Sack of Rome (410)

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 24th of August 410 AD, the Visigoths entered Rome through the Salarian Gate and began three days of looting that would send tremors across the entire Roman world. It was the first time in almost 800 years that a foreign enemy had taken the city. St. Jerome, living far away in Bethlehem, captured the feeling of the moment with brutal economy: "the city which had taken the whole world was itself taken."

  The questions that echo down from that summer are not just military ones. How did a city of perhaps 800,000 people, the symbolic heart of an empire, find itself besieged three times in two years? Who was the Visigothic king who finally broke through its walls, and what had he actually wanted? And what did it mean to the people who survived it, and to those who heard the news from thousands of miles away?

• 2. Alaric and His People

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  The Goths had been raiding into Roman territory since 238 AD, but the crisis that eventually produced Alaric began in the late 4th century, when the Huns swept into the lands of the Germanic tribes and drove them toward the Roman frontier. In 376, large numbers of Therving Goths under Fritigern and Alavivus sought refuge inside the Eastern Roman Empire. What they found there was starvation, punishing taxes, and contempt from the Roman population. They rebelled.

  At the Battle of Adrianople in 378, the Gothic forces killed the Eastern Roman emperor Valens himself. Peace came only in 382, when his successor Theodosius I signed a treaty making the Visigoths autonomous foederati settled in the northern part of the dioceses of Dacia and Thrace. They owed military service; the Romans owed them land and recognition.

  Fritigern died around 382. A Gothic chieftain named Alaric rose to prominence around the early 390s, though ancient sources disagree on the exact year: Jordanes says 400, the historian Peter Heather says 395. Alaric's grievances against Rome were deeply personal. At the Battle of the Frigidus in 394, he led Visigoths as part of Theodosius's army to crush a western usurper. Roughly half the Visigoths present died fighting. Alaric received the title of comes for his bravery but was refused a senior office in the imperial administration. He believed the Roman generals had deliberately put the Goths in the most dangerous positions to weaken them.

• 3. Stilicho and the Eastern Drift

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  When Theodosius died on the 10th of January 395, the Visigoths considered their 382 treaty with Rome formally finished. Alaric immediately led his warriors out of their designated lands, gathered federated Goths from across the Danubian provinces, and rose in open rebellion, moving toward Constantinople itself.

  The man who would repeatedly fail to destroy Alaric was Flavius Stilicho, a half-Vandal, half-Roman general who claimed Theodosius had named him sole guardian of both imperial heirs on his deathbed. These heirs were young: Honorius ruled the West and Arcadius ruled the East, neither capable of governing independently. Stilicho's claim to authority over both empires put him in direct conflict with Rufinus, praetorian prefect of the East, who held Constantinople and the young Arcadius.

  Rufinus negotiated with Alaric to pull him away from Constantinople, likely by promising him lands in Thessaly. Alaric swung south instead and looted the diocese of Macedonia. Stilicho marched east with a combined army but then, under apparent orders from Arcadius, stood down and returned to Italy. Rufinus was hacked to death in November 395 by Eastern troops. Whether Stilicho ordered the killing remains unknown.

  Freed from Roman pressure, Alaric plundered much of Greece: Piraeus, Corinth, Argos, and Sparta all suffered. Athens paid a ransom to avoid being sacked. By 397, Stilicho had returned with a rebuilt, mostly barbarian army and trapped Alaric at Pholoe, but then retreated again without finishing the fight. The Eastern Empire declared Stilicho a public enemy that same year. By 398, the Eastern government found it easier to appease Alaric: they named him magister militum per Illyricum and gave him military resources to draw on freely within that province.

• 4. Three Sieges

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  The execution of Stilicho on the 22nd of August 408 detonated the crisis that would consume Rome itself. Stilicho had been the main obstacle keeping Alaric from Italy. With him gone, Roman soldiers began killing barbarian foederati throughout Roman cities, and thousands of them fled to join Alaric in Noricum. Estimates of how many fighters Alaric now commanded range widely; the historian Peter Heather places the figure at around 30,000 fighting men total.

  Alaric invaded in early October 408, six weeks after Stilicho's death. His march south was, according to the historian Zosimus, as unhurried as if they were going to a festival. Rome held perhaps 800,000 people at the time. The Visigoths encircled the city and seized the Tiber, cutting off supplies. Grain rations dropped to one-half and then one-third of normal levels. Starvation and disease spread rapidly, and unburied bodies piled up in the streets. In the desperate atmosphere, city leaders tried to revive pagan rituals to ward off the invaders; Pope Innocent I agreed, provided the rites be done privately. The pagan priests refused to conduct the sacrifices anywhere but the Roman Forum, publicly. The plan collapsed.

  When Roman envoys boasted to Alaric that the city's people were ready for war, he reportedly replied: "The thickest grass is easier to cut than the thinnest." When they asked what he would leave them if he stripped the city, his answer was: "Their lives." The city eventually paid 5,000 pounds of gold, 30,000 pounds of silver, 4,000 silken tunics, 3,000 hides dyed scarlet, and 3,000 pounds of pepper to lift the siege. The Visigoths withdrew to Etruria in December 408.

  A second siege came in late 409. Alaric's moderate terms to end it, offered through Roman bishops, were reasonable enough that historian Olympiodorus the Younger called them extremely moderate. But Emperor Honorius, bound by oath and surrounded by advisors committed to war, rejected them. Alaric forced the Roman Senate to appoint the elderly Priscus Attalus as a rival emperor, had himself named to a senior military command, and lifted the siege. The puppet arrangement collapsed when Attalus refused to let Gothic forces secure Africa, leaving Rome's food supply vulnerable.

  The third siege began when Sarus, a Gothic chieftain allied with Honorius, ambushed Alaric near Ravenna as he waited for a negotiated meeting. Alaric survived. His patience with Roman diplomacy was finished. He marched back to Rome and on the 24th of August 410 his forces entered through the Salarian Gate, reportedly opened either by treachery or by citizens weakened by hunger.

• 5. Three Days Inside Rome

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  For three days, the Visigoths moved through Rome and stripped it. The mausoleums of Augustus and Hadrian were ransacked; the ashes from the urns inside both tombs were scattered. The Gardens of Sallust were burned and never rebuilt. The Basilica Aemilia and the Basilica Julia were also set on fire.

  The Goths spared the two major basilicas of Peter and Paul, which served as places of sanctuary. From the Lateran Palace, however, they took a silver ciborium weighing 2,025 pounds, originally given as a gift by the emperor Constantine. Moveable goods were taken throughout the city. Structural damage was concentrated near the old Senate house and the Salarian Gate.

  The monk Pelagius, a Roman from Britain who witnessed the siege, wrote about it afterward in a letter to a young woman named Demetrias. He described every house as a scene of misery, the slave and the nobleman sharing the same terror. Many citizens were tortured into revealing where they had hidden valuables. One was the 85-year-old Saint Marcella, a close friend of St. Jerome, who lived in deliberate poverty and had no gold to give. Soldiers beat her with cudgels. She pleaded not for herself but for a young companion named Principia who was with her. The soldiers relented and brought both women to the basilica of Paul. Marcella died of her injuries a few days later. Jerome later detailed the incident in a letter to Principia.

  Galla Placidia, the sister of Emperor Honorius, was taken captive. Some Romans were ransomed, others enslaved, others killed. The scale of violence, by the standards of ancient conquest, was described even by hostile observers as restrained; there was no general massacre, and most of the city's buildings survived, stripped of their wealth. Alaric led his forces out of Rome after three days and moved south into Campania.

• 6. Honorius and the Chicken

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  Emperor Honorius spent the sack in Ravenna, behind its protective swamps. The historian Procopius preserved one story about how the news reached him. A palace eunuch, keeper of the imperial poultry, brought word that Rome had perished. Honorius cried out, thinking immediately of a favorite large cock he kept, which he had named Roma. When the eunuch clarified that it was the city of Rome that had fallen to Alaric, the emperor replied with relief that he had feared it was his bird.

  Procopius was explicit that the anecdote illustrated the emperor's folly. Honorius had repeatedly refused terms that multiple advisors found reasonable, had executed his most capable general on the basis of false rumors spread by a palatine official named Olympius, and had responded to every crisis with panic and retreat rather than decision. Stilicho had held the Western Roman Empire together through 13 years of rule. His execution on a charge of treason, on the 22nd of August 408, had removed the one person consistently capable of containing Alaric. His son Eucherius was killed shortly after in Rome.

  The Eastern Roman Emperor Theodosius II declared three days of mourning in Constantinople when the news arrived.

• 7. Meaning and Aftermath

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  Alaric left Rome after three days, moving south through Campania, Lucania, and Calabria. He planned to cross into Sicily and then Africa but a storm wrecked the ships his forces had assembled. He died of illness at Consentia in late 410, months after the sack. According to legend, he was buried with his treasure in the bed of the Busento river by slaves who were then killed to hide the location. The Visigoths elected his brother-in-law Ataulf as king. Ataulf married Galla Placidia in 414. The Visigoths established a kingdom in southwestern Gaul in 418 and went on to help the Western Roman Empire fight Attila the Hun at the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields in 451.

  The material damage to Rome was significant. Using the number of people on the food dole as a measure, the historian Bertrand Lancon estimated the city's population fell from 800,000 in 408 to 500,000 by 419. Land taxes in the affected provinces dropped to anywhere from one-fifth to one-ninth of their pre-invasion value. Aristocratic support for public buildings and monuments ended in south-central Italy.

  The religious arguments provoked by the sack outlasted its physical damage. Pagans blamed Christianity for weakening Rome by abandoning the old gods. The historian Zosimus argued that without the traditional rites, the gods had withdrawn their protection and left the imperial government to make ruinous decisions. Christians countered that God had permitted the sack as punishment for Roman arrogance but had shown mercy by limiting its scope. The priest Paulus Orosius argued that Roman sovereignty had survived even if Roman wealth had not. These attacks on the faith drove Saint Augustine to write The City of God, a defense of Christianity that became foundational to Christian thought.

  St. Jerome wrote from Bethlehem: "If Rome can perish, what can be safe?" A more severe sack by the Vandals followed in 455. The Western Roman Empire ended in 476 when the Germanic Odovacer removed the last Western Roman Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, and declared himself King of Italy.