Theodosius I
Theodosius I was born in Hispania on the 11th of January, probably in the year 347, and by the time he died in Mediolanum on the 17th of January 395, he had done something no Roman emperor would ever do again: ruled the entire empire, from Britain to the eastern frontier, alone. That distinction has echoed across sixteen centuries. But the story behind it is tangled. Theodosius rose to power because another emperor was killed. He spent much of his reign fighting civil wars he chose to start. He is called "the Great" partly to tell him apart from his own grandson. And the reputation that earned him veneration in multiple churches was built, modern scholars now argue, largely by writers who invented the version of Theodosius they wished had existed. What actually happened in those sixteen years? Who was the man that Bishop Ambrose of Milan refused communion? And what did he leave behind when those two young sons divided the world between them?
Theodosius the Elder, father of the future emperor, held the rank of magister equitum under the western Roman emperor Valentinian I, making him one of the most senior military officers in the empire. His son accompanied him to Britain in 368-369 on the expedition to suppress what was called the "Great Conspiracy", a coordinated Celtic and Germanic invasion of the island provinces. That was Theodosius's first confirmed appearance in the historical record.
By 374, he had risen to independent command as dux of Moesia Prima along the Danube, and in the autumn of that year he repulsed a Sarmatian incursion, forcing the invaders into submission. His career was flourishing. Then, without clear explanation, it collapsed entirely.
The exile did not last long. Maximinus was himself removed from power around April 376 and executed. Emperor Gratian immediately replaced Maximinus and his associates with relatives of Theodosius, and by 377 Theodosius had his command back. The rehabilitation was swift. And then, in August 378, everything changed again: the eastern emperor Valens was killed at the Battle of Adrianople against invading Goths, and the Roman military establishment, depleted of credible leadership, needed someone to take charge. With the reluctant consent of Gratian, Theodosius was formally invested with imperial purple at Sirmium on the 19th of January 379.
The Goths who killed Valens at Adrianople were still loose in the Balkans when Theodosius took power, and the army he inherited was severely undermanned. Gratian surrendered to him control of the praetorian prefecture of Illyricum for the duration of the conflict, but offered only modest immediate assistance. Theodosius resorted to desperate measures: conscripting farmers and miners, punishing those who harbored deserters, and pressing men into service even if they had mutilated themselves to avoid it. He also admitted large numbers of non-Roman recruits, including Gothic deserters from beyond the Danube, some of whom were exchanged for more reliable Roman garrison troops stationed in Egypt.
In the second half of 379, his forces based at Thessalonica won some minor victories over individual raiding parties. A serious defeat in 380, blamed on treachery among the new barbarian recruits, set that back. During the autumn of 380, a life-threatening illness prompted Theodosius to request baptism. By November 380 the military situation had stabilized enough to move his court to Constantinople.
In January 381, a minor Gothic leader named Athanaric came to Constantinople and submitted. When Athanaric died that same month, Theodosius gave him a funeral with full imperial honors, a deliberate signal to the wider Gothic population that the empire was prepared to negotiate. After Athanaric died, Theodosius seems to have concluded the Goths could not be driven out entirely.
Following negotiations that likely lasted several months, the two sides concluded a settlement on the 3rd of October 382. The Goths were permitted to settle tracts of Roman land south of the Danube in exchange for military service, but they retained autonomy under their own leaders and could fight as a national contingent rather than being absorbed into Roman forces. The terms reflected the reality on the ground: the Goths were entrenched, and they had not been driven out. Their status as an autonomous entity within Roman borders would cause persistent problems for Theodosius's successors.
On the 28th of February 380, before he had even moved his court to Constantinople, Theodosius joined Gratian and Valentinian II in issuing the Edict of Thessalonica. The decree, addressed to the city of Constantinople, stipulated that only Christians who accepted the consubstantiality of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit could call themselves "catholic" and have their places of worship officially recognized as churches. Those who dissented were described in the text as "out of their minds and insane."
Recent scholarship has stepped back from the traditional view that this edict established Christianity as the official religion of the empire. It was aimed exclusively at Constantinople, and contemporary sources outside the capital seem to have largely ignored it. A German ancient historian notes the edict was neither anti-pagan nor antisemitic and gave no general advantage to Christians over other faiths. It is, however, the first known secular Roman law to positively define a religious orthodoxy.
Two days after arriving in Constantinople on the 26th of November 380, Theodosius expelled the Homoian bishop Demophilus of Constantinople and appointed Meletius as patriarch of Antioch and Gregory of Nazianzus, one of the Cappadocian Fathers, as patriarch of Constantinople. Theodosius had just been baptized by bishop Ascholius of Thessalonica during a severe illness.
In May 381, he convened the First Council of Constantinople, the second ecumenical council since Constantine's First Council of Nicaea in 325. The council confirmed Nicene orthodoxy, defined the Holy Spirit as equal to the Father and proceeding from him, condemned the Apollinarian and Macedonian heresies, and ruled that Constantinople was second in precedence to Rome. The council ended on the 9th of July. The honorific "the Great" was formally deemed merited at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, specifically because of Theodosius's promotion of Nicene Christianity.
In April 390, soldiers under Roman command killed a large number of civilians in Thessalonica. The massacre was most likely a response to a urban riot that had cost the life of a Roman official. What most scholars regard as the most reliable account is the Historia ecclesiastica written by Sozomen around 442. Sozomen names the murdered official as Butheric, the commanding general of the field army in Illyricum. According to that account, a popular charioteer attempted to rape a cup-bearer, Butheric arrested him, the populace demanded his release, and when Butheric refused, the general revolt that followed cost him his life. Sozomen also observes that Butheric's name suggests Gothic origins, and that his ethnicity could have been a factor in the riot, though no early source states this directly.
Theodosius was not in Thessalonica when the killing happened. The court was in Milan. Several scholars, including G. W. Bowersock and the authors Stephen Williams and Gerard Friell, believe he ordered the massacre in a burst of what they call "volcanic anger". Others, including historians Mark Hebblewhite and N. Q. King, do not agree. J. F. Matthews argues the emperor first intended selective executions; Peter Brown concurs that what was probably planned as a selective killing got out of hand. One reading of the sources suggests the soldiers, surrounded by angry citizens, panicked and cleared the hippodrome by force, at the cost of several thousand lives.
Ambrose, the bishop of Milan and an aristocrat who had by then served as bishop for sixteen years and outlasted three emperors, was away from court when the massacre occurred. He wrote Theodosius a letter offering, as historian Neil McLynn describes it, a way for the emperor to save face. Ambrose urged a semi-public demonstration of penitence and told him he would withhold communion until it was done. Wolf Liebeschuetz records that Theodosius complied, coming to church without his imperial robes until Christmas, when Ambrose openly restored him to communion.
The famous image of Ambrose physically blocking Theodosius at the cathedral door has been identified by McLynn and Peter Brown as a pious fiction, a product of the imagination of the fifth-century historian Theodoret. The documents that survive read, McLynn observes, more as negotiations between institutions than as evidence of personal friendship between the two men.
Gratian, Theodosius's original patron and the emperor who had appointed him, was killed on the 25th of August 383 at Lugdunum by Andragathius, the magister equitum of the rebel emperor Magnus Maximus. Theodosius, still militarily stretched, opened negotiations rather than march. He brokered a peace agreement between the young Valentinian II and Maximus that endured for several years.
The peace broke in 387. Valentinian fled east with his mother Justina, reached Thessalonica in summer or autumn of that year, and appealed for help. Valentinian's sister Galla was married to Theodosius at Thessalonica in late autumn 387. In summer 388, Theodosius recovered Italy from Maximus for Valentinian. The armies clashed at the Battle of Poetovio, and Maximus was defeated; on the 28th of August 388, he was executed. Damnatio memoriae was pronounced, and inscriptions bearing his name were erased.
Theodosius celebrated his victory in Rome on the 13th of June 389 and remained in Milan until 391. The Frankish general Arbogast was installed as magister militum of the West. When Valentinian II died at Vienna in Gaul on the 15th of May 392, either by suicide or by Arbogast's hand, Arbogast found himself in an impossible position: he could not assume the throne himself because of his non-Roman origins. On the 22nd of August 392, he had Valentinian's master of correspondence, Eugenius, proclaimed emperor at Lugdunum.
Theodosius gathered a large army that included Gothic foederati, Caucasian and Saracen auxiliaries, and marched west. The battle began on the 5th of September 394 with a full frontal assault. Thousands of Goths died. The following day, the fighting resumed and was aided by an extreme natural phenomenon called the Bora, which can produce hurricane-strength winds; it blew directly into the faces of Eugenius's forces. Eugenius was captured and executed. On the 8th of September, Arbogast killed himself. Theodosius had raised his son Honorius to co-emperor on the 23rd of January 393, a step that implicitly declared Eugenius's rule illegal, and Honorius arrived in Mediolanum for a victory celebration on the 1st of January 395. The victory at the Battle of the Frigidus, on the Vipava river, made Theodosius ruler of the entire empire for the last time.
Art historian David Wright has written that art from around the year 400 reflects optimism among traditional polytheists, and Ine Jacobs identifies what modern scholars call a "Theodosian renaissance" of classical styles during the years 379 to 395. Theodosius oversaw or sponsored several monuments that anchor this interpretation: the expansion and renaming of the Forum Tauri as the Forum of Theodosius in Constantinople, the Column of Theodosius begun in 386, and the missorium of Theodosius, the statue at Aphrodisias, the diptych of Probus, and the columns of both Theodosius and his son Arcadius.
The most physically dramatic undertaking was the removal of an ancient Egyptian obelisk to Constantinople in 390. Two obelisks had been shipped from Karnak to Alexandria in 13-12 BC. One had already been moved to Rome by Constantius II in 357. Theodosius arranged for the second to be transported to Constantinople and re-erected in the Hippodrome, the long Roman circus that was at one time the center of the city's public life. A sixth-century source dates the raising to 390, and epigrams on the plinth credit Theodosius and the urban prefect Proclus. The white marble base is covered in bas-reliefs showing the imperial household and the engineering feat itself; it has been called the key monument for identifying the Theodosian court style. The obelisk still stands in the former Hippodrome today.
Theodosius died of severe edema in Mediolanum on the 17th of January 395. His body lay in state in the palace for forty days. His funeral was held in the cathedral on the 25th of February, and Bishop Ambrose delivered the panegyric De obitu Theodosii. On the 8th of November 395, the body was transferred to Constantinople and buried in the Church of the Holy Apostles in a porphyry sarcophagus later described by Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus in his tenth-century work De Ceremoniis.
His sons Arcadius and Honorius, previously raised to the rank of co-emperor, divided the world between them. Both proved weak rulers presiding over foreign invasions and court intrigues. The east-west division they inherited endured until the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the late fifth century, and the descendants of Theodosius ruled the Roman world for six decades after his death.
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Common questions
Who was Theodosius I and why is he called Theodosius the Great?
Theodosius I was Roman emperor from 379 to 395 and the last ruler to govern the entire Roman Empire. He was initially styled "the Great" to distinguish him from his grandson Theodosius II; the honorific was formally deemed merited at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 in recognition of his promotion of Nicene Christianity.
What was the outcome of the Gothic War under Theodosius I?
The Gothic War concluded on the 3rd of October 382 with a settlement allowing the Goths to settle Roman land south of the Danube in exchange for military service. Critically, the Goths retained autonomy under their own leaders and fought as a national contingent rather than being integrated into Roman forces, terms that modern historians regard as disadvantageous to the empire.
What was the Massacre of Thessalonica and what was Theodosius I's role in it?
The Massacre of Thessalonica occurred in April 390, when Roman soldiers killed a large number of civilians, likely in response to an urban riot that had resulted in the death of a Roman official named Butheric. Scholars disagree on Theodosius's direct responsibility; some believe he ordered the massacre in anger, while others argue a planned selective killing got out of hand while the emperor was in Milan.
What was the Edict of Thessalonica issued by Theodosius I?
The Edict of Thessalonica, issued on the 28th of February 380 by Theodosius, Gratian, and Valentinian II, decreed that only Christians who accepted the consubstantiality of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit could call themselves "catholic" and have their churches officially recognized. It is the first known secular Roman law to positively define a religious orthodoxy, though recent scholars note it was addressed only to Constantinople and largely went unnoticed outside the capital.
What happened at the Battle of the Frigidus in 394?
The Battle of the Frigidus, fought on the Vipava river on the 5th and the 6th of September 394, was Theodosius's victory over the western usurper Eugenius and his general Arbogast. On the second day, a natural wind phenomenon called the Bora, capable of hurricane-strength gusts, blew directly against Eugenius's forces; Eugenius was captured and executed, and Arbogast killed himself on the 8th of September.
What is the Obelisk of Theodosius and where is it today?
The Obelisk of Theodosius is an ancient Egyptian obelisk originally from Karnak that Theodosius had transported to Constantinople and re-erected in the Hippodrome in 390. Its white marble base is covered in bas-reliefs of the imperial household and has been identified as the key monument of the Theodosian court style. It still stands in the former Hippodrome of Constantinople today.
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