Valentinian dynasty

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  On the 17th of February 364, a Roman army found its emperor dead in his quarters at Dadastana, Turkey. Jovian had died under circumstances that some considered suspicious, just months after his own predecessor Julian had fallen on the Persian frontier. Two emperors dead in a year. The legions pressed on to Nicaea and began looking for a third.

  Among the candidates was a soldier named Flavius Valentinianus, recently promoted to command a division of the imperial bodyguard, then stationed at Ancyra. He arrived at Nicaea on the 25th of February 364 and received unanimous support. Within weeks he had elevated his younger brother Valens as co-ruler. Within a generation, the brothers' children and grandchildren would shape the final century of the western Roman Empire.

  The Valentinian dynasty ruled from 364 to 455, with a break in the middle when the related Theodosian house held the throne. Five emperors carried the dynasty's name. Its founders came from the provincial backwater of Pannonia Secunda in the western Balkans, far from the marble corridors of Rome. What made them remarkable was not their origins but what they built and what collapsed around them. The Danube frontier would fall. Rome itself would be sacked. The questions that follow are how a frontier soldier's family held the empire together for nearly a century, and why, in the end, it could not.

• 2. Pannonian Roots

  ›

  Gratianus Funarius, the man who started it all, came from Cibalae, a town in the Roman province of Pannonia Secunda lying along the Sava river in the northern Balkans. He rose to become a senior officer in the Roman army and eventually comes Africae, the military commander of Roman Africa. His sons inherited both his province and his ambitions.

  Valentinian was born at Cibalae in 321 and followed his father into the protectores, the elite corps of the imperial palace. He rose to tribunus by 357 and served in both Gaul and Mesopotamia under Constantius II. His brother Valens was also born at Cibalae, in 328, and likewise pursued a military career. The 5th-century historian Socrates Scholasticus recorded that while serving in the protectores, Valens refused pressure to offer sacrifice in the ancient Roman religion during the reign of the pagan emperor Julian.

  The Hungarian historian Andreas Alföldi dubbed the family the Pannonian emperors, reflecting the importance of regional identity to their story. Pannonia and the western Balkans were the heartland of a form of Christianity called homoianism, a branch of Arianism that stood apart from the Nicene orthodoxy dominant in Gaul and Italy. This theological geography would run through the dynasty's internal conflicts for decades.

  Valentinian joined a unit called the scholae scutariorum, the shield-bearers of the imperial guard, whose names came from their equipment. It was from precisely this unit that the first Valentinian emperor was drawn when the army at Nicaea went looking for a new augustus in February 364.

• 3. Dividing the Empire

  ›

  Valentinian's first and most consequential act as emperor was to share power. Mindful of the instability created by the deaths of his two predecessors, he acceded to his soldiers' demands and appointed his younger brother Valens as co-augustus. Valens was named Tribune of the Stables on the 1st of March 364, and the Consularia Constantinopolitana dates his formal elevation to co-augustus on the 28th of March 364, at Constantinople.

  The brothers divided the empire along roughly linguistic lines, Latin in the west for Valentinian and Greek in the east for Valens. This was described at the time as divisio regni, a division of the realm, but it was meant to be administrative, not permanent. Valentinian retained precedence in the appointment of consuls. Both brothers served as Roman consuls for the first time that year, Valentinian at Mediolanum and Valens at Constantinople. The document recording all these arrangements, the notitia dignitatum, listed every administrative position in the empire.

  Valentinian made the city of Trier the seat of his government in the west and never visited Rome. Valens divided his time between Antioch and Constantinople. In practice the two empires were beginning to develop their own histories, their own armies, their own bureaucracies. Valentinian won victory titles against the Germanic peoples: Germanicus maximus, Alamannicus maximus, and Francicus maximus, all awarded in 368. But no western emperor would ever again rule in the east, and after Theodosius made a couple of brief visits, no eastern emperor would rule in the west either.

• 4. Frontier Wars

  ›

  Near the end of 364, a party of Alamanni came to Valentinian's headquarters to collect the customary diplomatic gifts. The magister officiorum Ursatius gave them something they considered inferior to past offerings. Angered, they crossed the Rhine into Roman territory in January 365. The incident was minor. The response would occupy Valentinian for a decade.

  After early Roman setbacks, Jovinus, the cavalry commander in Gaul, inflicted heavy losses on the Alamanni at Scarpona and at Catalauni, forcing them to pull back. In the summer of 368, after the Alamanni king Vithicabius was murdered in a coup, Valentinian and his son Gratian crossed the Main river and laid waste to Alamanni territory. Valentinian then fortified the frontier from Raetia to the Belgic channel, though construction was attacked at Mount Pirus near Rottenburg am Neckar.

  In the east, Valens faced a more dangerous adversary. The Sasanian king Sapor had Arsaces, the Armenian king and Roman ally, murdered in 368, placing Armenia under Persian control. Valens sent his infantry commander Arintheus to help defend Armenia. A confrontation at Vagabanta in the spring of 371 was inconclusive, and both sides eventually retreated.

  The Danube brought its own crisis. Valentinian's decision to build garrisons across the Danube angered the Quadi and the Sarmatians. When the Quadi king Gabinus was killed during negotiations with the Romans in 374, the Quadi crossed the Danube and plundered Pannonia. Valentinian launched a pincer offensive against the Quadi in August 375, crossing the Danube at Aquincum to attack from the southeast. The campaign inflicted heavy losses. Then, at Brigetio, on the 17th of November 375, Valentinian died suddenly. He may have suffered a stroke.

• 5. Battle of Adrianople

  ›

  By the early 370s, the Huns had conquered much of the territory north of the Caucasus and the Black Sea and were pressing the Goths westward toward the Dniester. The Romans failed to appreciate the scale of what was happening. In early 376, the Tervingi Goths under king Athanaric petitioned Valens to cross the Danube into Thrace seeking Roman protection. In autumn he agreed. Estimates of the numbers who crossed vary between 90,000 and 200,000, but they outnumbered the Roman troops stationed there.

  A corrupt official named Lupicinus, the Thracian military commander, immediately mismanaged the situation, seizing two Gothic chieftains named Fritigern and Alavivus. He then launched a full-scale attack on the Goths near Marcianopolis in Bulgaria and was promptly routed, leaving Thrace undefended. This was the start of the Gothic war of 376-382.

  Valens was at Antioch dealing with the Sasanian conflict when the news arrived. He quickly made peace with Persia and moved his forces into Europe. By the summer of 378 the Goths were advancing on Adrianople. Gratian, now the western emperor, sent word that he was coming to help, but was delayed by an encounter with the Alans at Castra Martis in the western Balkans. Advised to wait for the western forces, Valens refused. He was sure of victory and unwilling to share the glory.

  On the 9th of August 378, Valens ordered his forces toward the Gothic encampment. A skirmish between Roman archers and Gothic guards triggered a full engagement. The Roman army fought in full armour in intense summer heat, and by afternoon their lines broke. Valens himself was killed by an arrow, along with two thirds of his forces. It is estimated that between fifteen and thirty thousand Roman soldiers died that day. Ammianus Marcellinus and Paulus Orosius compared it to Hannibal's victory at the Battle of Cannae in 216 BC.

• 6. Faith and Power

  ›

  According to the 5th-century historian Sozomen, Valentinian was an orthodox Nicene Christian but largely indifferent to ecclesiastical conflicts. His laicism was especially welcomed by pagans. His second wife Justina was a committed homoian, a branch of Arianism. His brother Valens was also a homoian and aggressively promoted it, exiling Athanasius, the Trinitarian bishop of Alexandria, soon after his accession in 364.

  The most consequential religious figure of the dynasty was not an emperor but a bishop. Ambrose, the son of a praetorian prefect in Gaul, became bishop of Milan in 374 and held the position until 397. He had been a provincial administrator, a consularis of the conjoined provinces of Liguria-Aemilia, before being rapidly advanced through all the lower clerical ranks to take the episcopal office. His predecessor as bishop of Milan, the Arian Auxentius, had died after nearly two decades in the role, and Ambrose arrived with soldiers to suppress the sectarian violence that followed.

  In March 386, the court of Valentinian II asked that a basilica be made available to the Arian community in the army for Easter. Ambrose refused. After a series of demands and refusals, the army surrounded the Portian Basilica on Holy Wednesday. Ambrose held a competing service at the Basilica Vetus. Among those who moved to support the Nicenes at the Portian Basilica were Augustine of Hippo and his mother, chanting Psalm 79. The emperor backed down.

  Ambrose's power reached its peak when he threatened Theodosius with excommunication following the massacre of Salonica in 390, until Theodosius publicly repented. Having established this precedent, Ambrose pressed the emperor into a suppression of paganism beginning in February 391. On the 8th of November 392, all cult worship of the gods was forbidden outright.

• 7. The Sack and the West

  ›

  In the summer of 401, the Visigoth leader Alaric entered northern Italy and marched on Mediolanum, until the general Stilicho halted him at Pollentia in Piedmont at Easter 402. The threat was enough for the emperor Honorius to move his court from Mediolanum to Ravenna on the northeast coast for security. The seat of government did not return to Rome until 440, under Valentinian III.

  Late in 406, multiple waves of barbarians crossed the Rhine and swept through Belgica and Gaul to the Pyrenees, capturing many Roman strongholds including Trier. Stilicho's attempts to manage these threats while appeasing Alaric led to deteriorating relations with Honorius and a mutiny. Honorius had Stilicho executed on the 22nd of August 408. Many barbarians then defected to Alaric.

  Alaric marched on Rome in the autumn of 408, laying siege. After collecting a ransom, he withdrew, then returned twice more. On the 24th of August 410, Alaric's forces entered Rome and plundered it for three days before moving south. Alaric himself fell ill and died at Consenza in late 410, succeeded by his brother-in-law Ataulf, who led the Visigoths back to Gaul.

  Stilicho's wife Serena had been murdered during the siege of 408 by Romans who feared she was conspiring with the enemy. Stilicho himself had earlier strengthened his position by marrying his daughters, first Maria and then Thermantia, to the emperor Honorius. Both alliances ended in failure. The dynasty's last western emperor, Valentinian III, ruled until his death in 455, after which the west produced no more dynasties. His death, as the source records, marked the end of dynasties in the western empire.