishop had been.

And so the Christian population of Milan started a fight with itself, and of course no one was willing to give an inch.

In his capacity as consular prefect, Ambrose showed up on the day that the new bishop was to be elected, with the sole objective of keeping the peace.

He had reason to believe he might be able to keep a lid on things since he was respected by both sides.

Though a Nicene by disposition, Ambrose had always been tolerant of Aryanism in his role as prefect, and so everyone saw him as an honest broker.

When the election started to get out of hand, Ambrose stepped in to see if he couldn't settle everyone down.

And then someone in the crowd had a bright idea, and they shouted, Ambrose for bishop.

This cry was then taken up by the whole assembly.

Everyone suddenly agreed that Ambrose was the perfect compromise candidate.

Everyone, that is, except Ambrose himself, who begged and pleaded with the crowd to please think up a different solution.

He knew no theology, he was no priest, he hadn't even been baptized yet.

But the calls for his elevation persisted.

So Ambrose did the prudent thing.

He hightailed it out of there and went into hiding.

A week later, he was still in hiding when a message signed by the young young emperor Gratian began making the rounds.

Apparently, the emperor fully supported the wise decision to make the eminently capable consular prefect bishop.

Ambrose was stuck, and he knew it.

So he came out of hiding, went and got baptized, and became the new bishop of Milan.

An unconventional path to the cloth for sure, but once he got there, boy howdy, did he ever make the most of it.

Now on a normal day, being the bishop of Milan meant having a healthy degree of influence.

After all, you were the most powerful Christian official in the most important imperial capital in the Western Empire.

But after just a year in office, it stopped being a normal day for Ambrose.

Because in 375 Valentinian I suddenly died, and his youngest son, Valentinian II, was elevated to the rank of Augustus.

When the imperial court had left Milan in 374 heading east, it had been led by a domineering general who had been in office for more than a decade.

When it returned, it was led by a four-year-old.

Now, for a variety of reasons, the Roman imperial system rarely strayed into child emperors, which meant that when it did, there was no agreed to precedent for how to handle the situation.

Basically, that meant that a variety of powerful ministers would jockey with each other for power until a few emerged triumphant from the backrooms as the de facto heads of state.

In the case of young Valentinian II, the emergent leaders of the Milan court turned out to be the Empress Justina and the hugely popular and supremely capable new bishop of Milan, who managed to talk his way right into the heart of the imperial government.

This is interesting for its own sake, but it's also interesting because Justina was a staunch Aryan, while Ambrose was an Orthodox Nicene.

If you don't think the fact that the two most powerful figures in Milan are on opposite sides of a hugely contentious religious feud is going to cause problems, well, you just don't know highly contentious religious feuds.

But wait, you say, I thought Ambrose was sympathetic to the Aryans.

I thought he was an honest broker.

Well, yes, he

But Ambrose's influence did not stop at the city limits of Milan.

The bishop's silver tongue began to influence the religious policies of the not much more than a boy himself, Emperor Gratian.

This meant, first of all, that the previously ambivalent Gratian adopted Nicene Christianity, but it also meant, second of all, that Ambrose's strong anti-pagan views began to show up in imperial edicts being issued from Gratian's court in Trier.

Though most of the high officials, leading ministers, top generals, and even rank-and-file troops had come over to Christianity in the last fifty years, the rural areas of of the empire were still mostly untouched by the urban Christian revolution, and down in Rome, the old Italian senatorial class was still fiercely committed to their traditional religions.

Since the days of Constantine, the emperors had adopted a policy of indifference toward the paganism of the rural poor and a policy of toleration toward the paganism of the Italian aristocracy.

The former posed no political threat and so could be safely ignored, while the latter posed such a political threat that it was better to let sleeping dogs lie.

But the bold and ambitious Ambrose decided that that wasn't good enough.

Either Christianity was the truth or it was not.

If it was, then why do we tolerate demonic paganism in any form?

And if it was not, then what are we doing here?

So, at Ambrose's prodding, Gratian started to come down hard on Roman paganism, targeting previously untouchable institutions like the priesthood of Jupiter and the Vestal Virgins.

These were the zero-hour foundational cults of Rome that were the bedrock of Roman civilization.

They predated the Republic, for crying out loud.

Gratian ignored the pleas of the Italians and ordered all public financing for the cults cut off.

Starved of funding, these ancient priesthoods would limp on for a few more years until Theodosius would finally put them out of their misery once and for all.

But the most controversial anti-pagan edict that Gratian issued came in 382, when the emperor ordered the altar of victory removed from the Senate house.

The famous gold statue of the winged Nike had been captured by the Romans way back during their war with Pyrrhus and installed in the Senate house by Octavian to celebrate his victory at Actium.

The statue was widely seen as the personification of Rome's imperial power.

To remove it was not just a question of sacrilege, it was a question of national security.

A passionate debate erupted between Ambrose and Simachus, the most powerful individual senator of the day, which ended, of course, with victory for Ambrose.

The altar was removed.

Now, the altar of victory would be restored during the short, unrecognized reign of Eugenius, but it would be removed again by Theodosius when he captured control of the whole empire, this time for good.

There are a good half-dozen places in history we can point to and say this is when the Western Roman Empire ended.

The ascension of Diocletian in 284, the triumph of Constantine in 324, the sack of Rome in 410, the sack of Rome in 455, the expulsion of Romulus Augustalus in 476,

everyone seems to have their own pet moment that they like to point to.

For those inclined towards superstition, a favorite pet moment to point to is right here, when the altar of victory was removed from the Senate House in 382.

After all, given what happened next, it is hard not to draw some pretty heavy conclusions about the magical powers of the altar of victory.

While it stood, Rome was strong and unconquered.

When it was removed, Rome was sacked for the first time in 800 years, and then it was sacked again.

Less than a hundred years later, the Rome that had been the mistress of the world for a thousand years was gone.

Coincidence?

You tell me.

Just as an aside, I always thought the altar of victory, whose fate is officially unknown, would have made a great centerpiece for that long-awaited fourth Indiana Jones movie.

But in the end, I guess they decided that it was better to leave the series as a trilogy rather than ruin it with an incoherent crap fest that was as dumb as it was stupid.

For that, I salute Mr.

Spielberg and Mr.

Lucas for putting their commitment to quality filmmaking ahead of their desire to make a boatload of cash.

Anyway, in the midst of the fight over the altar of victory, there was one other little development that deserves to be mentioned.

In his defense of the altar, Simachus argues that despite the religious transformations of the last fifty years, the emperor was still Pontifex Maximus, and as such he had a duty to protect these ancient pagan symbols of Rome.

It was a fine argument, but one countered easily by Ambrose.

The bishop advised Gratian to simply renounce the title Pontifex Maximus, bringing an end to yet another bedrock institution of imperial power, and one that had been around almost as long as the altar had stood in the Senate House.

This renunciation also had the sly effect of ending the official unification of religion and government in the person of the emperor, leading to a whole new era in the West where the head of the church and the head of the state were no longer the same man,

which, as you can imagine, had some pretty far-reaching consequences.

So this is where things stood as Theodosius wound down the Gothic War.

Ambrose was ascendant, the last vestiges of paganism were under attack, Gratian was unpopular with the troops, the Aryan Empress Justina held sway over the now twelve-year-old Valentinian II, the Nicene Theodosius was establishing himself as a peacetime ruler of the East, and up in Britain, Maximus, longtime ally of the Theodosian family, was considering revolt.

Everyone had an agenda, everyone had an angle, and everyone was about to get thrown into the hopper to see who came out the other side.

In 383, the hopper was turned on when Maximus's troops spontaneously hailed their general as Augustus.

Unlike previous revolts that we've seen in the West, those of, say, posthumous or Corotius, Maximus was not acting out of local interest.

He had no intention of setting up some splinter kingdom in the hopes of better addressing some crisis.

He was making a good old-fashioned play at ruling the whole empire.

Well, the western half of it, anyway.

So, of course, that meant immediately pulling up almost all the British troops and sailing off with them for Gaul, to track down the emperor and overthrow him.

You think this might have a negative effect on the Roman ability to hold on to the island?

Yeah, me too.

Gratian was down in northern Italy when he learned that Maximus was in revolt.

Reinforcing the image that he was not a real soldier, the emperor was in the middle of preparing for a military campaign into Ratia when he got the news.

Wait, what?

I thought Gratian wasn't into soldiering, and now he's

so wait a minute.

How much of his reputation is based on truth and how much is based on slander?

Well, that's a really good question.

He was abandoned pretty quickly by his men, though, so maybe it wasn't all slander.

But honestly, I don't think anyone knows what the hell is really going on here, why people hated Gratian, and why they turned on him so quickly.

Gratian took the army he had gathered to fight the Germans and instead marched them north into Gaul to face Maximus.

The two armies met near Paris in mid-August 383, where they spent five days maneuvering around each other.

None of the soldiers had any interest in actually fighting a battle, and it quickly became apparent that this was going to be solved in the tents rather than in the field.

After the fifth day, a squadron of elite cavalry defected to Maximus.

Shortly thereafter, the great general Maributus, the man who had raised up Valentinian II, was convinced, or bribed, or whatever, to cross the line as well.

Then the floodgates opened.

Pretty soon Gratian was standing alone.

He fled with his entourage south to Lyon, where the plan was probably for him to sail to Italy, but for some reason he lingered in the city, which allowed Maximus's men to catch up to him.

Gratian was betrayed into their hands and unceremoniously executed.

He was twenty-four years old, and though he had technically been an Augustus for sixteen years, only for the last eight of those years had he truly been a ruler.

At the end of the day, no one knows why he was abandoned so easily by his men, or why loyalty to the house of Valentinian was so quickly cast aside.

Next week, though, we will find at least one man in the Empire who was not so ready to discard his loyalty to the ruling dynasty.

The Emperor Theodosius.

It would have been easy for him to accept Maximus, but he simply couldn't bring himself to endorse the patently illegal revolt and the shocking regicide that went with it.

He had neither the men nor the resources to do anything about it just then, but from the get-go, it appears that Theodosius' mind was made up.

Maximus would have to answer for his crimes, and if that meant civil war, then so be it.

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