142- You've Earned It

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Hello, and welcome to the history of Rome.

Episode 142, You've Earned It.

Last time, we left off with Constantius II finally headed west after extracting himself from the war with Persia in the winter of 350 AD.

It had been almost a year since the Gallic general Magnentius had overthrown and killed Constantius' younger brother Constance, and it was finally, finally, time for the emperor to do something about it.

While on his way to dole out some imperial retribution, though, Constantius had to stop along the way to take care of some business.

You'll recall from last week that in March of 350, at the prompting of Constantina, the general Vitranio had declared himself Augustus at his headquarters along the Danube frontier.

He had made this move specifically to aid Constantius and to counter the rise of Magnentius.

But when push came to shove, who knew what his ultimate ambitions were,

or what Constantius' reaction was going to be to Vitranio's self-elevation?

So far, the emperor had let it slide because he had been tied up with the war against the Sassanids, but now, who knows?

As Constantius approached the Dacian city of Sardica, though, it became obvious that neither man was planning to double cross the other.

The aging Vitranio welcomed 33-year-old Constantius as the true Augustus, and Constantius accepted the welcome without malice.

They then traveled together across the province to Nysus, where on December twenty fifth, the two leaders mounted a stage before an assembly of troops.

The soldiers had been instructed to reaffirm their allegiance to Constantius, and so, right on cue, they reaffirmed their allegiance to Constantius.

The Emperor accepted their pledge of loyalty, and then thanked Betranio for the good work he had done defending his family's honor.

Then he graciously accepted the general's resignation, not just from the office of Augustus, but from the army completely.

There were no hard feelings on either side, but there was absolutely no way Constantius could afford to have a man who had sniffed imperial power remain anywhere near that power.

It was just bad for business.

Vitranio was allowed to live out the rest of his days as a private citizen, supported by a generous state pension.

Constantius then traveled north to Sirmium, where he took stock of the situation on the Danube frontier and made his arrangements for the coming war with Magnentius.

Aware that battle would likely be joined in the spring, Constantius called his cousin Gallus to court in March of 351 and formally elevated him to the rank of Caesar for all of the reasons I outlined last week.

What's that, you say?

You could have sworn that last week I said Gallus was elevated at Antioch in 350 before Constantius even left the East?

Well, yes, I did say that, and I was wrong.

I misinterpreted something I read while I was writing last week's show, and then when I was writing this week's show, I got to the part in my notes where it said March 351, Gallus elevated at Sirmium, and began muttering really foul things under my breath.

So, sorry about that.

Gallus was elevated to the rank of Caesar in March of 351 at Sirmium and married off to Constantina at the same time.

Then he was sent to Antioch to keep an eye on the east while Constantius focused on the west.

Now the stage was set for the long-awaited confrontation between emperor and usurper.

Except neither commander was stupid and looking to just rush into some battle for the sake of having a battle.

Constantius, in particular, had no interest in plunging into Gaul, and so he remained coyly perched along the Danube, hoping to draw his rival out.

I have never read a good explanation for why Magnentius decided to fall for this and march away from his base of power and choose to face the emperor in Pannonia, and the only thing I can think of is that he felt like time was not on his side.

He had convinced the legions of the West to back him against Constance, but now they were dealing with the far less hated Constantius.

So maybe Magnentius determined that if he waited too long, that enthusiasm for the rebellion would drift and he would become isolated.

But that's all just me speculating.

All we really know is that he did go to Constantius rather than forcing Constantius to come to him.

But even then, the two rivals maneuvered around each other for the entire campaign season 351, and it wasn't until September that their armies finally squared off.

So, by now, the build-up to this battle had been going on for a year and nine months.

As a general rule, it's usually safe to assume that a big match will never quite live up to the hype, and the longer the hype period, the less impressive the match will seem in comparison.

But the Battle of Mersa Major, fought alongside alongside the Drava River, turned out to be a barn burner.

True, it did not settle the issue once and for all like all of the advertisements on TV had promised it would, but still, it was one of the bloodiest battles in the history of Roman Civil War.

And as you know now, that is really saying something.

And on top of that, there was even a dramatic betrayal right before the whistle blew that changed the whole dynamic of the fight.

The match was likely shaping up to be an equal contest, with each side probably composed of 40,000 to 50,000 men.

But at the last minute, one of Magnentius' key supporters, a general named Claudius Silvanus, a general who was so at the center of the rebellion that not only had he been the host at the dinner party where Magnentius had been proclaimed Augustus, but he was also the man who had spearheaded the assault on Rome following Nepatianus' attempt to control the city.

Well, he decided to defect to Constantius at the last minute.

Taking most of the men under his command along with him, Magnentius was left with just 35,000 to square off against the 60,000 Constantius now controlled.

But there was no getting out of the battle now.

The two sides were locked in, and on the 28th of September they got down to business.

As I said, the resulting battle was one of the bloodiest in the history of Roman civil war.

Over the course of the day's fighting, fully half of Constantius' army, some 30,000 men, wound up dead in the field.

Which would be really bad for Constantius until you consider that fully two-thirds of Magnentius' army, some 25,000 men, also wound up dead in the field.

The immediate upshot of this raw carnage was that, with only 10,000 men left, Magnentius was forced to fall back across the Alps to northern Italy, and Constantius was able to declare victory.

But the longer-term upshot was that at a time time when the Empire was under constant attack from all sides, Rome lost 55,000 highly trained soldiers in a single day.

I'll leave it to you to do the math on whether you think the Battle of Mercia Major wound up as a net positive for the Empire long term.

To his credit, though, Constantius did not immediately pursue Magnentius following the battle.

And by did not immediately pursue, I don't mean he waited a few days or even a few weeks.

No, as Constantius had already demonstrated, he was not so blinded by his desire to crush Magnentius that he was willing to just abandon the rest of the empire to its fate.

That is to say, that Constantius had enough foresight to recognize that beating down an internal enemy would be a pretty hollow victory if it meant allowing the external enemies of the empire to overrun the provinces.

So he put the war against Magnentius on hold for a full year, as he focused his attention on the Danube frontier, and in particular, the Sarmatians.

Since the Goths had been pushed back at the close of the crisis years, the Sarmatians had taken their place as public enemy number one along the northern border, and they took advantage of any and all weaknesses they detected in the Empire's lines.

If Constantius were to simply march off with the remaining legions in pursuit of Magnentius, well, that would be a weakness the Sarmatians would not fail to take advantage of.

So, for the rest of 351 and almost all of 352, Constantius stayed in Sirimium to focus his attention on stabilizing the border and running a pacification campaign against the Sarmatians.

Only after he was reasonably sure that he could turn his back for a little while without the middle of the Empire going to hell in a handbasket, did Constantius turn his attention back to Magnentius.

Between his unwillingness to ditch the eastern frontier in the middle of a war, and his unwillingness to push on west before ensuring the Danube region was secure, I gotta say, Constantius has a well-deserved reputation for impulsive hot-headedness, but it was clearly not a personality trait that defined him 100% of the time.

At least some of the time, he was patient and far-sighted.

In his later dealings with Julian, he will display almost exactly this same temperament.

So, you can say a lot of things about Constantius II, but I think it's pretty clear that at the end of the day, the man did have his priorities straight.

So, once he was satisfied that the Danube was safe, he marched off through the Alps before the winter of 352 could settle in, and he landed in North Italy, where Magnentius had been waiting for him.

Though he was not yet beaten, between the defection of Silvanus and the defeat at Merci Major, Magnentius was definitely reeling.

His legitimacy as a military leader had taken a major hit, but even more troubling was the fact that his political legitimacy was on life support.

So when Constantius crossed the Alps, all he really needed to do was pull the plug.

The citizens of Italy had lost all interest in helping prop up Magnentius, but they were compelled to continue supporting him because he was the biggest, baddest thing around.

As soon as Constantius showed up with his bigger, batter army, though, the locals relished in helping the emperor expel Magnentius' garrisons from their various cities.

Magnentius, no dummy, saw which way the winds were blowing and withdrew to Gaul.

Constantius then entered Milan, where he spent the winter planning the endgame.

As soon as the spring of 353 arrived, the emperor marched north into Gaul, looking to squash the rebel general once and for all.

Magnentius waited for Constantius at a picked spot in the Gallic Alps, where the last battle of the war would soon be fought.

Despite the significance of this battle, we don't know many details, troop numbers, or tactics, or anything like that.

All we do know is that Magnentius was once again defeated, but once again able to get out of the battle alive.

But getting out alive was of small comfort, as it only delayed the inevitable.

With two major defeats behind him and his coalition collapsing, Magnentius came to terms with the fact that he had taken his shot at Empire and missed.

At some point after the final battle, though we don't know exactly when, Magnentius committed suicide by falling on his sword.

Following the defeat and suicide of Magnentius, Constantius found himself in a wholly new position.

He was the only Augustus in the Empire left standing.

Sure, he had something of imperial colleague in Gallus, but Gallus was just a Caesar.

So I think it's safe to go ahead and say it.

Constantius II was now the sole ruler of the Roman Empire.

Congratulations, dude.

You've earned it.

The now sole emperor spent the rest of 353 and 354 campaigning against the Alemanni, mostly around the no-man's land between the Rhine and Danube rivers.

The sweetness of his victory over Magnentius, though, had almost immediately turned sour in Constantius' mouth, as he realized just how much the Rhine defenses had been weakened by the civil war.

Magnentius had pulled men off the frontier to fight his battles, and most of them had never come back.

So the real prize of war that Constantius had won for himself was a chaotic and weak western frontier.

Congratulations, you've earned that too.

He would do his best to get a handle on the situation, but it would be years before the citizens of the West were allowed to breathe easy again.

As Constantius was dealing with the Alemanni, he was also forced to pay attention to something his advisors had been trying to get him to pay attention to for a little while now, the conduct of his Caesar, Constantius Gallus.

Since his elevation to power, Gallus had set up shop in Antioch, and from almost the word go, complaints had been filtering in about his behavior.

When you look at the situation objectively, I don't think Gallus comes off as that terrible a ruler, so much as one who was in the habit of making enemies with the wrong people.

That is not to say he was a great guy who was just slandered to death, but there was definitely an influential clique of imperial advisors who hated him, and who exploited Constantius' natural paranoia to get rid of him.

Oh, did I mention that Gallus is about to be gotten rid of?

Well, he is.

There were basically two main things that set the stage for the fall of the young Caesar.

First, he was faced with a drought, which meant that grain supplies became limited.

Gallus, predictably, put the needs of the army above those of the common citizens, so grain deliveries to civilians were cut.

This, again predictably, made Gallus not particularly beloved by the man in the street.

Second, he had gotten in the habit of zealously persecuting pagans, particularly rich pagans, which is to say that Gallus appears to have stumbled across that ages-old method of imperial fundraising.

Find the richest guy on the block, and find him guilty of something.

With Gallus making enemies among the rich and poor alike, it was just a matter of time before word reached Constantius that there was a problem with his cousin.

Constantius decided to dispatch one of his Praetorian prefects to Antioch to ask Gallus to come to Italy and account for himself.

But Gallus was suspicious of the prefect's true motives, and so had him arrested.

Members of the local Antiochian political establishment attempted to come to the prefect's aid, but in the ensuing back and forth evidence of a conspiracy to overthrow Gallus came to light, that, though it had nothing to do with the prefect's arrival, all got thrown into the same pot.

Gallus, angry and paranoid, executed the whole lot of them for treason, including the unlucky prefect.

And with that, Gallus pretty much signed his own death warrant.

Constantius was extremely irate when he found out about the treason trials, and sent another messenger to Antioch.

This time he did not ask Gallus to come to Italy, he ordered Gallus to come to Italy.

And this order, as you can imagine, made Gallus really, really nervous.

Orders like that, from men like Constantius, usually mean just the one thing.

So instead of packing up and heading west, Gallus packed up his wife/slash cousin Constantina and sent her west instead.

The presumption is that Gallus Gallus was hoping she would be able to soothe her brother enough for Gallus to get out of this with his head still attached to his body.

We will never know if this plan was going to work, and there was good reason to think that it would not have worked, since Constantius was likely as angry at Constantina as he was at Gallus at this point for the active role she had played in everything that had gone on.

But we will never know, because on the way to Milan, Constantina came down sick and died en route.

Hearing of his wife's death, Gallus determined that he wasn't going anywhere, no way, no how.

So Constantius, that sneaky Constantius, tried a different tack.

He sent another messenger to Gallus, wondering aloud why Gallus had not come to Milan, since all he wanted to do was make him co-Augustus.

Gallus, paranoid, but also ambitious, allowed himself to be persuaded that he was actually going to get promoted, even after everything he had done, and so he left for a Milan immediately.

But along the way, there were subtle clues that the promotion was in fact a ruse.

Like, for example, the fact that whenever Galus' entourage approached, the various legionary garrisons along the way were mysteriously sent out on patrol.

This meant that Gallus never got within sniffing distance of a force big enough to help him revolt, should he decide that revolt was actually his best option.

Isolated from whatever allies he had left and any soldiers who might be bribed into protecting him, Gallus was now easy pickings, and while entering the home stretch, the unsuspecting Caesar was picked up in Noricum by Constantius' men at some point in late 354 and placed under arrest.

Assured that no harm would come to him, Gallus was escorted down to a city along the Adriatic coast, where some of the most powerful members of Constantius' court came to interrogate him.

Unfortunately for the imprisoned Caesar, these men also happened to be the same men who had been pressing Constantius to eliminate Gallus ever since the victory over Magnentius.

So, yeah, this is not really going to end well for Gallus.

The court officials accused the Caesar of all manner of treason, and then tortured him in an attempt to get him to confess to all the things they needed him to confess to.

But Gaulus took another route, and decided to pin every single thing he was accused of on Constantina, who he painted as a conniving shrew who had forced him to do all this rotten stuff.

A summary of Gaulus' defense was sent to Constantius, who, upon reading the report, blew his top.

This little weasel is trying to blame it all on my sister?

Well, that's about it for him.

Constantius sent his reply, execute the impertinent Caesar.

Now, as was typical with Constantius, as soon as the initial fury wore off, he mellowed and sent another order that Gaulus not be killed, and instead brought directly to Milan for further questioning.

After all, it's not like Constantina was the Virgin Mary or something, so maybe the kid did have a point.

But Constantius's men knew their boss well, and knew that as likely as not he was going to rescind the execution order when he calmed down, so they wasted no time.

Gallus was put to death the minute the execution order arrived.

He was twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old, and had been Caesar for three and a half years.

When Constantius learned that Gallus had been put to death, he probably regretted that his counter-orders had not gone out quick enough to save his cousin, but I seriously doubt he lost much sleep over it.

Gallus, as a person, had never really been much of anything to Constantius.

But it did leave the emperor with a problem, because, after all, he had elevated Gallus for a reason to maintain an imperial presence in the Far East.

Wintering in Milan over the winter of 354 355, Constantius had to have been at least a little nervous now that the volatile border with the Persians was left unmanned.

But the only male member of his family left the Emperor had no sons of his own was the bookish and completely inexperienced Julian.

Constantius had already elevated one inexperienced cousin to the purple, and look where that had gotten him.

So I think he can be forgiven for hesitating a bit before wanting to do it all over again.

As the spring of 355 turned into the summer of 355, though, a crisis popped up that likely pushed Constantius decisively into favoring the elevation of Julian.

Well, alleged crisis anyway.

See, one of Constantius' flaws, and there were a few flaws, was that he was too quick to believe whatever he was told, especially in matters of conspiracy, sedition, and revolution.

His court advisors had picked up on this, and so anytime a personal enemy of some senior official needed to be taken care of, well, let's just say that it wasn't too hard to convince Constantius that these personal enemies were in fact public enemies.

And so it went for Claudius Sylvanus.

After defecting to Constantius at the Battle of Merci Major, Sylvanus had been rewarded with the command of the Rhine legions, where he had served the Emperor faithfully.

This did not mean he was a saint Silvanus always made sure that he got his cut, if you know what I mean but even if he wasn't necessarily honest, he had been faithful.

But Silvanus had made enemies within Constantius' inner circle, and as his power and reputation grew, so too did his ability to threaten that inner circle.

So they determined to get rid of him.

In a very very cloak and dagger move, they got a hold of a letter Sylvanus had sent to a friend in Rome, sponged out some innocent lines, and rewrote them to make it look like Sylvanus was drumming up support for a possible rebellion.

Then they forged a further series of letters that appeared to confirm Sylvanus' guilt.

Then they waved all of this in the emperor's face and demanded he do something about it.

As paranoid as Constantius was, though, he was surprised enough by the charges that he decided to investigate.

Sylvanus, of course, denied everything, and dispatched a couple of top aides to Milan to rebut the charges the minute he heard what the unscrupulous courtiers were up to.

In a sad twist of fate, Sylvanus' aides were able to prove the letters fake, but in the meantime, their general had gotten jumpy.

Convinced that Constantius was going to find him guilty one way or the other, Sylvanus decided that if he was going to be executed for treason, he may as well commit some treason.

In the summer of 355, he declared himself Augustus and prepared for war.

Not too long after this declaration, though, a message arrived from the emperor ordering Sylvanus to come to Milan at once.

Under normal circumstances, this would have been rightfully considered a death sentence, but the man who bore the message, a general named Ursicinus, gave Silvanus hope.

Ursicinus and Sylvanus shared a loathing for Constantius' inner circle, so the fact that the emperor had used him to bear the message meant that Sylvanus may yet survive.

Indeed, the contents of the message indicated that Constantius did not even realize Sylvanus had gone ahead and declared himself Augustus.

So, Sylvanus agreed to follow Ursicinus to Milan.

But the crafty Constantius, ooh, that crafty Constantius, who did in fact know about Sylvanus' revolt, had used Ursicinus specifically because he knew Sylvanus would drop his guard.

On the way to Milan, Sylvanus was arrested and put to death.

Executed for treason only because he had been framed for treason.

That is a hard luck case.

The Sylvanus episode didn't really have too many long-term repercussions for the Empire, but it probably did play a role in Constantius' final decision to go ahead and elevate Julian to power.

Between tribal incursions along the Rhine, the possibility of war with Persia, and the ever-present threat of a revolt, Constantius knew he needed an imperial colleague to help him handle it all, and that said colleague had better be a member of the family, because no one else could be trusted.

So, next week, we will get our first look at the man Enlightenment philosophers and neo-pagans everywhere crush so very hard on Julian the Apostate, the last emperor to attempt to stem the rising tide of Christianity.

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