147- Capitulation

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Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome,

episode 147: Capitulation.

Last week, we left off with the Eastern Legions in a bit of a scrape.

The Emperor Julian was dead, he had not named a successor, and they were surrounded on all sides by a hostile Sassanid army.

Any one of those things taken alone would have been pretty rotten, but taken together, well, let's break out the popcorn and see what happens next.

After news of Julian's death got out, the senior officers of the army got together and tried to figure out what the hell they were going to do next.

Naturally, the first order of business was figuring out who was in charge.

After all, a good chain of command can't just peter out into a mud puddle of cavalry officers and supply chiefs.

Someone's got to be the eye in the pyramid.

With no imperial relatives around to make the choice easy on them, the officers turned to the most obvious non-royal candidate, the senior Praetorian Prefect, Saturninius Secundus Salutius.

The Prefect was universally respected, and from the moment Julian had been named Caesar, Salutius had been one of the emperor's closest and most influential advisors.

He had been so trusted, in fact, that when Julian had formed the commission to oversee the post-Constantius purge of the imperial court, Salutius had been its chairman.

Elevated to the rank Praetorian Prefect of the East after the Commission wrapped up its business, Salutius was the highest-ranking official in the tent after Julian died.

So the senior officers of the army tried to make him emperor.

But Salutius begged off, pleading that he was too old and too sick for such an exhausting job.

Also, man, is now really the best time to become emperor.

So the officers went back to the drawing board and came up with a surprising new candidate, a man who at the very least would not be able to cite Arthritis as an excuse to get out of the promotion.

Captain of the Imperial Bodyguard, Flavius Jovianus.

The choice of Jovian was surprising, not just because he was only 31 years old, but also because he was a relative unknown.

That is, he was not some high official or long serving officer with a lifetime of experience under his belt and friends in all corners of the empire.

Plus, while he was a fine officer, he had likely risen as high as he had, as fast as he had, not because of merit, but because his father had served for years in that same post.

So though his sudden elevation to the purple is surprising, I reckon that Jovian got the call for two main reasons.

First, because there were enough internal rivalries between the officers that, after Salutius, any unanimous choice was going to have to be a lesser candidate because all the better candidates had enemies in the room.

And second, again,

man, is now really the best time to become emperor?

Ammianus Marcellinus reports that Jovian was such an unexpected choice that when the soldiers cheered his elevation, it is possible that they completely misunderstood who they were cheering, that some thought they were hailing a high notary named Jovianus, while others thought they were cheering a recovered Julian.

But despite coming out of nowhere, Jovian was not exactly coming out of nowhere.

He was born around three hundred thirty one in Illyria, making him roughly the same age as Julian, and as I mentioned, he was the son of a highly regarded officer who had risen to become captain of Constantius II's personal bodyguard.

Jovian was also, coincidentally enough, the son-in-law of the commander of the Sirmium garrison, who Julian had kidnapped just prior to taking the city in mid-361.

There are two interesting things to note about Jovian's rise in the ranks that speak to Julian's character.

First, Julian was not necessarily one to hold a family grudge.

Both Jovian's father and father-in-law had been loyal to Constantius II,

which you would think would be the sort of thing that would actually preclude Jovian from being promoted to such a key position, but apparently it was not.

Second, Jovian was openly Christian, which contradicts any notion that Julian was an anti-Christian extremist.

He was anti-Christian, sure, but a good officer was a good officer, and good officers were in short supply.

The presence in the army of Valentinian, who we will get to in a moment, further speaks to the surprisingly limited extent of Julian's religious intolerance,

which is to say that when push came to shove, for Julian, talent often trumped religion.

Before I get off this point, I should note also, though, that the same was true for Constantine and his sons.

Yes, they were Christian and promoted Christianity and tried to push paganism to the fringes, but during the period between the Milvian Bridge and the revolt of Julian, polytheist officers and polytheist officials continued to occupy key positions in the military and in the government.

The emperors were pragmatic men ruling in difficult times, and talent was not just something you could discard, even if there was a larger religious battle to fight.

In terms of the sheer ugliness of the situation an emperor walked into upon donning the purple, there were few situations uglier than the one Jovian walked into.

Probably only the ascension of Gallus, who came to power after the disaster at Abritus, rivals Jovian's ascension in terms of its terrible no goodness.

In both cases an emperor was dead at the enemy's hand, that enemy was was still at hand, and the Roman army was mentally and physically broken.

Which is why only Gallus could probably appreciate what Jovian did next.

Certainly none of Jovian's contemporaries demonstrated any appreciation for it at all.

It's easy to demand vigor and resiliency, and if that fails, noble self sacrifice, when you're safely tucked thousands of miles away at the imperial capital much harder when you're actually standing there, plausibly facing total annihilation.

The new emperor at first attempted to continue the retreat towards Armenia, but the loss of Julian had destroyed morale, so he did what he no doubt felt he had to do.

He sent envoys to Shapur and asked what the price would be for safe passage home.

Shapur was delighted by this turn of events and replied that the terms would be simple.

Give back all the territory ceded to Galerius by the Treaty of Nispus, exactly what the Sassanid king had demanded of Constantius back in 357.

This meant the Romans would have to evacuate all the fortress cities that had acted as their forward line of defense and pull out of all the territory they occupied on the far side of the Tigris.

The one added term Shapur tacked on was a guarantee of Armenian neutrality in all future conflicts between the two empires.

The terms were harsh, and essentially amounted to total capitulation for the Romans, but Jovian had little choice.

For him, the deal boiled down to capitulate with your army left intact, or capitulate after it has been destroyed.

Sure, in the latter case, maybe you get to go out fighting, but was that really in the best interest of the empire long term?

To lose its whole Eastern army in battle just for the sheer stubborn glory of it all?

Jovian, probably glad Shapur wasn't asking for more, accepted the terms.

The Romans were granted safe passage back to Syria.

Julian had gone out looking for victory for victory's sake, and the army instead returned with nothing to show for it, but defeat for the sake of survival.

Now, I would be remiss if if I did not point out that there is another way to look at the Roman surrender.

For example, Amianus Marcellinus states that Jovian misunderstood the tactical realities of the situation, that the new emperor was mistaken in his belief that the cause was hopeless, because Shapur was actually much weaker than he appeared.

And it is worth asking a few questions.

If the cause was so hopeless, why hadn't the Sassanids crushed the Romans yet?

If the cause was so hopeless, why had Shapur asked only for withdrawal from the land beyond the Tigris?

Why not demand all of Mesopotamia?

Why not demand the Roman army lay down its arms before they headed home?

The answers to these questions no doubt lie in Shapur's own evaluation of the situation, which likely jibes with Marcellinus' assessment.

That the Romans were run down, but they weren't beaten yet.

That it was best not to risk asking the Romans for too much, because if they decided they had to fight on, well, this isn't exactly a case of the ant begging the foot for mercy.

Shapur clearly did not think he held the lives of the Romans in the palm of his hand, otherwise the terms would have been even harsher.

Indeed, if Jovian had decided to keep on fighting, it is very possible that the fortunes of war could have turned this all from a Roman debacle into a Roman victory, a fact the Sassanid king must have been acutely aware of.

So, when the emperor came calling, Shapur jumped at the chance to end this thing on favorable terms.

Remember, he had never wanted this war in the first place because he did not think he was strong enough to beat the Romans without it costing him big time.

All that said, however, a strategy that pins its hopes on the fortunes of war suddenly turning your way risks an awful lot.

In this case, it meant risking the safety of the entire Eastern Empire.

If the expeditionary army was destroyed, then there would be nothing to stop Shapur from sacking Antioch, and maybe even from sacking Alexandria.

It was just that simple.

At a minimum, any further fighting would just mean more dead Roman soldiers.

Not dead for any purpose, but dead because the invasion had been a bad idea, poorly executed, and no one wanted to admit it.

Sometimes you just have to grit your teeth, tip your cap, and go home.

And what was the cost?

Some land beyond the Tigris?

No one was ceding Syria, no one was handing over Egypt.

Jovian was accepting mild defeat, rather than risk appalling defeat.

Was it the optimum outcome?

Of course not.

Especially when you factor in that the surrender, of course, emboldened Shapur and left later Romans hungry for revenge, which virtually guaranteed continued strife along the eastern frontier for another generation.

And, as you may or may not know, that strife will one day prove so distracting that the issue of what to do about the horde of Goths that just showed up on the Danube asking for asylum will be badly mishandled.

And I mean, badly mishandled.

Who knows?

Maybe a mutually destructive fight in the desert would have led to an exhausted peace in the east that would have left the Romans free to deal with the incoming Goths responsibly.

But now I'm just kind of wandering off topic.

Jovian made the deal.

The Roman army headed home intact.

When Jovian and his exhausted men arrived back in Roman territory, the reaction to his peace deal was immediate and negative.

The ruling narrative quickly became that Jovian was a coward who had sold out the Empire to save his own skin.

In an age when military victory and political legitimacy were one and the same, just ask Julian, Jovian had committed the unforgivable sin of surrender.

It would have been interesting to see just how long Jovian would have been able to stay in power given this albatross hanging around his neck.

We'll never know, of course, because, well, we'll get to that in a second, but it is hard to imagine too much time passing before Jovian faced either a palace coup or a military revolt.

By all accounts, the emperor was acutely aware of his unpopularity, but before heading to Constantinople, he lingered in Antioch and began the process of returning the Empire to Christianity.

The fact that he was personally a Christian had to have played a major role in his subsequent edicts, but it's easy to imagine the new emperor also believed he was laying the foundations for his own base of power.

Reinstate the Christians, get the support of the Christians.

Isn't that how these things work?

To this end, Julian annulled most of the restrictions on Christian practices and revived most of the restrictions on pagan practices.

The Empire would never again return to its polytheistic roots.

In November of 363, Jovian felt that things were settled enough in the East that he could afford to head to Constantinople and face his political unpopularity head on.

He knew that he was likely walking into a viper's nest of backstabbers, because, after all, in addition to being the man who had surrendered the Eastern Legions, he wasn't even a member of the Constantinian dynasty, so who did he think he was anyway?

It was going to be a tough sell, but Jovian was a tough guy and ready to do what he had to do to secure the throne for years to come, except, yeah, it's not going to happen.

In February of 364, Jovian was heading down the home stretch in between Anchira and Nicaea when he suddenly died.

Some sources point to carbon monoxide poisoning, while others point to poison mushrooms.

A few later sources take it on faith that the emperor was assassinated, but most modern scholars seem to come down squarely on the side of a freak accident.

I, for one, am under the impression that Livia did it.

Whatever or whoever it was that killed Jovian, he was 32 years old when he died and had ruled the empire for just eight months.

I hate to say this because I'm fairly sympathetic to Jovian, but I think his death was a blessing for Rome.

I really don't see how the Empire survives the next few years or even the next few months without some kind of disastrous civil war.

There had already been riots in Milan when Julian's death was announced, riots that wound up killing Jovian's father-in-law, by the way, who had been the one to read the announcement.

Jovian was a political newcomer.

He had no connection to the previous dynasty, and he had just surrendered to the Sassanids.

You take these three things together, and you get big red flashing lights going off in the head of every ambitious general and prefect in the Empire.

Though Rome would still have to deal with the brief revolt of Julian's maternal cousin Percopius, I don't think that that even touches the kind of civil discord that probably would have broken out had Julian lived.

That's just speculation on my part, but I think the combination of Valentinian and Valens offered a much stronger imperial hand than Jovian would have ever been able to provide.

Which brings us to Valentinian and Valens.

Who are Valentinian and Valens, you ask?

Well, I'll tell you.

The former was a highly regarded officer who was in the right place at the right time, and the latter was that guy's brother.

Flavius Valentinianus had been born in 321 in Pannonia, and was the son of an important general named Gratianus.

Gratianus had spent most of his career in the west, and he reached the uppermost rungs of the chain of command during the reign of Constance.

Young Valentinian joined the army just after Constance took control of all the western provinces in 340, and he followed his father to postings first in North Africa and then in Britain.

After Gratianus presciently retired just before the fall of Constance, we don't know where exactly Valentinian went next, but it was almost certainly somewhere along the Rhine or Danube frontier.

The confusion about who was doing what when continues during the period of Magnentius's revolt.

No sources speak to what, if any role Valentinian played in the conflict, but we do know know that following his victory, Constantius II confiscated the estates of Gratianus, hinting that the retired general may have been providing support for the usurping general, which was not out of the question since the two old soldiers were both veterans of the Western legions.

If Valentinian joined his father's presumed support for Magnentius, it cannot have been too staunch because the rising officer next appears in Gaul attached to Julian's army, which is not exactly the sort of promotion you'd expect for a blood enemy of the dynasty.

It was in Gaul that Valentinian really began to make a name for himself.

He served with distinction as a cavalry officer, almost certainly fought at the Battle of Strasbourg, and generally endeared himself to superiors and subordinates alike.

The senior officers liked him because he got the job done, and the grunts liked him because of his easy going disposition,

a disposition which is kind of hard to imagine given Valentinian's ultimate cause of death.

In the winter of 359 360, Valentinian was promoted to the Eastern Legions, as Constantius prepared for war against the Sassanids, and he was likely already in Antioch by the time Julian revolted in January of 360.

For Valentinian, the upshot of this imperial conflict was that he was immediately dismissed from service by Constantius, who was concerned that Valentinian's close ties to Julian would make him a potential snake in the grass.

As with the revolt of Magnentius, we don't know what Valentinian thought about Julian's uprising, but it's possible Constantius was being overly paranoid about the whole thing, because after Julian became sole emperor, Valentinian was forced to remain in semi-exile in Egypt.

As a Christian, in a time when that was suddenly a bad thing again, Valentinian's future was very much in doubt.

However, as Julian was building up his war machine to go invade Persia, he recalled Valentinian to service.

Like I said, good officers are good officers, whatever they believe, and Valentinian was a good officer.

His reward for being such a good officer was that he got to witness firsthand the utter meltdown of the Eastern Invasion, Julian's subsequent death, and the Roman army's humiliating withdrawal back to Syria.

When they reached Antioch, though, Valentinian received one of the most fortuitous promotions in history.

As Jovian worked through the aftermath of the failed invasion and tried to lay the groundwork for his own imperial rule, he sent Valentinian to Anchira to command a key infantry division,

which meant that when Jovian passed through a few months later and then suddenly died a few miles down the road, well, good Valentinian was right there, wasn't he?

I mean, literally, physically, right there.

Wasn't he?

The immediate response to Jovian's death was very similar to the immediate response to Julian's death.

The military and political inner circle got together and tried to figure out who the next emperor was going to be.

Initially, two names were put forward Aquetius, a veteran officer, and Januarius, a relative of Jovian's who was currently overseeing supply operations in Illyria.

But as the officials talked their way through the problem, Aquetius was rejected because he was a bit rough around the edges, too much soldier and not enough statesman.

Then Januarius was rejected because there would be a frightening lag time between now and when we can actually drape him in the purple.

No one wanted to be responsible for opening up a prolonged power vacuum.

So what they needed was an experienced officer who was educated and cultured enough to survive as a politician, but who was also near enough at hand that we can get him in office like right now.

And then some one mentioned Valentinian, who they had just passed a few days back.

And they all liked and respected Valentinian, and the men seemed to like and respect Valentinian, and he's pretty well educated, and hey, I think we have our man.

A messenger was sent at once to fetch the no doubt surprised, but apparently willing Valentinian, and on February 26, 364 AD, he became emperor of the Roman Empire.

When he emerged to address the the assembled troops, however, they greeted him more as an angry mob than as joyful subjects.

With all the backroom picking of emperors lately, the soldiers were starting to feel left out of the process.

But Valentinian assured them that the needs of the army would always come first, and that they had nothing to fear from Emperor Valentinian.

After all, was he not one of them?

With the army now pretty securely on his side, Valentinian next had to shore up political support for his new dynasty.

To this end, one of his first acts as emperor was to announce that he would be appointing another emperor.

With the East not at all secured, and the West shaky at best, appointing a second emperor would ensure that everyone would have the imperial authority they needed to respond to crises when they needed it.

A few weeks later Valentinian completed Jovian's journey and arrived in Constantinople, whereupon he announced his choice for co-emperor, his brother Valens, the man who, as I am sure you already know, will one day ride out into a swarm of Goths at the disastrous Battle of Adrianople, never to return.

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