Rome's Gothic Wars: From the Third Century to Alaric (Key Conflicts of Classical Antiquity) (25 page)

The problem of Alaric thus fell into temporary abeyance
. This was just as well for Stilicho who now had more pressing concerns. Eutropius suborned the
comes Africae
Gildo, a north African aristocrat who had been given his sweeping imperial command by Theodosius twelve years earlier.
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Gildo transferred his allegiance from the western to the eastern government and cut off shipments of
African grain to the city of Rome. Rome’s urban population was prone to rioting at the best of times, and a food shortage would have guaranteed disaster and might easily have led to the collapse of Stilicho’ regime. Until Gildo was suppressed, Stilicho would have no time for the East
. At Constantinople, in the meantime, the eastern court dissolved into an orgy of political intrigue. Eutropius was unpopular both because he was a eunuch and because of his role in the religious controversy to which eastern cities were always prone. Despite his success in personally leading a campaign against the
Huns in
Armenia and Asia Minor – and the consequent award of the consulate for 399 – his enemies were on the lookout for any opportunity to bring him down. In the end, a nasty revolt in Asia Minor destroyed not just Eutropius’ regime, but that of his successor Aurelian as well, while also poisoning forever Alaric’s good relations with the eastern empire.
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We have already briefly met the Gothic leaders Gainas and Tribigild, the one a commander in the army that Theodosius had taken to fight Eugenius, the other in charge of troops at Nacoleia in Asia Minor. Tribigild, perhaps having decided to imitate Alaric and win a promotion for himself, raised a rebellion in spring 399 and defeated the first imperial
army sent to fight him. Gainas, sent to suppress the rebellion, decided that Tribigild was too powerful to defeat. He recommended that the imperial court enter into negotiations, which he undertook to manage. Tribigild’s chief condition for renewed allegiance was the deposition of Eutropius. As the eunuch already had powerful enemies in the palace, the empress
Eudoxia chief among them, Arcadius was finally persuaded to abandon a chamberlain whom he sincerely trusted. Eutropius was cast out of office along with his supporters in August 399, enjoying a short exile in Cyprus before being executed on spurious treason charges
.
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An experienced eastern bureaucrat named
Aurelian became praetorian prefect and replaced Eutropius as the chief minister of Arcadius.

That, however, did not satisfy Gainas, who now bargained on his own account, rather than as an intermediary with Tribigild. In April 400, Gainas marched his army to
Chalcedon, on the Asian side of the Bosporus opposite
Constantinople. He demanded what Alaric had received three years before – a senior military command – and also the consulate. Several other senior generals had held the consulate and Gainas clearly felt his own services had earned similar recognition. He also demanded the deposition of Aurelian. Two of the three requests were granted – Aurelian was deposed and Gainas was designated consul for the following year
. However, the new praetorian
prefect Caesarius was just as hostile to Gainas as Eutropius and Aurelian had been, and the Goths were unpopular with the people of Constantinople as well. In July, Gainas decided that it would be safer to move his troops away from the city and into Thrace. But mobilization provoked riots, and thousands of Goths, mostly civilians, were massacred inside the city by the urban mob, many burned alive in the church where they had taken shelter. Gainas was forced to flee after being defeated in battle by the general
Fravitta, and did not return alive from his attempt to get across the Danube
. Tribigild too was suppressed, and the longevity and stability of Caesarius’ regime put paid to any hope Alaric might have had of renewing cordial relations with the eastern court
. Caesarius’ government in Constantinople lasted for fully three years, and by the time he was eventually replaced in 404, Alaric had left the eastern empire behind
.

Late in 401, Alaric and his followers set out for Italy, arriving there on the 18th of November.
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How many of them there were is beyond us. Some scholars maintain that Alaric took with him to Italy most of the Gothic settlers of 382, but there is nothing in the sources to suggest that. Even his motives are a blank, although it seems clear that he no longer regarded the eastern empire as a reliable negotiating partner, and the death of
Gainas at the end of 400 may have made Alaric’s own position worryingly anomalous. Crossing the Julian Alps, Alaric hovered on the frontier of Italy, threatening Stilicho with invasion and hoping to extract concessions that are not, at least at this point, specified in our sources. In the spring of 402, Alaric invaded and Stilicho brought him to battle twice in northern Italy, first at
Pollentia in April on Easter Sunday, then at
Verona a couple of months later. Alaric had been able to cross the Alps while Stilicho was detained in Raetia, and he won a victory over a small Roman army before going on to besiege
Milan, a grand city which was frequently an imperial residence. Stilicho marched to the relief of the city, then drove Alaric to Pollentia. The battle of Pollentia was a modest but real success for Stilicho: he seized many prisoners, including Alaric’s wife and children, and took possession of all the treasure that Alaric had amassed in half a decade’s plundering. Stilicho granted Alaric a truce, in which he was meant to withdraw from Italy for good; perhaps Stilicho wanted to preserve a chastened Alaric as a potentially useful tool, perhaps he simply regarded Alaric as too powerful to destroy
.

But very soon, Stilicho claimed that Alaric had violated the terms of the truce and brought him to battle again, this time at Verona, in July or August of 402.
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This fight was no more conclusive than Pollentia had been and even Claudian admits that Alaric was able to consider attacking Gaul or Raetia in its immediate aftermath
. If some of Alaric’s support melted away in the absence of a decisive success, he was nonetheless able to avoid further confrontations and retreated into the Balkans again.
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From 402 to late 404 or early 405, Alaric occupied the northwestern Balkans, perhaps the province of
Pannonia Ⅱ, shunted by Stilicho into the
de facto
no-man’s land between East and West. In this corner of Illyricum, Alaric could not aggravate the
state of almost continuous cold war between the eastern and western courts, or at least not until one side or the other decided to deploy him in its own interest. This time it was Stilicho who took the initiative. He decided to grant Alaric the same sort of office that Eutropius had granted him half a decade earlier. Probably in 405, Alaric’s followers again returned to
Epirus, their leader once again bearing the codicils of office appointing him
magister militum
, but now supplied by the western rather than the eastern empire.
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Eastern propaganda chose to see this move as Stilicho’s preparation for a full-scale invasion of Illyricum, an interpretation modern scholars have been too willing to accept. In fact, Stilicho’s move represented nothing new. Granting Alaric his new title was no more than the reassertion of a hegemony that Stilicho had always claimed to possess, and it involved taking no action whatsoever – Alaric was already in Illyricum, and he might just as well be put to some use as an irritant to the eastern court
. Even had Stilicho actually planned to take action himself in Illyricum, and there is not the slightest evidence that he did, events in Italy and Gaul rapidly made such plans unfeasible.

Late in 405, a Gothic king named
Radagaisus, hitherto completely unknown to history, crossed the Alps from central Europe, marched through the province of Raetia, and invaded Italy. More than a year passed before he was finally subdued. To make matters worse, on the last day of either 405 or 406 a large band of
Vandals, Alans and Suevi crossed the Rhine near
Mainz and spread devastation in the northern provinces of Gaul.
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That invasion provoked a string of usurpations in
Britain, the third of which, led by a common soldier named
Constantine (r. 407–411), spread across the Channel and soon removed Gaul, Britain and Spain from the control of Honorius’ government in Italy
. For obvious reasons, Stilicho had to deal with the threat to Italy before he could attend to a Gallic usurpation
. In August 406, he chased
Radagaisus down near
Florence and won a crushing victory that left thousands of the Gothic king’s followers enslaved – so many that the bottom fell out of the market for able-bodied slaves.
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With Radagaisus dead, Stilicho could turn to other matters, particularly suppressing the Gallic
usurpation of Constantine, for which purpose Alaric might prove very useful
. Unfortunately for Stilicho, Alaric had now lost patience.

There is no question that Alaric had recouped whatever losses of manpower he had suffered at Pollentia and Verona, and, after three years as a legitimate commander in Illyricum, he may well have begun to rebuild his financial position as well. But Illyricum and Greece had been plundered repeatedly since the early 390s and it is hard to see how they could have yielded revenues on a large enough scale to replace the spoils that Stilicho captured at Pollentia. Having already been resident in the eastern empire for so long, Alaric seems to have decided its potential as a target was limited. The West offered richer pickings. Thus in 407, he marched on Italy again, taking up position in
Noricum – modern Austria – and demanding
4,000 pounds of gold if he was to spare Italy from another full-scale invasion.
Stilicho, whose first attempts to deal with the Gallic usurper
Constantine had not succeeded, decided to turn Alaric loose on him instead. He therefore convinced
Honorius and the
Roman senate to part with the sum demanded.
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Stilicho’s plan was sensible and based on a realistic assessment of the dangers inherent in the present situation, but it weakened his own position fatally. The senators who had to pay for this massive subvention understandably resented it, and their sympathisers at court began to play upon the suspicions of the emperor.
Like Valentinian Ⅱ before him, Honorius had ambitions to rule in his own right and, again like Valentinian, he was a dreadful judge of character, totally incapable of recognizing where his own best interests lay. Unlike his late predecessor, however, Honorius possessed a certain low cunning
. Rather than confront Stilicho prematurely, he allowed enemies at court to undermine the general’s position. Matters were only exacerbated by Stilicho’s insistence that
Honorius marry his younger daughter
Thermantia when the emperor’s first wife
Maria, Stilicho’s elder daughter, died.
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The breaking point came through purest chance –
Arcadius died in May 408 and both Honorius and Stilicho determined to go to Constantinople to assert western control there. Honorius already mistrusted Stilicho’s motives. He now allowed the
magister officiorum
Olympius to persuade him that Stilicho was planning to seize the throne for himself
and his own son
Eucherius, thereby displacing the Theodosian dynasty. Given that the well-timed death of a puppet emperor had secured the position of that same dynasty only fifteen years before, one can see why Honorius might have believed insinuations along such lines. At any rate, he acquiesced in an organized coup against Stilicho. At Ticinum, modern
Pavia, regiments destined for the Gallic war mutinied, lynching several officers. Stilicho was blamed, and Olympius had him declared a public enemy by Honorius
. Loyal to the Theodosian dynasty to his last breath,
Stilicho refused to attack the emperor who had betrayed him, even given the vast resources at his disposal. Instead, he allowed himself to be removed from the sanctuary of the church in Ravenna in which he had sought refuge and went quietly to his execution on 22 August 408. His supporters were purged in cities around Italy; his
young son was hunted down and executed; and the wives and children of his barbarian auxiliaries were massacred by the thousand
.
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The death of Stilicho meant that the full force of Alaric’s anger was unleashed on Italy.
Olympius refused to honour the promises which Alaric had been given.
Thousands of barbarian soldiers, their wives and children dead, deserted and joined him in
Noricum.
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He gave Honorius one last chance,
demanding a sum of gold – how much is not specified – and an exchange of hostages, perhaps hoping for the return of such civilian dependents of his new followers as still survived.
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When this overture was rebuffed, Alaric marched straight down the Italian peninsula to Rome. During the winter of 408/409 he besieged the city – the first of three sieges – and blockaded the river route up the Tiber from
Portus, thereby threatening the Romans with starvation. Panic gripped the city, and scapegoats were sought.
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Stilicho’s widow
Serena was strangled by order of the
senate, posthumous vengeance on the man they blamed for Alaric’s continued existence.
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While the senate dithered, Alaric’s following grew as barbarian slaves, some of them the survivors of Radagaisus’ Gothic army, fled to join him from all over Italy. Finally, the Romans gave in and begged for a truce. In exchange for Alaric’s letting food into the city, the senate promised to send an
embassy to Ravenna and convince the emperor to make peace with him. Alaric agreed. For him, Rome was a bargaining counter, not an end in itself, and if he could get more out of allowing the Romans to eat than he could from keeping them starved, then so much the better. The senate’s embassy departed early in 409 and achieved what it had set out to do.
Olympius conferred high office on the Roman envoys, and Alaric was invited to meet with representatives of the emperor
.