143- Julian the Pre-Apostate

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Hello, and welcome to the history of Rome.

Episode 143, Julian the Pre-Apostate.

After defeating Magnentius, dispensing with Gallus, and putting down the recent revolt of Silvanus, for the first time in a long time, Constantius II was completely secure on the throne.

But with everything that had gone on the last few years, it must have felt like the most insecure security in the world, like that at any moment some chunk of the empire could slip away and bring Constantius crashing down with it.

Opportunistic German tribes had taken advantage of the shaky Rhine defenses, leaving the west awash in barbarian invaders.

The Sarmatians were a persistent source of trouble along the Danube, and it seemed like the Sassanids would come crashing back into Mesopotamia at any moment.

So while Constantius had to have been happy that he now was the sole and unchallenged ruler of the Empire, he also had to have been more than a little wary about what the future had in store for him.

With all of this weighing on his mind, the Emperor finally decided in November of 355 to elevate the last male member of his family to the purple and hoped the young man would be able to help shore up that insecure security Constantius was wrestling with.

It was obvious that at this stage in history, the Empire absolutely needed multiple emperors fighting on multiple fronts to keep the whole project from falling apart, and so enter Julian the Apostate.

Julian had been born in 331 or 332 AD in Constantinople, and as we've already seen, he managed to survive the massacre of the princes by virtue of the fact that he was too young to pose any immediate threat.

After the massacre, Julian was shipped off with his brother to Bithynia to live with their maternal grandmother, and he appears to have had a happy few years living in comfortable pseudo-exile.

His education was overseen by the bishop Eusebius, the same bishop Constantius had pushed to take over Constantinople in 338, and a Gothic eunuch named Mardanius.

After Eusebius died in 341, Julian and Gallus were packed off to an imperial estate in Cappadocia, and there was nothing pseudo about this exile.

Far from the cosmopolitan centers of the empire, the villa in Cappadocia became a prison, but young Julian only managed to escape by means of the collection of books he was allowed to accumulate.

Studying anything that seemed even mildly interesting, interesting, Julian became enamored with Greek philosophy and the pagan cults of old, though he was always careful to focus first and foremost on Christian texts to avoid any unpleasant questions about where his heart might be drifting.

In 348, probably because he already had his eye on them as potential heirs, the sonless Constantius recalled his cousins from their Cappadocian exile.

Gallus likely spent some time in Ephesus before settling in at Constantinople, while Julian spent the next two years bouncing between the capital and Nicomedia, furthering both his classical and Christian education by studying with the greatest teachers of his age.

Following the revolt of Magnentius, the universe fired a warning shot across Julian's contemplative bow when he found himself present in Sirmium to witness his brother's elevation to the rank of Caesar.

It is one thing to be the kept relative of a distant Augustus.

It is quite another to be the brother of a Caesar.

The political waters were lapping at Julian's heels.

But they would not drown him just yet, and for the next few years he was allowed some freedom of movement to continue his studies.

So he traveled up and down the Anatolian coast, where he sought out the great masters of philosophy and rhetoric and even magic.

It was at this point, round about 351 or 352 AD, that Julian turned decisively away from Christianity.

Now, there was no real dramatic moment of conversion where Julian lights a bundle of scripture on fire and declares himself the enemy of Christianity for all time.

It was just that during this period, the scales of belief tipped away from Christianity and towards paganism.

Julian knew Christian scripture backward and forward, and had always been troubled by its many contradictions.

And so now he embraced an alternative theology.

The classical philosophy he read and the pagan cult he encountered were exciting, and most likely they simply offered Julian a more satisfying explanation of the cosmos than he found in Christian teachings.

I should note, though, that a few armchair psychologists have argued that Julian's rejection of Christianity may have stemmed from the fact that his devoutly Christian cousin Constantius had, you know, murdered his entire family.

But I think that's unnecessary.

I just think Julian was a whip smart 20-year-old who turned his back on the traditional religion of his family in order to pursue more exotic belief systems.

Things like this happen literally every single day, so I don't think we need to bring the trauma of his childhood in to explain why Julian ultimately turned his back on Christianity forever.

I have to imagine that the years in between Gallus's rise and Gallus' fall had to have been the happiest of Julian's life.

He was young, mostly free to come and go as he pleased, and he was surrounded by exciting new ideas.

For a reserved intellectual like Julian, this had to have been something close to heaven, enjoying the perks of his imperial connections without any of the political or military entanglements.

However, when the Gallus affair climaxed with the execution of his brother, the idyllic life of Julian ended, and something far more complicated took its place.

As the last remaining male relative of Constantius, he was called to Milan shortly after his brother's death in late 354 so that the emperor could size him up, figure out if he was dangerous first of all, and then figure out if maybe Julian could handle the job of Caesar should the need arise.

After his arrival in the Italian capital though, he was kept under a sort of house arrest.

He wasn't allowed to leave, but neither was he ever summoned to meet with Constantius.

So is he going to kill me like the rest of my family?

Is he going to let me go?

Like, what's the deal here?

This limbo persisted a good seven months, and it was not until mid-355 that Constantius finally decided to have a look at the boy.

Julian had done his best to adopt a non-threatening posture throughout his life, and after meeting with the emperor, Julian was relieved to discover that this posture had shown through.

His confinement in Milan did not in fact turn out to be him just sitting on death row.

Constantius decided to let his cousin leave Italy to continue his education.

His life having just flashed before his eyes though, Julian took this opportunity to visit the only city a burgeoning young intellectual absolutely must visit before they die, Athens.

He received permission to travel to the ancient city and departed at once.

Eager to take in everything that Athens had to offer, he studied at the feet of the Greek masters and was inducted into the Ellucinian mysteries.

But at the end of autumn 355, just three months after arriving, Julian learned that his days as a professional student were about to come to an end.

Or maybe Constantius had reconsidered, and it was his life that was about to come to an end.

Julian, reluctantly, and most likely fearfully, returned to Milan.

As I'm sure you can probably guess, though, Constantius had not called Julian back to Milan to kill him.

No, he had a far worse fate in store for the cerebral 23-year-old.

On November 6, 355 AD, Constantius assembled the troops and announced that he was making Julian his Caesar.

The troops cheered, Julian cringed, and the Empire had itself a new junior emperor.

And what would the new junior emperor's assignment be?

How about ridding all Gaul of its German invaders and returning peace and security to the western provinces?

Think you can handle that?

This throw him in the deep end and see if he can swim mentality has been taken by some to indicate that Constantius didn't really care if Julian sank or swam.

If the kid pulls it off, then great, the Empire is that much better for it.

But if it turns out he's in over his head and gets killed in the fighting, well, that takes care of a dynastic threat I'll probably just get all paranoid about in a few years anyway.

In other words, sending Julian north was win-win, at least from Constantius' point of view.

As Julian left for Gaul, I can very much much picture the bookmakers of the Empire taking odds as to whether the young Caesar was going to come back alive.

He had no military experience and no political experience, so if the Germans didn't stab him in the front, then surely some cutthroat advisor is going to stab him in the back.

Just look at what had happened to his brother.

When the new Caesar arrived in Gaul in his ill-fitting military attire, and accompanied by an entourage whose loyalty first and foremost was to Constantius, no one figured that he stood a chance.

But to everyone's surprise, Julian decided not to mess around with this thing.

If he was going to be Caesar, then dog on it, he was going to be Caesar.

Much as I'm sure part of him wanted to sit in his tent reading books while other men took care of his business for him, Julian refused to fall into that trap.

The parallels to Marcus Aurelius on this point are interesting, and I often think that in Julian we get a chance to see what a 20-something year old Marcus would have been like as an emperor had not Antoninus Pius inexplicably reigned for like 150 years.

Both men were much more inclined temperamentally to intellectual pursuits, but forced into action, both refused to shirk their duty, and they took seriously their role as a military leader.

It speaks well of both of them.

Over that winter of 355-356, Julian threw himself into the soldier's life, commandeering a drill sergeant and forcing himself to do everything a new recruit would be expected to do.

The senior officials surrounding the young leader, military and political alike, were surprised at his dedication, but still, they probably were snickering behind his back.

This pampered prince was no soldier.

Who did he think he was kidding?

At the end of this no doubt stirring montage, though, Julian was in shape and ready for action.

He had no intention intention of sitting on the sidelines or being a mere figurehead.

He was going to lead the legions into battle.

If people didn't think he was up to it, well, he was just going to have to prove them wrong.

The only question left was where to start.

As I touched on last week, the revolt and subsequent defeat of Magnentius had left the Rhine defenses in shambles.

Cities were undergarrisoned, watchtowers were left unmanned, and the general focus of everyone had been on the internal threat of Constantius rather than the external threat of the Alemanni and the Franks.

The Germans picked up on this pretty quickly, and in the five years since Magnentius had donned his purple cloak, the Romans had been pushed back off the Rhine River, losing control of a good number of cities in the process, including Cologne, the capital of Germania Inferior.

So Julian's first task was clear: march to the lower Rhine and retake the lost urban centers along the river.

For all of 356 Julian campaigned against the Germans and emerged victorious from a series of decently sized encounters.

As winter approached, Julian had succeeded in driving off the occupying Germans and retaking, among other cities, the great military capital of Cologne.

It was a fantastic start to his career, though I would be negligent in my duties if I didn't point out that defending walled cities was not exactly the Germans' forte.

They withdrew at the first sign of serious pushback from the Romans, but still, a good first day for the new Caesar.

The winter would bring Julian's first taste of real hardship.

After scattering his men across Gaul in winter quarters, Julian himself set up shop with a small garrison in the city of Sonon.

Julian, confident that the year's campaign had put the Germans on notice, was expecting no trouble, but as soon as he was settled, an army of Franks suddenly appeared at the gates of the city.

It was not a large army, but it was bigger than any force Julian could muster right at that moment, so direct counter-attack was out of the question.

That said, the city's defensive fortifications were sturdy, so it looks like if the Germans want a siege, then a siege is what they are going to get.

The Germans apparently had no problem with this, and so a siege is what they got.

For the next month, Julian was trapped inside the city, unable to break out, but also unwilling to give up.

Now, the siege of Sinon raises a huge question.

What in the world was Marcellus doing during all of this?

Who was Marcellus, you ask?

Well, he was Julian's master of the horse, who was stationed just a hundred miles away, with an army big enough to easily drive off the besieging Germans.

He knew what was happening, and yet he did nothing.

He had his excuses, but really, dude, what is so important that you can't pop down and rescue the freaking Caesar of the Empire?

Which is exactly what Julian wanted to know after the Germans got tired of the stalemate and withdrew.

Marcellus, as I said, has his excuses, but there was absolutely no doubt in Julian's mind that he had been hung out to dry by a disgruntled subordinate, and he wrote to Constantius telling the Emperor exactly that and demanding that Marcellus be removed from his post.

Marcellus countered by writing a letter of his own, explaining why he had failed to do anything about the siege.

But confirming, at least in my own mind, that Marcellus was full of it and had indeed intentionally left Julian hung out to dry, Constantius sided with his Caesar, and Marcellus was banished to the Danube frontier.

Once the spring of 357 arrived, Julian was ready to put the winter struggle behind him and go on the offensive.

In coordination with his master of the infantry, a general named Barbaccio, Julian planned a two-pronged invasion of Alamanni territory along the upper Rhine.

Julian would march due east, while Barbaccio, currently in Milan, would march north through Ratia.

They would then meet in Alamanni territory and deliver some stern reprisals to the Germans for running amuck in Roman territory.

But But the flying pincer move Julian envisioned fell apart immediately.

It started out well enough, but as Julian advanced, a German army crossed the Rhine and attacked the key Gallic city of Lugdunham, forcing Julian to stop and come to the city's aid.

Barbaccio, meanwhile, was about to prove himself to be either incompetent or sinister, or maybe both.

Not only had he allowed the Germans now attacking Lugdunham through the line in the first place, but when they were finally driven off by Julian, Barbaccio let them waltz right back through, despite a clear warning from Julian that fugitive barbarians were headed his way and weighed down with captured treasure.

As if this wasn't bad enough, a few weeks later Julian was fighting with the Alamanni and struggling to cross the Rhine, and he requested Barbaccio send him seven boats to help him make the crossing.

Barbaccio was in the process of building a pontoon bridge of his own, and with more than enough boats at his disposal, Julian figured the master of the infantry could spare him a few.

But when he got the request, get this, rather than give Julian seven boats, Barbaccio burned seven boats, which just doesn't make sense on any level.

So then Julian found a fordable spot in the river and managed to drive off the Alamanni he had been facing.

But when he looked around for Barbaccio, who should be in the area any second now, he discovered that his master of the infantry had been outsmarted and that the Germans had destroyed his pontoon bridge, and so Barbaccio was still on the Roman side of the Rhine.

Left alone in German territory, Julian prudently fell back.

Undeterred, the Caesar set about trying to salvage the campaign, and so he called for additional grain supplies from the south.

But rather than allow these grain supplies to pass through, Barbaccio, again, get this, burned the carts they were being transported on, claiming that he was afraid the shipments would fall into enemy hands.

Then, unilaterally deciding that the year's campaign season was over, Barbaccio withdrew back to Milan, leaving Julian exposed to a swarm of stirred-up Germans.

So,

what exactly was Barbaccio's deal?

Ammianus Marcellinus, the soldier historian who was serving in the legions at this point, summed it up nicely when he said: It is unresolved whether he, that is, Barbaccio, committed so many monstrous acts as a result of his own vanity and self-destructiveness, or prompted by orders of the emperor.

Coupled with Marcellus' conduct the previous winter, it does not seem exactly out of the question to wonder if Julian's various commanders had been given explicit instructions by the emperor to undermine his Caesar at every opportunity.

But Constantius did want the Germans bottled up, and he had sent Julian to spearhead the operation, so it seems a little weird that he would simultaneously try to trip him up.

If he wanted Julian dead, why not just kill him like he had killed everyone else?

In all likelihood, then, Marcellus, Barbaccio, and the others were simply ticked off about having to take orders from some untested youth playing soldier, and when they saw chances to undermine him, they took them.

That, and Barbaccio, appears to have been kind kind of an idiot.

But despite their efforts, Julian would not be undermined.

Indeed, it was right at this low moment, ditched by Barbaccio and left stranded near Strasbourg with an undersized and ill-supplied army, that Julian won his greatest victory.

A German king named Connotomar, I have no idea if I'm pronouncing that right, took the success the Alaminae had been having that year as an opportunity to forge a coalition coalition of six tribes and lead them on a massive offensive.

As Julian hunkered down with the thirteen thousand soldiers he had left, reports came in that some thirty five thousand Alamanni were crossing the Rhine River and heading straight for him.

Julian, choosing to force the issue now rather than face battle after a retreat that would likely completely exhaust his already exhausted army, ordered his men forward.

Though the Romans were outnumbered, and by Romans I of course mean the Germans fighting for Rome, the discipline that had always been the legion's calling card was still a decisive factor, and at the Battle of Strasbourg Julian had some of the best troops in the whole empire at his disposal.

The turning point in this battle likely came before the first shot was even fired.

Always hyper protective of the egalitarianism that they felt defined them, the German troops demanded that Connodemar and the other chiefs dismount from their horses and fight on foot with everyone else.

Bowing to public pressure, the German king complied, but in so doing, he lost his mobility and any sort of ability to run a coherent attack.

But, then again, with 35,000 fighting 13,000, how coherent does your attack really need to be?

Things started out well for the Germans, as they managed to turn back Julian's initial cavalry assault on their left side.

Heartened by this success, the middle of the German line surged forward, and the bloody business of raw, hand-to-hand fighting commenced.

Eventually, the sheer weight of the Germans took its toll, and the German center was cut in two.

Normally, this would be death to an army, but both split wings were able to maintain their order and continue fighting as two separate units.

Still, things looked pretty dire for Julian and his army until the Roman back reserve line stepped up to the plate.

After the Germans cut through the front line, they ran headlong into a solid wall of highly trained veterans who refused to be pushed back and who refused to be split up.

So now, rather than emerging on the far side of a victorious charge with nothing left to do but mop up the fractured Roman army, the German foot soldiers found themselves trapped between the solid back line and the two wings of the split front line who now hemmed them in on either side.

If Julian had been able to swing some cavalry around behind them, this all would have resembled nothing so much as the last phase of the Battle of Canny.

So yeah, now things looked pretty dire for the Alemanni.

Finally, frustrated and dying by the hundreds, the Germans lost heart and hightailed it out of there.

Julian ordered his own army in pursuit, but only to a point.

He told his men that when they reached the Rhine, that they were not to get bogged down by climbing into the river.

Instead, he ordered them to stay on the banks and just fire spears and arrows at the fleeing Germans.

The estimate is that the Alemanni left as many dead in that river as they had on the battlefield.

In total, 6,000 Germans died at the Battle of Straussburg.

The Romans, amazingly, lost only 243.

The cherry on top of this great victory was when Connotomar was tracked down and brought back in chains.

Julian dutifully sent the beaten king on to Milan for Constantius to gloat over.

The Battle of Strasbourg cemented Julian's reputation as a leader to be reckoned with.

His troops now loved him.

Constantius' agents now feared him.

And that little tick in the back of the emperor's mind, the one that led him to be super paranoid about everyone and everything, especially threats from within his own family?

Well, that little tick just got real fired up.

Next time, we'll watch all of this come to a head as the relationship between Constantius and Julian will break down completely over an order to transfer Gallic troops to the east to help fight the Resurgenus Sonids.

Were the troops really needed, or was this all just about undermining, there's that word again, a Caesar on the rise?

I say next time because I hate to do this to you after just being gone for so long, but I'm flying back home for a week of family fun, and I will have absolutely no time to work on the show.

But we'll be back in two weeks to watch as Julian's troops, surprisingly and without any prompting from me, I swear, declare Julian Augustus.

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