Stilicho

• 1. Introduction

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  Stilicho was the most powerful man in the Western Roman Empire, a half-Vandal general who rose from the ranks to hold an empire together with his bare hands. Born around 359, he spent his career fighting enemies on every frontier while simultaneously battling rivals in his own court. His father was a Vandal cavalry officer; his mother was a provincial Roman woman. That dual identity would shadow him his entire life, giving his enemies a weapon they could always deploy against him.

  He married into the imperial household, commanded armies across the breadth of the late Roman world, and twice gave his own daughters to the emperor as wives. For over a decade he was the man who kept the Western Empire from collapsing. Then, on the 22nd of August 408, he was executed in Ravenna. Within two years, the Visigoths sacked the city of Rome for the first time in nearly eight centuries.

  What kind of man holds an empire together, and what breaks him in the end? The answers lie in the wars he fought, the rivals he outmaneuvered, and the single catastrophic misjudgment that let his enemies destroy him.

• 2. The Making of a Commander

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  In 383 the emperor Theodosius sent the young Stilicho to the Persian court of Shapur III at Ctesiphon, carrying the title of tribunus praetorianus. The mission was to negotiate a peace settlement over the partition of Armenia. Stilicho was a junior member of the delegation, not its leader.

  His marriage to Serena, the niece of Theodosius himself, followed the successful conclusion of those talks. Claudian, the court poet who later became Stilicho's chief propagandist, claimed Theodosius rewarded him with Serena's hand because of outstanding achievement. Historians are skeptical. As a junior envoy, Stilicho had done nothing of particular distinction. A more likely explanation is that Theodosius simply saw the value in binding a promising, half-barbarian soldier tightly to the imperial family.

  The promotion that came next moved quickly. By 385 Stilicho had advanced to comes sacri stabuli and then to comes domesticorum. In 392 or 393 he received command of soldiers in Thrace. The marriage produced three children: a son, Eucherius, and two daughters, Maria and Thermantia.

  Despite his father's Vandal background, Stilicho appears to have thought of himself as entirely Roman. His religious identity reinforced this. Many Germanic Christians were Arian, following a doctrine the Roman state considered heresy. Stilicho was almost certainly Nicene Christian, aligned with Theodosius, who had declared Nicene Christianity the official religion of the empire. The faith of the empire was his faith.

• 3. Regent of the West

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  Theodosius died in 395, appointing Stilicho guardian of his young son Honorius and naming him supreme commander with the rank of comes et magister utriusque militiae praesentalis. The armies that had clashed at the Battle of the Frigidus were still scattered and unruly. Claudian later preserved what he imagined as the dying emperor's last words to Stilicho: "When I was raised to heaven disorder... and tumult did I leave behind me. The army was still drawing the forbidden sword in that Alpine war... Scarce could this madness have been calmed by my vigilance, much less by a boy's rule... 'Twas then that Stilicho took my place."

  Honorius ruled the west from Ravenna while his brother Arcadius sat on the eastern throne in Constantinople. Stilicho also claimed guardianship over Arcadius, though no independent source confirms this. Neither emperor proved capable of strong personal rule. Stilicho became the de facto commander-in-chief of the western armies, while in the east his rival Rufinus held equivalent power from behind the throne.

  To deepen his grip on the western court, Stilicho gave his daughter Maria to Honorius in marriage in 398. After Maria died, he gave Thermantia to the emperor in 408. Neither marriage produced children. His authority rested on his military record, the emperor's inexperience, and the steady accumulation of rivals who ultimately proved his undoing.

  In the year 400 the senate granted him the highest civilian distinction available: appointment as consul of Rome.

• 4. The Alaric Problem

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  Alaric, the Visigothic warlord, had fought alongside Stilicho at the Battle of the Frigidus, commanding a substantial contingent of Gothic auxiliaries. After Theodosius died, the relationship curdled into one of the most tangled strategic rivalries in late Roman history.

  In 395 Alaric's Goths broke their treaty with Rome and raided the Balkans while the eastern armies were pinned down fighting Hunnic incursions in Asia Minor and Syria. Stilicho led his forces into Thessaly and, according to Claudian, surrounded Alaric's entire army. Then orders arrived from the eastern court directing him to withdraw. He obeyed, handing Alaric an escape.

  In 397 Stilicho defeated Alaric's forces in Macedonia. Alaric escaped again into the mountains. The historian Zosimus, drawing on Eunapius, accused Stilicho of overconfidence and self-indulgence. Modern scholarship finds other explanations more convincing: eastern orders, unreliable barbarian troops, the simultaneous revolt of Gildo in Africa, or the simple possibility that Stilicho was never as close to cornering Alaric as Claudian claimed.

  After an invasion of Italy by Radagaisus in 405-406, Stilicho approached Alaric differently. He needed Gothic troops for a planned campaign to retake Illyricum from the east, and he was running out of recruits from the western provinces. He appointed Alaric comes et magister militum per Illyricum, a formal military post that brought the Goth inside the imperial system. When political troubles forced the cancellation of the Illyricum campaign, Alaric demanded the payment he was owed for mobilizing his forces. Stilicho persuaded the senate to pay. Senator Lampadius stood in the chamber and declared in Latin: "Non est ista pax, sed pactio servitutis" -- "This is not peace, but a pact of servitude."

• 5. Wars on Every Front

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  Gildo, the commander of all Roman troops in Africa, revolted in 397 with the aim of placing the African grain supply under control of the eastern court. Africa fed Rome, and losing it would be catastrophic. Stilicho sent Mascezel, Gildo's own brother, to suppress the rebellion. The campaign succeeded quickly. On Mascezel's return to Italy, he drowned under circumstances that were, in the careful phrasing of the sources, questionable -- possibly on Stilicho's orders.

  In Britain, around 398, Stilicho directed a campaign against the Picts, later called Stilicho's Pictish War. The details are disputed. Claudian credits him with sending forts and a legion to defend the British provinces against Picts and Scots. Critical analysis suggests the campaign did not go well, and Stilicho himself is never recorded as leaving Italy that year. The troops defending Britain probably acted without him.

  In 401 Vandals and Alans invaded Raetia and Noricum in the north. While Stilicho moved the main army to deal with them, Alaric invaded Italy from the east and besieged Honorius at Mediolanum. Stilicho returned with a vanguard, broke the siege, and on Easter Sunday of 402 surprised Alaric at the Battle of Pollentia. His forces captured Alaric's camp and his wife. Alaric escaped with most of his men. A follow-up engagement at Verona again drove Alaric back with a diminished force.

  In 405 Radagaisus, king of a Gothic tribe north of the Danube, crossed the Alps with a combined force of Goths, Alans, Sueves, and Vandals. Stilicho assembled roughly 20,000 men through desperate measures, including offers of freedom to slaves who would enlist. Radagaisus had split his army into three parts when Stilicho struck at Florentia, catching the largest division by surprise. Stilicho executed Radagaisus and enrolled 12,000 of his warriors into Roman service. The rest were sold as slaves.

• 6. The Fall

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  To stop Alaric and Radagaisus from breaking into Italy, Stilicho had stripped the Rhine frontier nearly bare. He left it defended, in Edward Gibbon's phrase, "only by the faith of the Germans and the ancient terror of the Roman name." On the 31st of December 406, a coalition of Vandals, Alans, and Suevi crossed that frontier into Gaul. The Franks, Rome's allies on the northern bank, tried to stop them. The Vandals defeated the Franks with Alan support, losing their own king Godigisel in the fight, and poured into the western provinces.

  The crossing ignited military revolts in Gaul and Britain. In Britain, Constantine III raised a rebellion and moved his forces into Gaul. Stilicho sent his subordinate Sarus against him. Sarus won a major engagement and killed both of Constantine's senior commanders, but a relief force drove him back. Constantine's rebellion held.

  Rumors now circulated at court: that Stilicho had arranged the murder of Rufinus in 395; that he planned to place his son Eucherius on the throne following the death of Arcadius, which had occurred on the 1st of May 408. On the 13th of August 408, the Roman army at Ticinum mutinied, killing at least seven senior imperial officers. The historian John Matthews later observed that the events which followed had every appearance of a thoroughly co-ordinated coup organized by Stilicho's political enemies.

  Stilicho withdrew to Ravenna, where he was taken into custody without resistance. He was executed on the 22nd of August 408. His son Eucherius was killed shortly afterwards.

• 7. Aftermath and Rome's Sack

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  The violence that followed Stilicho's execution was not limited to him and his son. Throughout Italy, the wives and children of barbarian soldiers serving in the Roman army were killed by local Romans. The sources estimate that perhaps 30,000 of these soldiers then abandoned their posts and sought the protection of the one man willing to fight for them: Alaric.

  Alaric crossed the Julian Alps and drove through Italy. By September 408 his army stood outside the walls of Rome itself. Without Stilicho, Honorius had no general capable of breaking the siege, and he adopted a strategy of waiting behind the walls of Ravenna while Rome starved.

  Alaric besieged the city three times without delivering a final assault. He was still attempting to negotiate a permanent peace settlement and the right to settle his people within Roman territory. Only after a fourth attempt at a deal failed did his army move. After months of siege, with the population dying of hunger and some resorting to cannibalism, the Gothic army broke through the gates in August 410 and sacked Rome.

  It was the first time a foreign army had taken the city in nearly eight centuries. Many historians point to Stilicho's removal as the event that made it possible. The man who had twice repelled Alaric from Italian soil, who had destroyed Radagaisus and his combined barbarian army, was gone -- and the court that executed him had no one ready to take his place.