The Xenophile Historian

A History of Europe

180 to 476

(All dates are A.D. from now on)

	Troubled Times Begin
	The Severan Dynasty
	The Barbarians Learn New Tricks
	The Soldier Emperors
	Diocletian
	Constantine I
	Constantinian Christianity
	Announcing the Middle Ages
	Constantine's Successors Muddle Through
	The House of Valentinian
	Population Figures of the Late Empire Period
	The Beginning of the End of the Classical World
	Notable Fifth-Century Christians
	Alaric the Visigoth
	Gaiseric the Lame
	Attila the Hun
	The Arthurian Mythos
	The Final Collapse
	Go to Page Navigator

It now appears that the fall of Rome took place when it did because of decay in the apparatus of administration and defense; both the government and the army were costing more than the empire could afford, and giving less in return.⁽¹⁾ By the late fourth century taxes had gotten so high that the small farmers that made up 90% of the empire's population stopped coming to the market towns, because that is where they paid their taxes. Without the farmers the towns ran out of food, so the town-dwelling population moved away and the government's revenue fell catastrophically.

Individual voices began to sound the alarm long before this happened. While most Romans probably went about their daily business, trying to enjoy life in whatever way possible, some compared the current strains and dangers to Rome in previous days, and concluded that the empire was past its peak, though the idea of its collapse may have seemed preposterous even to them. In the middle of the third century Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage, wrote about it: "The world has grown old and lost its former vigor . . . Winter no longer gives rain enough to swell the seed, nor summer sun enough to toast the harvest . . . the mountains are gutted and give less marble, the mines are exhausted and give less silver and gold . . . the fields lack farmers, the seas sailors, the encampments soldiers . . . there is no longer any justice in judgments, competence in trades, discipline in daily life . . . "

Thanks to Edward's Gibbon's monumental work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, we now view the period from 180 to 476 as a great tragedy of history, a time of unstoppable decay and the crumbling of classical civilization. However true that may be, it was a process that took nearly three hundred years, so the average Roman, not having our perspective on things, probably did not notice that life as he knew it was ending. To him, the Empire seemed to go on as usual: tyrants wore the emblems of emperors and claimed to be the "first citizen of the Republic"; rich men went to Senate meetings but did nothing important; soldiers left to fight barbarians, though now they did it more for money than for the glory of Rome.

Most historians mark 180 A.D. as the beginning of the decline, because that is when Marcus Aurelius died and his foolish son Commodus took his place. Commodus (180-192) was a startling person for such a good home to produce, though he seems to have kept his vices hidden while his father was alive. A few months after assuming the purple, however, he gave himself over to the craziest stunts the Empire had seen since Nero, and Dio Cassius, a historian who grew up during this time, wrote that Commodus "was a greater curse to the Romans than any pestilence or crime." Thinking himself an incarnation of Hercules, he walked around wearing a lion skin like that hero, with gold dust sprinkled in his blond hair, and insisted on being worshiped as a god. He named a grain fleet Commodian, changed the names of Rome and Carthage to Commodiana, and tried to put his name on both the legions and the Senate. In the arena he indulged in executions and chariot races, and even fought as a gladiator!⁽²⁾ After twelve years of misrule, the legions decided to get rid of him; they persuaded his mistress to give him some poisoned wine, and when that did not work, her current lover (a wrestler) strangled him.

The Senate picked a retired officer, Pertinax, to rule next. The Praetorian Guard accepted him at first, because they could overlook any vice in an emperor but stinginess. Emperor Pertinax, however, had every virtue but generosity, so his bodyguards murdered him three months later. Then the impulsive Praetorians put the Empire up for auction. Dio Cassius described how they conducted this disgraceful business:

"The would-be buyers were Sulpicianus and Julianus, who vied to outbid each other, one from inside [the military camp] the other from the outside . . . Some of the soldiers would carry the word to Julianus, 'Sulpicianus offers so much; how much more do you bid?' And to Sulpicianus in turn, 'Julianus promises so much; how much do you raise him?' Sulpicianus would have won the day, being inside and being the prefect of the city and also the first to name a figure of 20,000 sestertii per soldier, had not Julianus raised his bid no longer by a small amount but by 5,000 at one time, shouting it in a loud voice and also indicating the amount with his fingers."

Julianus only enjoyed his prize for 66 days. The armies in Britain, on the Danube and in Asia would have none of this, and each proclaimed its commander as the next emperor. The Danube army, being both the largest and closest to Rome, got there first with its general, Septimius Severus. Deserted by everyone, Julianus locked himself in the palace; in the royal bedchamber a soldier used his sword to end Julianus' pretensions. Then Severus spent the next four years in a brutal civil war to eliminate his rivals and make his claim stick.

The Severan Dynasty

In the end most of his reforms backfired. Just as the peace of the first and second centuries brought prosperity and strength, so now the wars of the third century brought poverty. The high taxes drained so many pockets that some members of the upper classes chose to move down in society--and into a lower tax bracket. Thus, as in other times, high taxation led to lower revenues. To keep the poor fed--and quiet--Severus distributed large amounts of food, money and medicine, adding to the burden on the imperial budget. The result was a vicious circle; the state could not meet all the demands placed on it, nor could it survive without meeting them.

Severus spent the most on defense, as you might expect. He started taking barbarians into the army, and raised three legions for his Parthian war. After the war he left two of the new legions in the East, garrisoning the province he conquered in (northern) Mesopotamia; the third he kept near Rome as a reminder for the Praetorians to behave. The pay of the soldiers went up, and some restrictions on their lives disappeared; Severus allowed them to marry, work small plots of land, and wear gold rings as a symbol of their improved status.

Former military men moved into civilian posts in the bureaucracy, until one historian noted that "the emperor and his council now resembled a general and his staff, with the equestrian civil servants as their executive officers." Severus allowed this because he did not see a need to keep the Empire's hallowed customs. An ethnic Carthaginian from the Libyan town of Leptis Magna, he spoke Latin with a Punic accent, and his sister never mastered the Latin language, so they often discussed family affairs in Punic (it's a good thing Cato never lived to see this!). His sympathies were firmly with the provinces; Punic and Celtic words were allowed on legal documents during his reign, most of the top officials came from Africa or Asia, and he granted Roman citizenship to more provincial towns.

In 208 the Picts overran the Antonine Wall and southern Scotland. Severus went to direct the defense and died in 211 at York; his successors abandoned everything north of Hadrian's Wall.

The two sons of Severus, Caracalla and Geta, ruled together for less than a year before Caracalla accused his younger brother of treachery and had him killed.⁽³⁾ Caracalla (211-217) was headstrong and unpopular, but successfully followed his father's dictates. He raised the soldiers' pay by another 50 percent and paid bounties to barbarian chieftains for staying away from weak points on the frontier (soon the "protection money" would grow until it equaled the whole army payroll). For Rome he built the largest public bath house on record--a structure with so much social life going on inside that it was almost a small city in its own right. To pay for all this he again raised taxes and debased the currency. In 212 he granted citizenship to all free men in the Empire, not because of a love for human rights, but to add as many taxpayers as possible to government records.

Caracalla declared war on Parthia in 214, because the last Parthian king, Artabanus V, refused to give him a daughter in marriage. He crossed the Tigris, ravaged Media, and added some more Iraqi real estate to the empire. On the return trip, Macrinus, one of Caracalla's joint Praetorian prefects, took fright, because he saw his name mentioned as a security risk in the emperor's private correspondence, meaning that his life was in danger. He had Caracalla assassinated by a hit man, and a few days later the soldiers hailed him as emperor.

The change in emperors saved the day for the Parthians. Artabanus invaded Roman Mesopotamia and destroyed several cities; an anti-Roman king, Tiridates II, was crowned in Armenia. Macrinus sued for peace, agreeing early in 218 to surrender his prisoners and pay an indemnity of 200 million sestertii. This was too much for the troops. Julia Maesa, the sister-in-law of Septimius Severus, enlisted army support for her fourteen-year-old grandson, Varius Avitus Bassianus, better known to us by the title Elagabalus (Heliogabalus in Greek). A battle near Antioch ended in a rebel victory, and soon after that the fleeing Macrinus was captured and put to death.

Elagabalus now went to Rome to claim his prize. The four-year reign of the teenage emperor was the strangest Rome had experienced to this point. The priest of a Syrian sun god, El-Gabal, he brought his religion with him, and tried to make it supreme over every other, including the worship of Jupiter. The idol of the sun god, a black phallus-shaped meteorite, ended up in a temple on Rome's Palatine hill. He spent extravagant sums on parades, orgies, and practical jokes, and just in case anything else was needed to disgust the Romans, he was a transvestite and homosexual as well.⁽⁴⁾ The Imperial family tried to "straighten" him out with a respectable bride, but after marrying and divorcing five of them, including a Carthaginian priestess of Asherah and (horrors) a Vestal Virgin, it became clear that he was not interested in women. Eventually even Julia Maesa decided he was bad news, and persuaded him to appoint his cousin Severus Alexander as Caesar and heir to the throne. When Elagabalus changed his mind afterwards and tried to eliminate Alexander, the Praetorian guards killed him and threw his body into the Tiber River.

Severus Alexander ruled as a likeable but incompetent emperor for the next thirteen years (222-235). He came to grief because, unlike the other Severan emperors, he cared little for military matters, at a time when the Empire needed a militant ruler. In 226 the Parthians were overthrown by one of their vassals, a Persian named Ardashir. The empire he established, the Sassanid or Neo-Persian Empire, was more tightly knit, more efficient, and more aggressive than its Parthian predecessor. The new empire he founded saw itself as the heir of the old Persian Empire destroyed by Alexander the Great. Ardashir and his successors dedicated themselves to the recovery of the provinces that had once been Persian and were now Roman: Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt. Thus began a long series of wars that would eventually exhaust both empires.

The first Roman-Persian war ended in a stalemate and truce, and Severus Alexander left to deal with the Alemanni, a German tribe that had stormed across the Rhine while Rome was preoccupied with Persia. At this point Alexander wavered, and decided to bribe the Germans to go home instead of fighting them. The soldiers didn't like this, and incredibly, Alexander forgot what Septimius said about the military--he tried to slash the army's payroll to recover the money spent in the bribe! This foolish mistake resulted in his death at the hands of his angry soldiers.⁽⁵⁾

The Barbarians Learn New Tricks

The Goths were a German tribe, one of many the Romans had been familiar with for a long time. Julius Caesar found the Germans to be a handful of herdsmen, who did a little hunting and fishing to fill out their needs. Around 100 A.D. the historian Tacitus described a more advanced society, which lived in nearly permanent wattle-and-daub villages and practiced farming, though with not much enthusiasm; they were organized for only one task--war--and they saw valor as the one indispensable virtue. He called them a robust race "with blue eyes and reddish hair; great bodies, especially powerful for attack," who considered it "limp and slack to get with the sweating of your brow what you can get with the shedding of your blood."

Brave as they were, the German tribesmen were little more than a rabble at first. They hurled themselves screaming and half-naked into battle, their only armor being wooden or wicker shields. They did not have even the finely crafted iron weapons of the Celts. Only a few owned swords; the rest relied on Neanderthal-style clubs and spears with fire-hardened wooden points. When this mob met a disciplined Roman legion, the usual result was a rout. One Roman historian wrote about a group of fleeing barbarians who attempted to swim across a river for safety. They "were battered by javelins, or carried away by the current, or finally overwhelmed by the mass of fugitives and collapse of the river banks. Some ignominiously tried to escape by climbing trees. As they cowered among the branches, bowmen amused themselves by shooting them down."

The reason why the Severan emperors faced trouble on the northern frontier was because there were more Germans than before. In the two centuries since Augustus and Arminius the Germans had multiplied steadily. They were also getting more sophisticated, in part because of the influence of the Empire. As their population grew the Germans looked for new lands to settle; Rome prevented westward expansion so they had to look east and south. This movement, which was probably a steady trickle of small tribes choosing to relocate, rather than a fifth-century-style Volkwanderung, produced two new nations, the Goths on the shore of the Black Sea in the late second century, and the Gepids in the Carpathian mountains⁽⁶⁾ in the first years of the third century. Because they had the most Lebensraum, the Goths prospered; by the mid-third century they were the strongest German tribe. Upon reaching the Black Sea, they learned to be sailors as well. Just as ominous for the Romans, the many small tribes on the Rhine merged to form permanent federations--the super-tribes of the Alemanni and the Franks.

The Soldier Emperors

The first of them, Maximinus I (235-238), was the roughest character to have assumed the purple so far. An eight-foot tall general from a peasant family in Thrace, he never even visited Rome. Previously the Senate didn't argue much when the army raised a governor or general to the purple because he always came from an upper-class family; the move may have been illegal but the candidate was acceptable. This time, however, they balked, nominating two of their own instead, Balbinus and Pupienus. They may have had a point; Maximinus treated the imperial treasury as if it were his own money, taking what he pleased from it, and gouging the people with confiscatory taxes that put many well-to-do folks in the poor house. Maximinus couldn't deal with Balbinus and Pupienus right away; he had to rush to the Rhine to stop a major incursion from both the Alemanni and the Franks, followed by some Dacian and Sarmatian raids across the Danube. In Africa, an aged governor and his son (Gordian I & II), also proclaimed themselves emperors, to keep their province from paying the new taxes.

The governor of neighboring Numidia sent troops to get rid of the two Gordians, and once the northern frontiers were pacified, Maximinus marched on Rome. On the way he had to besiege the northern Italian town of Aquileia, and this took so long that his soldiers mutinied and killed him. Back in Rome, the Praetorians suspected that Balbinus and Pupienus were planning to replace them with German bodyguards, slaughtered both of them before this could happen, and promoted a thirteen-year-old grandson of Gordian I in their place.

This teenage ruler, known to us as Gordian III (238-244), did better than expected, thanks to a competent advisor, Gaius Furius Sabinus Aquila Timestheus. First they demobilized the African legion which had killed Gordian's grandfather and uncle, a risky move since it left most of North Africa unprotected. In 243 they went east, where Timestheus made up for Gordian's lack of experience, and together they defeated a major Persian invasion. However, Timestheus fell ill and died not long after that, and Gordian was murdered by the troops, so that they could have an adult emperor, namely their commander, Philip the Arab (244-249). Philip was in Rome in 248 to celebrate the thousand-year anniversary of the city's founding--a citywide party which spared no expense and dispelled much of the pessimism Romans had been gathering in recent years--but otherwise he was as ephemeral as the emperors before and after him.

Before 248 was over, three rebellions broke out in the provinces. Philip seems to have lost his nerve, because this crisis prompted him to offer his abdication to the Senate. A city prefect named Decius talked him out of it, arguing that the would-be usurpers would not last long, and Philip responded by making Decius commander-in-chief of the legions on the Danube front, since the Goths were starting to make trouble there. Decius cleaned up that problem so swiftly that Philip began to fear that the soldiers would transfer their allegiance from himself to Decius. Philip left Rome with an army to get rid of Decius; the two fought at Verona and Philip was killed.

As emperor, Decius (249-251) thought his foremost duty was to restore the paganism of the past in its original form. He felt that the state had fallen on hard times because the Romans had forsaken their gods and rituals. Consequently he strongly disliked the eastern cult which used an instrument of execution for its symbol--Christianity.⁽⁷⁾ There had been ugly persecutions before, but they were always local in nature; while one governor threw Christians to the lions, another would leave them alone. Now Decius launched the first empire-wide persecution, ordering all Christians to sacrifice to the old gods or die. After executing the bishop of Rome, Fabianus, he supposedly said: "I would far rather receive news of a rival to the throne than of another bishop in Rome."

A large-scale emergency broke out in 250 when the Goths broke through the defenses on the Lower Danube and ravaged the provinces of Lower Moesia and Thrace (modern Bulgaria). Things really went wrong for Rome when Decius took personal command of the army sent to retaliate. He and the army walked into a trap at Abrittus in Serbia and were completely slaughtered. It was a bad omen for the future; never before had an emperor been killed by barbarians.

More soldier-emperors rose and fell in rapid succession: Trebonianus Gallus (251-253), Aemilianus (253), and Valerian (253-260). This and the Gothic disaster encouraged Rome's other enemies to try their luck. Now provinces which had not seen acts of war or rebellion in centuries came under attack. North Africa and Egypt were menaced respectively by tribes of Mauri (Moors) and Blemmyes. The Vandals crossed the Lower Rhine, looted Gaul and Spain and even raided Morocco; an army of Alemanni crossed the Upper Danube and entered Italy. These two Germanic invasions forced the abandonment of the Rhine-Danube angle, with its defensive limes, to the Alemanni in 254. Meanwhile the Goths captured a fleet of ships, and used them to plunder both the east and west shores of the Black Sea; when they had their fill of this they broke into the Aegean, destroyed the famous Diana's Temple at Ephesus, and pillaged Athens (255). Also in 255, the Persians began a five-year war, and won a great victory at Barbalissus, which took away Roman Mesopotamia and Armenia and put Syria at their mercy. Emperor Valerian tried to buy time for the shattered eastern provinces by requesting an interview with the Persian king. At the interview the emperor disappeared into captivity in Persia and the plunder of Syria went on. Since Valerian was an enemy of Christianity, Christians declared that both his capture and the death of Decius were caused by the wrath of God, which is to be feared more than any false idol.

Amid these misfortunes the Empire began to break up. Often the Roman soldiers sent against the invaders did as much damage to Roman communities as the enemy. The army commander on the Rhine and the Arab king of Palmyra were crowned emperors, meaning that there were now three Roman emperors. One emperor, Postumus, ruled Britain, Gaul and Spain. Odenathus ruled Syria, the Holy Land and Roman Mesopotamia; later his widow Zenobia added Egypt and Asia Minor. The official emperor, Valerian's son Gallienus, was restricted to Italy, North Africa and the Balkans.

The division was not altogether bad--it allowed each emperor to concentrate his efforts on a single frontier. By 268 Postumus, Gallienus and Zenobia had succeeded in restoring the efficiency and confidence of their armies and had cleared the invaders out of the territories. Then because he was a civilian, Gallienus fell victim to his Praetorians, who wanted a military man on the throne again. The next two central emperors, Claudius II (268-270) and Aurelian (270-275), were officers from the Danubian provinces,⁽⁸⁾ and likely accomplices in the assassination. Claudius won significant victories against both the Alemanni and the Goths; the latter earned him the title Gothicus. Not long after that he succumbed to the plague, the first emperor since Septimius Severus (not counting Valerian) to die of natural causes.

Since his immediate predecessors had solved the military problem, Aurelian put the Empire back together surprisingly quickly. In 271-273 he defeated both Zenobia and the feeble heirs of Postumus, restoring the unity of the empire. He abandoned Dacia, an indefensible province, to the Goths and Gepids, and evacuated its soldiers and inhabitants to the south bank of the Danube; otherwise the recovery was complete.⁽⁹⁾

For the first time since Hannibal's invasion five centuries earlier, it was felt necessary to protect the city of Rome with a wall, which still stands. In the summer of 275 Aurelian decided it was time to lead a campaign against the Persians, and marched east. He got as far as Thrace before his temper got the better of him; he caught his secretary in a lie and threatened to punish him. In self-defense, the secretary informed some Praetorian officers that the emperor had marked them down for execution, along with himself. The officers, perhaps because of a guilty conscience, accepted the warning as authentic, and struck the emperor down.

The Soldier Emperors could turn back Rome's enemies, but there was another deadly danger they could not deal with--prolonged economic decline. Because the Empire had stopped expanding, the economy had become static. In the past, military expansion had paid off in rich booty, and the tapping of new sources of wealth had justified a large army. Now, however, wars were defensive, and the army had become a financial liability rather than an asset. To pay for the army and other ruinous expenses in the budget, they debased the currency. The denarius and antonianus, the two chief silver coins of the third century, lost 95 percent of their silver content, becoming silver-coated copper coins. Prices skyrocketed; a peck of wheat which sold for half a denarius in the second century cost 100 denarii at the end of the third (from 90¢ to $180 in 1997 dollars). Soldiers and government workers were now often paid in trade goods instead of cash; in the Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus, bankers refused Roman money and tried to bring 300-year-old Ptolemaic coins back into circulation.

A decrease in population made the political and economic problems worse. This was caused by the casualties suffered in conflict, the military's insatiable appetite for more men, and plagues regularly depleting the supply of workers. Worst of all, the peasants chose to abandon the land, rather than have their crops confiscated or their farms ravaged by barbarians and marauding Roman soldiers. Thousands of farmers looked for safety in the walled cities or found more profit in brigandage. Formerly productive farmland turned to wilderness. Aurelian's response was to decree that local officials must bring in the specified taxes, whether or not the lands they administered were revenue-producing. The position of city or town magistrate now became a burden, and service in once sought-after posts became mandatory.

Not much is known about the next short-lived ruler, Tacitus (275-276), who was at his villa in southern Italy when the soldiers hailed him as emperor. Tradition claimed he was a seventy-five-year-old senator, and a descendant of the historian Tacitus; both are considered unlikely, given the nature of the other men who wore the purple at this time. The Goths and Persians were making trouble again in Asia Minor, so he went to deal with Persia, and sent his brother Florianus to confront the Goths. There in Cappadocia, we are told that he died of a fever, a fate so uncommon among late Roman emperors that the story is probably true. Florianus promptly claimed the throne, but the legions of Syria and Egypt refused to accept him, promoting their own commander, Probus, instead. The armies of Florianus and Probus met at Tarsus, but before a battle could take place, the summertime heat got so oppressive that Florianus' European soldiers decided they would rather go home than fight, so they put Florianus to death.

Probus (276-282) led many successful attacks against the Franks, Burgundians and Vandals; between campaigns he kept the soldiers busy by clearing land to plant vineyards on. He did such a good job of securing the Rhine and Danube frontiers that when peace finally came, he staged a triumph in Rome and declared that soon they would not need armies any longer. This was his undoing. The senior officers feared unemployment, and before long the army on the upper Danube proclaimed Carus, the Praetorian prefect, as emperor in his place. The unit Probus sent to get this upstart deserted, and he had to flee from his own troops. They found him hiding in a tower, though, and forced their way in to kill him.

Once domestic affairs had been taken care of, Carus (282-283) marched east, declaring that he had come to the throne to punish the Persians. He left his elder son Carinus behind to rule in his absence; his younger son, Numerian, came with him. He did this because Carinus was a compentent military leader, and thus could look after himself, but Numerian's only talent was in poetry. Sure enough, Carinus defeated German and British invasions, and crushed a revolt in northeast Italy. Meanwhile in the east, Carus found the going easy; he reoccupied Roman Mesopotamia without opposition, and then captured Seleucia and Ctesiphon, the Persian capital. However, just a few nights later, Carus was found dead in his tent. There had been a violent thunderstorm, and some declared that lightning killed him. Others suspected, however, that his death was the work of one Arius Aper, Numerian's father-in-law, who saw a greater future for himself once the young man's father was out of the way. The throne now passed under the joint rule of Carinus in the West and Numerian in the East.

The Persians made peace with the Romans, and Numerian began the long trek home. By the time he got to Bithynia, he was suffering from lack of sleep and a disease of the eyes, and had to be carried in a litter. At Nicomedia on the Bosporus, the army stopped to rest; there Aper murdered Numerian. For the next few days the soldiers asked about the emperor's health, and Aper told them that Numerian could not leave his tent because he had to protect his weakened eyes from the wind and the sun. Before long, however, the stench of the corpse revealed what had happened. Aper tried to pass Numerian's death off as from natural causes, so he could claim the throne for himself. However, the troops were not of the same mind; a general from Dalmatia, Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocles, charged Aper with murder and executed him with his own hand.

The troops in the east did not care for Carinus, so naturally they hailed their general as the new emperor, and he changed his name to a more Roman-sounding one, Diocletian. Then he marched into Europe to remove Carinus. Carinus had the advantage at first, with a larger army and a better claim to the imperial throne, but when the two armies met in battle, at Margum in eastern Serbia, Carinus was assassinated by one of his own officers, who accused Carinus of seducing his wife. Carinus' army went over to Diocletian, meaning that the whole Empire was now his.

Diocletian

The first problem was an unruly army. The soldiers--particularly the Praetorian Guard--had gotten their way almost every time for nearly a century, and were inclined to assassinate the current emperor if they didn't. Moreover, the reestablished unity of the Empire was precarious, with wars likely to break out in more than one place at any time. The legions tended to lose battles when an emperor wasn't around to lead them, so the main army on each front expected to have an emperor of its own. The soldiers liked it that way, and if left alone they would start setting up their commanders as emperors again. Diocletian decided that the simplest way to cope with this danger was to beat the soldiers to it. At first he tried the method used by the "five good emperors," and adopted a drinking buddy, a general named Maximian, as his heir. Although this was legal, it must look odd to the reader, because Maximian was only five years younger than his new stepfather. A year later, Diocletian proclaimed Maximian his co-emperor, who would rule the western half of the Empire while Diocletian administered the eastern half. This worked better, but there were so many barbarian invasions to deal with over the next few years that Diocletian decided more was needed. In 293 he created a system that would be called the "Tetrarchy"; two junior emperors were elevated (Galerius in the East, Constantius in the West) and given the title of "Caesar"; the two senior emperors got the title of "Augustus." Each of the younger men was required to marry a daughter of his patron; Constantius had to divorce his wife, Helena (the future St. Helena), to do this, though their son Constantine remained his heir.

The plan was that when an Augustus died a Caesar would move up to take his place, and a new Caesar would be chosen. This new system proved its merit quickly; Constantius fought on the Rhine and in 296 re-conquered Britain (which had been in revolt since 287), while Galerius fought on the Danube and led an expedition against Persia in 297. The Persian campaign ended triumphantly, giving Rome her most favorable Mesopotamian frontier to date.

To increase the security of the emperor's person, Diocletian completed the trend toward autocracy, surrounding the emperor with enough pomp and splendor to make any usurper think twice before removing him. No longer even pretending to be the "first citizen" of a restored republic, Diocletian turned the emperor's position into an undisguised oriental despotism, called the "Dominate." Diocletian wore a crown, rather than the customary laurel wreath, and adorned himself in silk robes laden with jewels. Imperial etiquette transformed the emperor into a veritable god; rigid ceremony demanded that people bow low before him, kiss the hem of his robe, and address him as dominus et deus, "lord and god." By contrast, the Senate was relegated to the status of a city council.

Diocletian also changed the structure of the army to bring it up to date. Under the Severans and the Soldier Emperors it became impossible to move the legions around as in the old days, because now the typical legionary put down so many roots in his original campsite (a wife, a business on the side, etc.) that he couldn't give more than grudging service elsewhere. To get reinforcements for a threatened frontier, Diocletian took two cohorts from each legion in a quiet sector, rather than move the whole legion. At the same time new cavalry units were raised and stationed independently, to counter the cavalry of the enemy. As temporary detachments became permanent the old legion camps disappeared; in their place came a garrison army tied to fortifications, creating a two-part army. Each Augustus kept part of the garrison army in his capital, and the rest was split between three administrative centers close to the frontier: Trier in Gaul, Sirmium in Illyria, and Antioch in Syria. In manpower the garrison army was probably about the size of the whole pre-crisis army; the mobile army of cavalry and infantry used another 100,000 men, showing the extra burden the army bore on the state in Diocletian's time.

The other big problem was money. Diocletian issued a new currency and tried to prevent it from inflating out of sight by fixing the wage and price of everything sold in every marketplace throughout the Empire, with death as the penalty for charging more than what was decreed. The edict was incredibly detailed; it set prices for wheat, barley, wild pheasants, fattened pheasants, sparrows, dormice, peas, beer, underwear fashioned from hares' fur, parchment treated with saffron, and even haircuts and freight rates. In addition, maximum salaries were specified for every worker in the Empire. Despite this, there wasn't enough money in the Empire to pay the soldiers, and laws don't change economic facts. When the edict was posted, Lactanius tells us, "nothing appeared on the market because of fear, and prices soared much higher." Eventually Diocletian realized his edict was unenforceable, and let prices go unchecked. The new currency went the way of the old, and forty years later a peck of wheat price-fixed at 100 denarii was selling for 10,000 denarii.

To make future revolts less likely to succeed, Diocletian cut each of the old provinces in half, which increased the number of governors from 50 to 100. The new administrative districts were more logical than the old, whose irregular boundaries reflected the empire's growth, rather than any thought-out plan. They were grouped into thirteen dioceses, and each diocese was governed by a vicarius (vicar); above the dioceses were four prefectures, each under a prefect who served directly under an emperor. Paralleling this civil administration was a separate hierarchy of military officials. Command of the armies went to generals called duces, from which we later derived the title duke. Finally, a large secret service was created to keep close watch over this vast new bureaucracy.

In order to pay for the enlarged government and military establishment, taxes would have to be raised. The problem in doing this was the same that many previous rulers had faced, when strapped for cash; if you raise the tax rate on everyone enough to get the revenue you need, the poorer segments of the population can't afford to pay. In place of older rates, he enacted an income tax system, which took the most revenue from those with the ability to pay it. Because the Empire's population (like most in the pre-modern world) was about 90% rural, the land was assessed for the quality of its soil and the expected size of the harvest, and the four prefects were expected to announce what their prefectures needed every year. If there wasn't enough money the soldiers would have to be paid in goods, so Diocletian set up a more efficient collecting service as well.

As you might expect, the new system leaned much harder on the public than the old one had; the typical citizen saw his taxes increase and his personal freedom decrease.⁽¹⁰⁾ Local officials also saw their burden increase; those who did not collect their quota in taxes had to pay for the deficit out of their own pockets. Italy in particular lost all of its old privileges, except for a tax-exempt status on the city of Rome itself. However, this failed to make up for Maximian's most important political act, when he moved the capital of Italy from Rome to Mediolanum (modern Milan). He did this because the decline of the Roman navy meant that Rome was no longer a convenient place for an imperial capital. Without official sea transport, every legion and every government agent who left Rome for any place besides southern Italy had to travel halfway up the Italian peninsula, before turning east or west. At any rate, Mediolanum (and later Ravenna) were both closer to where the western emperor needed to be.

Diocletian's bureaucracy saved the Empire (although at great cost), and it served the emperors in the east for the next three hundred years. But today he usually receives a bad press because in one area he completely misread the trends. Christianity had grown over the last three hundred years so that it by now it claimed at least ten percent of the Empire's population as followers, making it more important than any pagan religion. Most of the soldiers of the day habitually disliked Christians, so for Diocletian it seemed natural to first order the Church to submit to his authority, then to launch the last and most vicious wave of persecution the Church experienced. It was a bad decision that put a sour note on all his other achievements.

Constantine I

Constantine agreed with his troops. He intended to conquer the whole empire and leave it to his sons. Over the next 18 years he succeeded in overthrowing his colleagues. In 308 he eliminated old Maximian, who was never happy with his forced abdication and tried to make a comeback. The battle which made Constantine master of the West took place at Milvan Bridge, on the Tiber River, in 312, and resulted in the death of Maxentius. Meanwhile in the East, Maxentius had gotten rid of Severus in 307, Galerius had died (of natural causes) in 311, and Licinius defeated Maximin in 313. That left just Constantine and Licinius, and Constantine's final victory in the battle of Adrianople (324) allowed him to rule the Empire alone for the last 13 years of his life. Constantine may have gotten the chance to try for the throne because he was an emperor's son, but he obviously had the talent needed for it; he never lost a battle. He also did better than Diocletian because he went with the tide instead of against it. Though Diocletian set up the structure of the late Roman Empire, the style of it was Constantine's.

The most important change made by Constantine involved Christianity. Beforehand, he and his family had shown a tendency toward monotheism, by belonging to the cult of a sun-god called Sol Invictus (Unconquered Sun). This movement, started by Elagabalus, became an official state religion under Aurelian; many emperors in the late third century had themselves portrayed on coins with a crown of sunbeams, and the words Sol Invictus. According to the official story, Constantine switched from the sun-god to the Son of God when he marched on Rome. Shortly before the battle of Milvan Bridge, he saw a vision of a cross in front of the sun, surrounded by these words: "In hoc signo vinces" (By this sign conquer). At once he marched his troops into a river, declared them baptized, and ordered them to paint the Greek letters chi and rho (an abbreviation for the name of Christ) on their shields. He may have done this to embarrass his rivals, who were all anti-Christian. When the battle ended in victory he became a lifelong friend of Christianity, legalizing it in the areas he ruled. Finally on his deathbed he was baptized (337).⁽¹¹⁾

The eastern half of the Empire had more Christians, so the adoption of Christianity made the people more patriotic. By bringing the leaders of the Church over to his side, Constantine gave himself an air of legitimacy that the emperors had lacked for a century. Even allowing for the divisive effect of the heresies that would follow, the result was a stronger state, and closer ties with Armenia, which had declared itself Christian in 303.

Constantine also reorganized and enlarged the mobile army, disbanded the Praetorian Guard because it had supported Maxentius in the recent civil war, and let the garrison army dwindle to a watchtower militia. Thus, the mobile army became the most important force in the Empire. One result of these changes was a much needed reduction in the cost of defense, which Diocletian had fixed at a level too high to sustain.

On one point Diocletian and Constantine held the same views. They saw that the western half of the empire was no longer as important as the eastern half. The West's population was so scattered in the countryside that even the new system could not produce enough money and supplies for the army. The eastern provinces, on the other hand, with their higher, more concentrated populations, were easier to manage. The East had become the proper place for an emperor to live. Diocletian's headquarters was Nicomedia, the old capital of Bithynia. Galerius had his headquarters at Thessalonica, but moved it to Nicomedia when he succeeded Diocletian. Constantine also wanted an eastern capital, and got one even while he was the official emperor of the west; in the winter of 317/318 he moved to Sardica (modern Sofia, Bulgaria). This showed that he considered Licinius more dangerous than any barbarian threat to Gaul and Britain.

After the fighting ended, Constantine looked at the possibilities for a permanent capital in the east. At first he decided that Illium--ancient Troy--would be the most appropriate. According to one legend, he personally marked out where the city walls should be, and ordered construction to begin. However, one night after the gates for the main wall were hung, the Lord appeared to Constantine and told him to seek another place for his new Rome. This time he moved to the European side of the Bosporus, picking a small city named Byzantium. Again he marked out the new city limits, by walking two miles away from old Byzantium, spear in hand. He kept going until a weary follower asked how much farther he planned to go; Constantine, who used divine visions to make his activities more impressive, replied, "I shall go on until He who is walking in front of me stops."

Constantine launched a massive program to build the new city in record time. He turned it into a replica of Rome (complete with seven artificial hills), filled it with art treasures taken from other cities, and built a hippodrome, a forum, senate house⁽¹²⁾, many churches and bathhouses, and gardens watered by aqueducts. Topping it off was a colossal gilded statue of Apollo, its head replaced by Constantine's, which held in one hand an orb symbolizing world power.⁽¹³⁾ The whole creation, dedicated in 330, was first named Nova Roma, and later Constantinople.

Constantine's choice for a new capital was a brilliant one. By placing it on the main crossing point between Europe and the Middle East, he gave the government a commanding position over the trade of both. Moreover, since it was on a peninsula, defenses were superb: the navy could protect it on three sides, while the most massive set of walls the Western world had seen were on the fourth side (three walls in all), making the city so impregnable that it resisted onslaughts for a thousand years. Thus the West was saved from many invasions, particularly Islamic ones, for the whole Middle Ages.⁽¹⁴⁾ It was also from Constantinople that the two last great Roman legal codes were produced, by Theodosius II in 438 and by Justinian between 529 and 534. These summaries of laws, decrees, and precedents, some dating back to the days of the Republic, were the Empire's last great achievement, which petty kings in the West would imitate for centuries to come.

Despite Constantine's preference for the east, he knew that calling his state "Roman" looked rather odd if the city of Rome was no longer an important part of it. Therefore he started some building projects in Rome as well, to make up for a generation of neglect since Diocletian took over. In January 326, he headed west, thinking that Rome would be the most appropriate place to celebrate the twenty-year anniversary of the beginning of his reign. Tragedy struck, however, before he got there. In May he executed his eldest son, Crispus, and then in June he suffocated his wife Fausta in a hot bath. Why this happened was never made clear; the most popular story was that Constantine had discovered an illicit love affair between Crispus and Fausta. A more complicated, but more logical theory, holds that Fausta wanted one of her own sons, not Crispus, to become the next emperor, so she accused Crispus of attempted rape, a crime punishable by death; Constantine then felt compelled to execute Fausta, too, when he found out she had framed Crispus. Finally, some historians believe that Constantine got jealous, because Crispus proved to be a fine governor and military leader when Constantine put him in charge of Gaul, and he feared that his son was becoming more popular than he was. Whatever his motive, Constantine was in a sour mood after that. He only stayed in Rome long enough to dedicate a new church, St. Peter's Basilica (see below), and then hurried east, never to show himself in the western half of the Empire again.

Constantinian Christianity

As the Church converted Constantine, so Constantine also transformed the Church. The Christianity taught by Jesus was a prophetic faith; three hundred years later it had become a priestly one. Jesus did not tell his followers they needed priests, altars, or temples, but now all three of those elements overshadowed everything else. Though Constantine did not persecute pagans, his big subsidies made it clear whose side he was on. Constantine became the Church's prime defender, in ways the Bible had never promoted. His actions discouraged those who followed any other faith, and disagreement with the government on matters of doctrine became grounds for treason; the state now used the same brute force to promote Christianity that had once been used to promote paganism.

As Christianity came out into the open, so did some critical controversies among the believers. In the third century theologians like Paul of Samosata and Sabellus taught that Jesus was a good man so filled with the Holy Spirit that he turned into God; this point of view, called Sabellianism, saw the unity of God as so important that they probably did not believe God could be in Heaven while Jesus walked on Earth. A different view was proposed in Constantine's time by Arius, a brilliant clergyman from Alexandria. Arius thought that Jesus could not really be the son of God; instead he was a person God had created at the beginning of time to save men. Alexander, the bishop of Alexandria, excommunicated Arius, and Alexander's successor, Athanasius, argued strongly that Jesus must be the son of God, for if He isn't, His death cannot save us from our sins. That should have ended the matter, but enough of the clergy agreed with Arius that Constantine felt the need to intervene.

The result was the first great ecumenical (universal) council of bishops, held at Nicaea in 325; more than 250 bishops attended. Constantine had not yet been baptized, and probably had only a superficial knowledge of what they were discussing, but he presided over the meeting anyway, though most of the speeches must have gone over his head. The view of the moderate (Trinitarian) faction was put down in writing, as the famous Nicene Creed, and Arianism and Sabellianism were condemned as heresies. Only Arius and two supporters refused to sign the creed. Since Constantine wanted unity most of all, the council must have looked like a big success to him.⁽¹⁵⁾

Between 325 and 348 a brave bishop named Ulfilas, a barbarian raised in Constantinople, traveled to the Visigoths and introduced them to Christianity. By combining Greek and Roman letters with Scandinavian runes, Ulfilas invented a Gothic alphabet, and wrote the Bible in it for his converts, though he prudently omitted the books of 1 & 2 Kings because he felt that would encourage the tribesmen to continue their warlike ways. His teaching later spread to the Ostrogoths and the Vandals, and there lay a major tragedy. Ulfilas was a follower of Arianism, because he had become a Christian during the years when Arianism was most popular; that made the Germans he converted heretics.

When the Germans began to take over Roman territory, their Arianism became the creed of a proud and very successful minority, who feared absorption into the mass of Catholics they had subjugated. This attempt to exist as a distinct and superior class was shortsighted, for it continually reminded their subjects that a handful of foreigners ruled them. It is no coincidence that the most successful of the German tribes were either those who adopted the faith of the empire's Catholic majority (the Franks), or avoided Christianity until Arianism was gone (the Anglo-Saxons).

Judaism converted some Arab and Berber tribes during this period, but the only faith which advanced at a rate comparable to that of Christianity was Manicheism, a "new & improved" version of Zoroastrianism taught by the third-century Persian prophet Mani. Manicheism accepted Zoroaster's thesis that life is a struggle between a good and an evil god, but added to it advanced personal ethics that resembled those of Christianity. In spite of repression, it spread rapidly in Persia, and it flourished in the Roman Empire until it seemed to challenge the Church in the fifth century; that caused the emperors to turn their machinery of persecution against it as well.

Besides Armenia and the Roman Empire, the only Christian states were Abyssinia and Nubia. They were converted in the fifth and sixth centuries respectively, but lost what little contact they had with the rest of Christendom when the Moslems conquered Egypt in 641.

Announcing the Middle Ages

The standard Roman design for a large building was the basilica, a three-part hall with a two-story main section (nave) and a single-story hall flanking it on each side. Halls of this type were ideal places for church congregations, so they built hundreds of them in the fourth and fifth centuries.

The basilica normally had a wooden roof. Concrete ceilings were possible, but this meant building an expensive support structure in the form of massive walls and buttresses. When Constantine decided to build a basilica over the grave of the Apostle Peter he made it big but kept the cost in mind by opting for a wooden roof; he also saved money by using columns from abandoned pagan temples.

St. Peter's Basilica gave Rome a Christian building on a scale to match the masterpieces of classical antiquity, and despite Constantine's cost-cutting measures it outlasted most of its rivals. It was only in 1506--by which time the south wall was leaning about 5 feet over from a vertical angle--that the demolition team came in and began working on the present-day St. Peter's Cathedral.

Other changes were apparent in the types of people who appeared. Counts and dukes, bishops and monks make the last chapters of Roman history read like a medieval chronicle. Serfs tilled the land, mounted knights rode to the battlefield. Nearly every man went into the same profession as his father. The slide to feudalism began at least a century before the Western Roman Empire fell.

Constantine's Successors Muddle Through

Church leaders like Athanasius thought better of Constantius when confronted by "Julian the Apostate." Now that his position was secure, Julian renounced the Christianity his family had forced on him, declaring he had been a pagan all along. His two years of sole rule were an erratic postscript to the dynasty; he took away the privileges of the Church, ordered it to give back the land it had taken from pagans, removed Christians from military and civil posts, and forbade Christians from teaching literature. He also tried to weaken Christianity by favoring its enemies⁽¹⁶⁾, and wrote more than any other emperor⁽¹⁷⁾, but nothing he did could revivify the ancient beliefs. His synthetic neo-Platonism, which borrowed the organization of the Church and tried to outdo it in superstition, had no real following. As a high priest in his order, Julian personally took part in many services, kindling the altar fire, wielding the knife and looking for omens in the entrails of slaughtered birds. A letter to Arsacius, a co-priest in Galatia, shows he also intended to compete with Christian charity:

"Why do we not notice that it is their kindness to strangers, their care for the graves of the dead and the pretended holiness of their lives that have done most to increase atheism [i.e., his name for Christianity]? I believe that we ought really and truly to practice every one of these virtues. And it is not enough for you alone to practice them, but so must all the priests of Galatia, without exception . . . In the second place admonish them that no priest may enter a theater or drink in a tavern or control any craft or trade that is base and not respectable . . .
In every city establish frequent hostels in order that strangers may profit by our generosity; I do not mean for our own people only, but for others also who are in need of money . . . For it is disgraceful that, when no Jew ever has to beg and the impious Galileans [Christians] support both their own people and ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us . . ."

Julian never realized that paganism was a dead ideology. In 363 he died in battle against the Persians, and the Church came back stronger than before. With his death the house of Constantine became extinct, and the troops proclaimed Jovian, a young officer on the Persian front, as the next emperor. A Christian, Jovian undid Julian's anti-Christian policies, and gave up part of Armenia and Iraq to get out of a bad situation with the Persians. Then he started home, but only got at far as the border between Bithynia and Galatia before he died in bed, cause unknown.

The House of Valentinian

For some time it had been Roman policy to recruit Germans into the army, but the Empire was still having trouble dealing with other Germans. Since previous wars had left the frontier provinces depopulated, the emperors tried a risky form of coopting. They allowed friendly tribes to come in as foederatii, or allies. In return for a land grant just inside the frontier, the foederatii were expected to swear loyalty to the emperor and guard their territory against their intruding cousins. This was first tried by Julian the Apostate in 358; after he defeated the Franks severely, he allowed some of them to settle in Toxandria (modern Belgium). The Franks probably resented being ground into submission, but afterward they honored their military obligations--if imperial forces were garrisoned nearby.

Valens (364-378) was a feeble ruler, who depended on Valentinian for advice; he also was a determined Arian who persecuted non-Arian Christians (by contrast Valentinian was a Christian, but neutral on the subject of the Trinity; he persecuted no one for his religious beliefs). The arrangement between the two brothers worked, though; in fact the dynasty they established was one of the longest-lived in Roman history, lasting for 93 years (364-457).

The first invasion Valentinian had to deal with came from the Alemanni, who broke over the Rhine and captured a key fortress. Then Britain was invaded by Saxons from the Continent and Picts from the north. Valentinian appointed his eight-year-old son Gratian (367-383) as co-ruler in the West, and moved his headquarters to northern Gaul, from which he could direct both cross-channel operations in Britain and campaigns against Germany. He ended up spending seven years on German soil, where he fought the Alemanni, enlisted the help of the Burgundians (hereditary enemies of the Alemanni), and admitted more German immigrants into Roman territory. Then he went to the upper Danube, which needed defense from raids by the Marcomanni, Quadi and Vandals. While there he met a delegation of Quadi, and their insolence so greatly enraged him that he broke a blood vessel and died. The Danubian soldiers declared his second son, four-year-old Valentinian II (375-392), co-emperor of the West with Gratian, and Gratian chose to accept this sudden elevation, perhaps because he knew the legions caused more trouble than usual when they didn't get what they wanted.

In the fourth century the Goths recovered from their defeats at the hands of the Illyrian emperors, and the Ostrogoths expanded, mainly at the expense of the Slavs. This expansion became explosive under a little-known king named Ermanaric (342?-372), forming an empire that levied tribute on all German and Slavic tribes between the Baltic and the Black Seas (modern Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus and Ukraine). He also expanded across the Don to the Volga River, and occupied the Crimea, which had been a sleepy Roman protectorate for the past four hundred years. His new neighbors were the Alans on the north slopes of the Caucasus (an Iranian tribe descended from the Sarmatians), and the Huns on the opposite bank of the Volga.

To both the Romans and the Germans, the Huns were repulsive, frightening, and behaved atrociously. "They all have stumpy, powerful legs and a muscular neck," wrote Ammianus Marcellinus, a historian who lived in the late fourth century, "but are so disfigured and bent that they could be taken for two-legged beasts. They have become so hardened by their way of life that they need no fire or seasoned food but live on the roots of wild plants or the half-raw meat of any animal." They were illiterate and so filthy that they wore the same clothes until they rotted off, and were only comfortable on horseback. "They are no good at all fighting on foot," Ammianus continued, "but are perfectly at home on their tough, ugly horses, which they sometimes ride sidesaddle when they relieve themselves. It is on horseback that each one of his people buys and sells, eats and drinks, and bent across the narrow neck of his steed, takes a deep sleep." They flattened children's noses with boards and bandages, while youths scarred or burned their faces so they wouldn't have to shave. On top of all that, Huns were utterly ruthless warriors, who easily outran all their enemies and were deadly in the use of the bow and the lasso (which was used to capture or unhorse an opponent).

Gothic cavalry was good, but the cavalry of their steppe-dwelling teachers was better. Ermanaric found this out when he foolishly attacked the Huns. His disastrous defeat was followed by a Hun invasion that shattered his kingdom; Ermanaric reportedly cut his throat to avoid capture by the new, terrifying enemy. The Huns swept across the Ukrainian and Hungarian steppes to the Danube, enslaved the Visigoths and Gepids, and settled down with their flocks, now lords of a pasture that stretched farther than anyone could keep track of. In three years they had obliterated a century of German expansion (372-375).

While the Gepids remained where they were, the terrified Goths and Asding Vandals piled their possessions into their wagons and begged the Romans to give them refuge. Emperor Valens agreed to let them in, because he had plenty of abandoned land that needed resettling; the Goths were unlikely to pay taxes but they would make good recruits for the army. At any rate, he did not have enough guards to halt a horde crossing the frozen Danube in winter. Soon the scale of the migration, a full-blown Volkwanderung, was more than the Romans could cope with. German tribes were soon pouring across the whole length of the Danube: Vandals in Austria, Ostrogoths in Serbia, and Visigoths in Bulgaria. Once they settled the new foederatii, the Romans treated them like defeated enemies, rather than like allies. The Visigoths were never given enough land, their cherished weapons were confiscated, many of them were enslaved, and callous Romans sold them rotten grain at exorbitant prices. And with 200,000 people in the Visigoth camps alone, food ran out quickly; there was even a report of starving Goths trading their children for Roman dogs, which they promptly cooked in the stew-pot. Administration broke down, hunger turned to anger, the Germans began to seize the supplies they needed, both sides cried bad faith, and open warfare broke out in the Balkans.

To bring this situation under control Valens went forth with a strike force in 378. Its cavalry was inadequate even for scouting, so Valens relied on his infantry to do most of the work. Near Adrianople he found the camp of the Visigoths, a wagon ring defended by what he took to be the whole tribe. But no sooner did he begin the attack when a wave of Gothic horsemen swept out of their hiding places and threw the whole Roman army into confusion. The defeat was total; Valens and all his men were killed. Seven hundred years had passed since Rome's first legions marched against the Samnites; now the legionary passed into history. The soldiers who surrounded the next emperors were mainly German cavalrymen. The dragon of the German war-band replaced the Roman eagle.

Gratian chose Theodosius, a Spanish brother-in-law, to replace Valens in the East. Theodosius I (379-395) inherited a mess, but he had both the talent and resources to tidy it up. He used his wealth and Gothic-speaking priests to win friends among the Visigoths, and sent the army, under command of a Vandal named Stilicho, to forcefully deal with those barbarians who remained unfriendly. By 382, this mixture of diplomacy and blockade had pacified the Visigoths, and they returned to their settlements in Bulgaria. To keep the Empire secure, Theodosius enlarged the army some more, and passionately looked for new means to pay for it. In 383 he decreed that "no man shall possess any property that is exempt from taxation." A torrent of regulations and edicts took this to the limit; for example, they could now accuse a serf who tried to leave his land of theft, because "he is stealing his own person."

After the frontiers became quiet, several usurpers arose to threaten the imperial family. In 383 the troops in Britain, who were dissatisfied with Gratian, proclaimed their allegiance to their general, Magnus Maximus ("Great the Greatest"). This rebel crossed the English Channel and occupied Gaul; Gratian sent an army to deal with him, but the soldiers switched sides, and not long after that Gratian was assassinated. Next Magnus Maximus negotiated a settlement with Valentinian and Theodosius, and both agreed to peace, out of concern for Valentinian's safety. The truce lasted for four years; then Magnus Maximus invaded Italy and Valentinian fled to the East. Theodosius staged a counterattack that defeated and captured the usurper, and subjected him to the capital penalty (388).⁽¹⁸⁾ Valentinian returned to the West, and soon fell under the domination of Arbogastes, his Frankish general. One day in 392, Valentinian decided that Arbogastes was getting too powerful, and handed him a letter of dismissal, but the Frank threw it to the ground. Shortly after that Valentinian was found dead in his palace in southern Gaul; we don't know if he committed suicide or was murdered. Arbogastes then raised his own nominee, a popular orator named Flavius Eugenius, but just two years later Theodosius defeated the western army and had Eugenius put to death. Thus Theodosius got to rule the whole empire for the last five months of his life.

Theodosius is now sometimes called "Theodosius the Great" because he made Catholic Christianity the official religion of the Empire. Thus, we should remember him for finishing the religious reform Constantine I had started. Early in his reign he suffered a grave illness, accepted baptism, and professed that Christianity, in the form taught by the Nicene Creed, was the only true faith. Upon his recovery he sought to get rid of paganism and heresy forever. Arians were ordered to hand over their churches to Catholic priests, and a second ecumenical council, held at Constantinople in 381, outlawed Arianism and clearly defined the relationship between God the Father and God the Son. One edict actually banned the discussion of any religious question, which temporarily deprived the people of their favorite topic of conversation. Manicheism was classified as heresy and driven underground. For a time he treated the Jews with leniency, though, because he was a friend of their chief rabbi, Gamaliel VI.

Meanwhile Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, became the most powerful person in the Empire, and the first Christian clergyman to successfully coerce a head of state. In 388 a bishop in Mesopotamia burned down a synagogue; Theodosius tried to punish the bishop, and Ambrose refused to conduct the Mass until the emperor revoked both the bishop's punishment and an order to rebuild the synagogue. Two years later Ambrose gave the emperor his greatest humiliation. It happened like this: a mob in a Macedonian city, Thessalonica, lynched the local general, Butheric, for imprisoning a popular charioteer. In response Theodosius allowed his soldiers to massacre 7,000 civilians in Thessalonica, and Ambrose ordered the emperor, under threat of excommunication, to do public penance for this un-Christian act. He did, and the Christians of Milan watched the astonishing spectacle of a Roman emperor, stripped of all his imperial insignia, begging forgiveness for his sins in a church.

Prodded by guilt, and possibly by Ambrose, Theodosius attacked the enemies of Christianity vigorously after that. On February 24, 391, all pagan temples were closed. Pagans started practicing their rites outdoors, so on November 8, 392, Theodosius banned that practice, too. Shortly before his death (in January 395) he stripped the temples in Rome, dragged their idols through the streets, and ordered the senators to choose whether Jupiter or Jesus would rule the Empire; of course most of them converted (and so did any citizen who knew what was good for him!).

Theodosius I had ruled the whole empire effectively, but saw that neither of his sons was up to the task, so he willed that the Empire be divided between them: Ten-year-old Honorius (395-423) got the western half, eighteen-year-old Arcadius (395-408) got the eastern half. There was no cause for alarm among the public; the Empire had always come back together previously. Nor did anybody seem concerned that the administrations and finances of East and West remained distinct when one man ruled both. What was different this time was that the split became permanent. Neither East nor West could produce an emperor that was strong enough to rule the whole thing; both Honorius and Arcadius were weak and worthless, so their ministers and generals did the real work. The final act of Theodosius had the same result as Constantine's moving of the capital--the West was abandoned to strengthen the East. After 395 the West was effectively on its own, to fight its own battles, and work out its own destiny.

Population Figures of the Late Empire Period

Most of these people were crowded into the agricultural zones of the Old World. The main one ran from Europe's Mediterranean shores to India, while another covered the eastern half of present-day China and a bit of its neighbors (Korea and Vietnam). Throughout this whole period seven out of every ten people in the world lived in these two areas. However, this statistic by itself doesn't tell the whole story. The years up to 100 A.D. were good ones for civilization; this was the age of Hellenism and the rise of the Roman and Chinese empires, so population increase during that time was rapid. Then it leveled off. Between 150 A.D. and 400 we are certain that Rome and China had no growth at all; in fact, their populations shrank. Meanwhile the barbarians outside the pale of civilization continued to multiply.

Nowadays large families are often raised by those least capable of feeding and clothing all their children; in earlier times population growth was a measure of economic prosperity. When empires are successful they bring peace and security to their subjects. Improved communications mean that food can be transported from places that have it to places that need it. The result of both these factors is an upsurge in population up to the limit of what the land can feed.

However, when empires come under pressure they raise taxes until it becomes uneconomical to farm land of marginal quality. Thus during the decline of the Roman Empire the total area under cultivation dwindled. We have calculated that in the fourth century a whole quarter of the empire's farmland was abandoned. This would have caused a drop in both living standards and population.

We already saw Rome begin the transition from a classical to a medieval society with Diocletian's reforms. With the tying of the peasants to the land came an end to the classical ideal of citizenship for all free men, as the new serfs were hardly better off than the slaves of old. And with the conversion of the empire to Christianity, theology replaced philosophy as the main topic of intellectual discussion. A new society formed in the shell of the old; nothing remained of the old empire but the empire itself.

Today there are 39 nations where the Roman Empire once ruled. The Romans brought peace and prosperity to this huge area for ten generations, and did it at a time when they could send orders only as fast as a man could ride, and transport cargoes in oxcarts and barges. That bare fact is impressive; whatever followed would look insignificant by comparison.

The Beginning of the End of the Classical World

To cut costs, the emperor's treasurer would argue that hiring tribesmen for use in emergencies was cheaper than keeping a Roman cavalry on standby. And that was probably the only practical course available, given the money available. But mercenaries are also likely to fight for themselves as well as for pay. This meant that once infantry could no longer win battles, the throne was up for grabs to people who lived and fought in the saddle.

At this point it is appropriate to ask: were the German victories against the Roman Empire really a disaster for mankind? Those who got to know the Germans may not have thought so. The Germans could be violent, uncouth folks, but they were a good deal more faithful to their wives than their civilized counterparts; the fifth-century Christian monk Salvian also noted that the "evil dens" and sins which marked Roman life could not be found in areas where the barbarians ruled. In the late empire period Romans admired German men for their strength, and German women for their blond-haired beauty; it was common for dark-haired ladies to wear blond wigs imported from the north. And as for the violence, remember that our accounts concerning the early Germans were written by people who not too long before got their jollies by throwing Christians to lions.⁽¹⁹⁾

Now why did Imperial Rome's population shrink, even during its best years? The reason for this may have been that many of its people were slaves (slaves have a notoriously low reproduction rate), or because of a high death rate in the cities, which were regularly decimated by epidemics. Edward Gibbon blamed it on Christianity; many Christians thought a true man or woman of God should not marry, so even those who weren't monks tried to live like them. However, this fad came so late in the Empire's history (the fifth century) that we must see it more as a symptom than the root cause of the problem. Whatever the reason, the specialization of civilized society helped to increase the barbarian's advantage. While every adult male German was at least a part-time soldier, the taxes and labor of more than a hundred civilians supported each Roman legionary. Professional soldiers are expected to have superior morale and experience, and can defeat several times their number of amateurs, but they can only do so while they are well equipped, and fourth-century battles like Adrianople showed that the legionaries' methods and equipment had become obsolete. The German soldier around 400 A.D. had a sword made of better steel, was well-dressed in scale armor (at the same time the Romans stopped carrying their shields, breastplates and spears because they complained that they were too heavy!) and was likely to have a horse. All the Romans had left in their favor were discipline and generalship, and when these failed, they hired Germans to fight other Germans.⁽²⁰⁾ This last strategy could only be a stopgap measure, for an indispensable soldier will try to get his own way if even his most unreasonable demands are not met. The Roman frontier ceased to be a barrier between civilization and barbarism, becoming instead a barrier between the unauthorized barbarians outside and the employed barbarians inside. In the end, the Western Roman Empire was destroyed by the arms of the German mercenaries that imperial necessity had created.

By the fifth century, Rome had given all it had to give, and though it showed considerable flexibility, late Roman society lacked the vitality of the Republic and the Principate. Since no manmade state lasts forever, we probably should not ask why Rome fell, but why the Empire's pieces never came back together again. And the answer is that Rome did not have a homogeneous culture. The Empire of the Caesars lorded over half a dozen major groups of people, each with its own language, history, customs and aspirations. From about 300 B.C. to 400 A.D., when the Italians had a higher population than the rest, they were able to bring them all under a single rule. Yet while the Italians imposed their view of order, the Celts, Greeks, Berbers, Egyptians, and Semites underneath kept their own gods as national symbols, giving them Roman names to make them look respectable in Rome. Moreover, the demographic center of gravity did not remain in Italy; after Rome fell it moved to the Rhine valley.⁽²¹⁾ Consequently France and Germany became the main states of Europe in the centuries that followed.

Another reason why the Roman Empire never came back is because the world it was based on also disappeared. In the past Europe had been the western fringe of a civilized world centered on the Middle East; now European civilization had grown to the point where it could stand on its own. The north shore of the Mediterranean basin declared itself part of the new order, while in the seventh century, the Arabs conquered the southern and eastern shores, bringing another new culture to North Africa and the Levant. The central portion of the former empire-Spain, southern Italy, the Balkans and Asia Minor-became the battlegrounds between European and Islamic civilization. Thus we should see the Middle Ages not so much a time of recovery after classical civilization's collapse, but as the time when both Christianity and Islam were triumphant over paganism.

That brings us to one more question: why didn't the eastern half of the Empire fall with the West? To answer this we must look back to Julius Caesar's campaigns. The Greeks and Carthaginians had colonized the Mediterranean basin and turned it into a single economic unit, paving the way for political unification under Rome. Julius Caesar marched beyond the lands drained by rivers flowing into the "Great Sea," and introduced Mediterranean culture to France and England. There it flourished among the upper class while politics favored it. When the Empire ceased to expand and the cost of defending it rose to unacceptable levels, the slender trade of the West was taxed out of existence. The government worker likes the townsman because he is accessible and pays his taxes with cash. To gather a percentage of the produce of scattered, uncooperative peasants, to transport it to where it can be sold or put to use without wasting too much of it, yields a much poorer return than collecting taxes as money. People moved out of the cities, and farmers stopped coming to the cities, because that was where the tax man was most likely to look for them. To make up for the resulting deficit, taxes on farms went up, and those farmers who could not pay their taxes/debts were likely to be thrown into slavery. Many farmers escaped their financial burden by deeding their land to a great landowner and working for him as a tenant (another forerunner of feudalism). Still others moved to barbarian-ruled areas or joined bands of brigands. Eventually the West could no longer pay its own way. Ammianus described the West as a land harassed by "the burden of tributes and the repeated increase in taxes . . . crushed by the severity of the dunning tax-collectors." Once the division of the Empire became permanent and the West was deprived of support from the East, it collapsed in just a few decades. The East, by contrast, was always able to raise money from somewhere, and it had Egypt, the province with the most grain and a highly concentrated population, making it the most profitable province of all. Thus the East hired some of the invaders and bought off the rest, allowing it to survive ingloriously for a century, until Justinian came along and rebuilt the Empire along new lines.

In southern Italy, impoverishment and depopulation began long before the Pax Romana ended; as early as the reign of Augustus Gallic potters were producing a good imitation of Italian ware, and the export trade of Campania gradually dwindled away afterwards. The expensive agriculture of Italy had already declined in the face of African and Spanish competition.⁽²²⁾ These troubles were of more than local importance, for Italy and Tunisia were the only western provinces with a level of civilization equal to the Greek-speaking East; elsewhere the population was too sparse and too unsophisticated to maintain the urban way of life. Cities were founded for administrative/defensive purposes, but few became self-sufficient; even apparently successful ones like Trier, Metz, Mainz, Mediolanum, Verona and Aquileia depended on business from the nearest army units for their prosperity.

The factory system never replaced individual labor in the ancient world because the self-employed artisan did not need much capital to set up a workshop; what he needed the most was skill. Though the eastern city dwellers continued to demand goods of superior workmanship, in the West such tastes were a recent and superficial acquisition. And the potters of Gaul weren't the only provincials who could make Italian-style crafts; in Africa we can follow the economic decentralization one stage further, for the Carthaginians first used imported Roman lamps, then made copies of them, and finally switched to homemade lamps that were crude but usable. This reversion to self-sufficiency was a visible sign that people were moving out of the cities and fending for themselves. The effort to convert towns that had run a chronic (but mild) deficit into sources of revenue destroyed them. Taxation drove people away, the government's price-fixing made many professions profitless, and its attempt to keep people in them by making all jobs hereditary must have created many outlaws. The result was an Orwellian paradox, where citizenship became slavery and the free man wanted to become a serf.⁽²³⁾

Notable Fifth-Century Christians

1. John Chrysostom (350-407), a reluctant bishop of Constantinople, was the greatest Christian orator of the day. A native of Antioch, he was temperamentally unsuited to life in the imperial capital, and his sermons against the Empress Eudoxia and the corruption around him led to his exile twice. Today we remember him as an example of piety and courage, and hundreds of his eloquent sermons have survived, which earned him his Greek nickname of Chrysostom ("golden mouth").

2. Jerome (345?-420), an Italian who mastered both Hebrew and Greek, became the scholar who translated the Bible into the Latin text still used by the Catholic Church today, the Vulgate Bible.

3. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) probably did more than anyone else since the first century to put down in writing what Christianity was all about. As a youth he experimented with various religions and philosophies, including Manicheism and Epicureanism, until he became the imperial rhetorician for the city of Milan, where the eloquence of Bishop Ambrose convinced him that Christianity could be intelligent and that the Bible was not as barbaric as he originally thought. From 396 until his death he served as a bishop for the North African city of Hippo Regius. Two of his writings have become classics: Confessions, where he tells the story of his search for the truth, and The City of God, where he explains the Christian's duties as a citizen of this world and a citizen of the Kingdom of God. He also wrote against the heresies of his day, like the Donatists, and was one of the first Christians to advocate torture as a tool to make heretics repent.

4. Leo I, also known as Leo the Great, was bishop of Rome from 440 to 461. A key spokesman in the controversy concerning the person of Christ, he was the most powerful leader the Roman Church had seen up to this point. He also introduced the Petrine theory, which claimed that the Apostle Peter was the first bishop of Rome. Not long after that, bishops of Rome began to call themselves popes, meaning "papa." Thus, just like Israel once called for a human king to lead it, now the Church chose to have an earthly king, rather than wait upon the Lord for guidance.
Finally, we should note that when Attila the Hun invaded Italy in 452, it was Leo I, rather than the emperor, who personally met with Attila and persuaded him to spare Rome.

5. Patrick (389-461) Originally a citizen of Roman Britain, Patrick was kidnaped by pirates and sold as a slave in Ireland at the age of sixteen. After six years of service as a shepherd he escaped back to the empire, but in a dream he heard the voice of the Irish calling him back, so in 432 he returned, founded several monasteries, and devoted the rest of his life to getting Christianity started in Ireland. The rest of the information we have on him is pure legend, but the Celtic Christian Church he founded preserved both civilization and Christianity after Anglo-Saxon barbarians obliterated them from most of neighboring Britain. For more about the best years in Irish history, read Thomas Cahill's How the Irish Saved Civilization.

Alaric the Visigoth

Because of all this, Arcadius and Honorius were not getting along as well as brothers should. In 401 Arcadius figured out a way to turn his Gothic problem into an asset; he suggested to the Visigoth king Alaric that he ought to occupy Illyria in the name of the eastern emperor. Alaric agreed, since he wanted to obtain food and a better homeland for his people. For Arcadius this was a "two birds with one stone" deal; whether the Visigoths succeeded or failed he would no longer have them on his back, making trouble for the rest of his citizens.

Meanwhile in the West, Stilicho skillfully conserved and deployed his dwindling forces, using them to stave off disaster for a decade. Money was always a problem--once he had to strip the gold off Rome's most venerable temple to pay his troops--but he won every battle and thus kept a lid on the situation. In gratitude, the Romans built a splendid statue to him in the Forum of Rome, praising him for his bravery and loyalty, and noting the "exceptional love" which they held for him.

To stop the Visigoths, Stilicho called in the troops from the Rhine frontier. They defeated the Visigoths twice, in 402 and 403; in 405 he annihilated a formidable coalition of Ostrogoths, Quadi and Asding Vandals that had invaded Italy in the meantime. Still, the price was high. The next year saw the rest of the Marcomanni, Quadi,⁽²⁴⁾ and Vandals--Stilicho's own people--join forces with a clan of Alans from the Hun-dominated Caucasus, and move west. On the last day of 406 they swarmed across the undefended frozen Rhine at Mainz. This time they brought their families and possessions, meaning that they intended to stay.

The barbarian invaders made such a mess of Gaul that the most notorious of them--the Vandals--gave their name to a word describing senseless destruction: vandalism. The only army left that could save Gaul was the garrison in Britain. This garrison was unreliable, though. Disappointed with Honorius and Stilicho, they had revolted and set up a soldier emperor of their own, a certain Marcus, in 406. A year later Marcus was murdered by an equally unknown pretender, Gratianus, who suffered the same fate at the hands of somebody named Constantine III four months later. This Constantine brought the army across the Channel to occupy Gaul; officially he was pacifying a province which the rulers of the West had abandoned, but he was actually seeking to have his usurped imperial title recognized by the Franks, Burgundians and Alemanni, who had taken advantage of the collapse of the frontier to annex the west bank of the Rhine. The Alans, Suevi and Vandals, rather than staying to fight, continued south, crossed the Pyrenees, and occupied two thirds of Spain (409).⁽²⁵⁾ In the end Constantine III was easily captured and executed, by an army sent from Italy that would have been better employed elsewhere (411). Meanwhile the abandoned Britons waited in vain for the Romans to come back, discarded their superficial Latin culture, and went back to the Celtic languages and tribal ways of the pre-Roman era.

As half the Western Empire disappeared Honorius grew frightened, decided Stilicho had done this to give the Empire to the Vandals, and had him murdered (408). Then the treacherous emperor slaughtered many Germans who had settled in northern Italy. With those acts the Italian core of the Empire, for which so much had been sacrificed, was immediately forfeit. The Empire had existed for so long that no one could imagine an alternative; the barbarians asked for land and subsidies but not the imperial crown, their leaders had wanted nothing more than military commands within the framework of the imperial system. Once Stilicho was dead, the army of the West dissolved. The Visigoths entered Italy and besieged Rome; when the Romans warned Alaric that they outnumbered the attackers, Alaric responded by saying, "Then come out, the thicker the grass the easier the scything!" Eventually Rome gave the Visigoths what they demanded: 5,000 lbs. of gold, 30,000 lbs. of silver and 3,000 lbs. of pepper. Also significant, 40,000 malcontents joined Alaric's horde at this point: slaves, oppressed peasants, and German mercenaries outraged at the butchery of their families. Soon in Spain and Gaul they would be welcomed as liberators in the same way.

In 409 Alaric came back, and was bought off by another ransom. In 410 the Western authorities, safe in their new capital at Ravenna⁽²⁶⁾, refused his latest demands, and Alaric took Rome by storm. He followed the standard practice in ancient times where he plundered the city for three days, then departed; he didn't touch church property, though, because he and many of his men were Christians. Rome was no longer a political capital, but its sacking sent shock waves across the known world. It had been unthinkable; the Eternal City, which had resisted all attackers for eight centuries, had now fallen to an uncivilized conqueror. From far-off Bethlehem, St. Jerome lamented, "The city which has taken the world is itself taken!" No other event showed so well how weak the Empire had become--or how little time it had left.

Rome falls to the Visigoths.

In 408, Theodosius II became the next emperor of the East, at the tender age of seven. His father Arcadius had given him the title of Augustus when he was just one, and his youth allowed him to enjoy the longest reign (408-450) of the Roman era. However, he was the reclusive, scholarly type, who liked to study theology, astronomy and history; he left most of the tasks of running the state to others, especially his pious sister, Aelia Pulcheria.

Tribes of Germans were now loose all over the West. In theory an emperor still ruled Italy, and by encouraging Germans to fight one another he could sometimes impose some order on the situation. Nevertheless, the real power now lay with the Germans.

By his own standards Alaric had failed; despite his successes, he had not given his people a home they could call their own. He didn't really want to destroy the Empire, but divert its food supply to his tribe. North Africa was still the main food-producing area, so he marched to the toe of the Italian boot. When he got there he learned that without a fleet, he couldn't even cross over to Sicily, let alone Africa. He started back, hoping to confiscate the ships he needed from a local seaport, but instead he fell ill and died. Legend has it that his retainers diverted the Busento River, so that they could bury Alaric and his treasure in the riverbed. However, the river nearly dries out every year, so now this seems like a waste of labor, if it really happened.

Alaric's brother-in-law and successor, Ataulf, was so impressed by the civilization he held hostage that he tried to win a home for the Visigoths through politics. In Roman service he took the Visigoths to Gaul, where they disposed of a rebel, a Gallo-Roman named Jovinus, whom the Alemanni and Franks had proclaimed emperor (413). Then they moved into Spain, where they attacked the Alan-Suevic-Vandal states set up by the invaders (414).

Like Stilicho and Alaric, Ataulf did not believe a German could take the throne for himself, but he saw an opportunity to marry into the imperial family and thus become the father of a future emperor. Accordingly, he told Honorius he wished to marry the emperor's sister, Aelia Galla Placidia, and thus form a Gothic-Roman alliance; he may have thought Honorius would accept because he had no heir of his own. Honorius rejected the offer but his headstrong sister, who was entirely willing, accepted. They celebrated the wedding in 414, with Ataulf donning Roman robes for the occasion. Yet only a year later a treacherous follower murdered Ataulf, so he left no heir to the imperial throne. Honorius chose a new brother-in-law more to his liking--a general with a Roman family tree--and though Placidia did not want to remarry, she eventually changed her mind and became the storm center of intrigues for the next 25 years as the regent of her useless son, Valentinian III.⁽²⁷⁾ Meanwhile the Visigoths, under a new chief named Vallia, campaigned in Spain as Roman allies; in 416 they destroyed the Alans and Siling Vandals. The Suevi and Asding Vandals were saved, though, by the Romans, who feared that the Visigoths were becoming too strong. In 418 they persuaded the Visigoths to call off their campaign and retire to a legal home in southwestern Gaul (ancient Aquitania), with its capital at Toulouse.

For the inhabitants of Gaul, the arrival of the Visigoths caused many dislocations, but not as many as expected. The newcomers demanded more than a third of the farmland, and naturally took the richest lands they could find. Thus, their principal victims were the biggest landowners; for them civilization as they knew it ended. But most Gallo-Romans had little to lose, and lost little. The new Visigothic kingdom was completely independent, free from even nominal submission to Roman authority; moreover, the Visigoth marches had shown that the Romans could no longer protect their land or their people. Nothing could disguise the fact that the Roman Empire was coming apart.

Gaiseric the Lame

Of all the Western Roman Empire's territories, this was the one it could least afford to lose, and the Romans recognized Gaiseric's kingdom to keep African grain coming to Rome (442). Yet the Vandal lord did not stop there; he built a formidable fleet and began to raid other shores of the Mediterranean. The Vandals conquered the Balearic Isles, Corsica, Sardinia, and even Sicily. The Vandal kingdom now looked a lot like the empire Carthage ruled over at the beginning of the Punic Wars, but whereas the ancient Carthaginians had been traders, the Vandals were simply pirates. Since Rome had let its navy go to seed after the Second Punic War, there was no Roman resistance to the Vandal fleet (nor was there any to the Gothic fleet in the third century). By capturing Rome's grain supply, and by using his pesky pirate fleet and double-dealing diplomacy, Gaiseric kept both Roman diplomats and Visigoth kings off balance.

To support his warriors, Gaiseric confiscated many Roman estates, and put the former owners (and many Catholic clergymen) to work on them. Consequently relations between the Arian Vandals and the Catholic ex-Romans were never better than strained. Gaiseric barely managed to keep this in check, and under his successors vicious persecutions took place, giving medieval hagiographers many grim tales for their stories of the saints.

Cruelty was just one sign of the swift degeneration that occurred among the Vandals after Gaiseric. The warriors, seduced by their new luxuries, grew weak, corrupt and disorganized. Thus they fell quickly when the Eastern Roman Empire conquered them in the sixth century, and soon they disappeared as a distinct people, leaving behind only a mixed population and lingering bitterness.

Attila the Hun

Though successful elsewhere, Attila, Gaiseric and the other barbarian kings faced a formidable opponent in Italy. This was Aetius, a Roman aristocrat who commanded the army during the reign of the last and least competent of the Valentinians, Valentinian III (425-455). Like Stilicho, Aetius was both admired and feared--and with good cause. High-handed and utterly unscrupulous, he thought nothing of letting the Vandals have North Africa in return for their support against other enemies of Rome.⁽³⁰⁾ Since Aetius personally owned some of the best lands in Gaul which the barbarians had not yet seized, many thought he was protecting his own interests at the Empire's expense. Yet what was good for Aetius was usually good for the Empire, and he defended the core of it so effectively that he postponed the Western Roman Empire's end beyond his lifetime. For that reason, he is often honored with the title, "the last of the Romans."

Aetius failed to dislodge the Vandals from Africa, but he was successful everywhere else. He temporarily forced German tribes like the Alemanni and Rugians back across the upper Danube, and with the help of the Huns, crushed the Burgundians when they tried to cross the Rhine into Gaul (437); then he decided that the Burgundians could be useful defending the Empire and resettled them as foederates around Geneva (443). Any military victory at this point was a considerable achievement; records from the 440s show that money and manpower were in such short supply that new recruits were only called up in the most serious emergencies.⁽³¹⁾ To the tried and true strategy of pitting German against German, Aetius added the fierce Huns as auxiliaries. Aetius had spent time as a hostage in the Hun camp, so he and Attila understood each other. Roman gold was used to bring down a Hunnish horde to crush a peasant revolt in Gaul, and then Aetius hired the Huns to make things miserable for his favorite enemies, the Visigoths. To residents of Gaul, the Hunnish remedy must have seemed worse than the German disease. For nearly twenty years Attila and Aetius had a fine business relationship; once Attila sent as a gift to Aetius his most exotic slave, a Moorish dwarf.

The campaigns the Huns undertook for Aetius gave them an appetite for more plunder. In 443 Attila struck deep into the Eastern Roman Empire, burning Naissus (the birthplace of Constantine the Great) and pillaging Sardica (modern Sofia). He did not leave until the court of Constantinople offered him a tribute of 6,000 lbs. of gold, an annual subsidy of 2,100 lbs. of gold, and promised to dismantle its fortifications on the Danube. Four years later he returned, and found a country ravaged by earthquakes and plague. Nevertheless, the eastern Empire tried to resist, sending an army commanded by a Goth named Arnegisclus. The Goth put up a stubborn defense before he was killed and the army routed. But this time Attila did not press his advantage; apparently he had suffered severe losses in the fighting, and was afraid of plague spreading to his troops. On top of all that, the East was running out of money, forcing the new emperor, Marcian, to take a tougher stand against the Huns; as he put it, "I have iron for Attila, but no gold." Deciding the East was no fun anymore, he turned around and withdrew.

Now Attila felt confident enough to campaign for himself and nobody else. He used love as his excuse for invading the West. Honoria, the sister of Valentinian III, had been caught in a love affair with Eugenius, a palace steward. The servant was immediately executed, and the imperial family ordered Honoria to marry Flavius Bassus Herculanus, a wealthy but boring old senator with palsy. Rather than accept this fate, Honoria sent a eunuch named Hyacinth to Attila with a letter begging him to rescue her from her relatives. The letter came with a ring, which the Hun accepted as a marriage proposal. He then demanded the delivery of his new fianceé, along with half the territory of the Western Roman Empire as a dowry. Valentinian refused and Attila declared war.⁽³²⁾

In 451 Attila's Huns burst into Gaul and swept all before them. With the Huns came their German vassals: Ostrogoths, Gepids, Thuringians, Rugians, Sciri and Heruli. Now Aetius and the Visigoth king, Theodoric I, had no choice but to unite against an invader who could destroy them all. The "Roman" army led by Aetius was mostly Visigoths, with a motley assortment of Franks, Saxons, Burgundians, and Gaulish Celts. Attila fell back from Orléans (the westernmost point reached by any Asiatic conqueror), and the two forces met on the rolling Catalaunian plain, near modern Troyes. The resulting battle, incorrectly called the battle of Chalons, was a frightful slaughter (the Visigoth historian Jordanes wildly estimated that 165,000 were slain) that ended in a standoff--and Attila's retreat. Though the western allies claimed victory, Theodoric was killed and the great Hun's force was only slightly impaired.

Attila came back in 452, invaded north Italy and sacked Milan. Rome was his next target, but on the way he met Pope Leo I, who persuaded him to go back the way he came. Why Attila spared Rome was never made clear by either side. Some say he was overawed by the commanding presence of the leader of Western Christianity; cynics suggest that a big bag of gold changed hands at the meeting. Whatever the case, one year later Attila married a German girl named Ildico and died of a hemorrhage on his wedding night. His empire disintegrated immediately; led by the Gepids, the Germans crushed Attila's six sons at the battle of the Nedao (454). The surviving Huns returned to the Russian steppe, except for a few who stayed in Hungary to raid the Eastern Empire; when they found that even this was beyond their strength, they also withdrew to the Black Sea (470). Next to them, a pocket of Ostrogoths survived in the Crimea as a memento of Ermanaric's vanished glory.

The Arthurian Mythos

Like all German attacks on the Empire it appeared that the raiders were looking for loot, but what they really wanted was land. From the mid-fourth century on it ceased to matter whether the attackers were defeated or not; the Romans were so short on manpower that they settled defeated tribes within the Empire, in the hope that this would make good Roman citizens out of them. As a result Britain probably had a large German population on its east coast by the time the Romans left. For about thirty or forty years, though, Britons and Germans lived side