Migration of the Goths, ca. 300 AD to 700 AD.
The Goths were an East Germanic tribe who according to their own traditions originated in Scandinavia. From Scandinavia, the Goths migrated and set up a kingdom in Scythia. In the third century, the tribe split into two: the Ostrogoths remained in Scythia, while the Visigoths migrated to Dacia. They remained in Dacia until 376 AD, when one of their two leaders, Fritigern, appealed to the Roman emperor Valens to be allowed to settle with his people on the south bank of the Danube. Here, they hoped to find refuge from the Huns, who lacked the ability to cross the wide river in force. Valens permitted this, and even helped bring the Visigoths over the river. In return, Fritigern was to provide soldiers for the Roman army. Valens promised the Visigoths land, food, and protection. His major reason for quickly accepting the Goths into Roman territory was to increase the size of his personal army. The selection of which of the Goths might cross the Danube was unforgiving: the weak, old, and sickly were left on the far bank to fend for themselves against the Huns. The ones that crossed were meant to have their weapons confiscated, but the Romans in charge accepted bribes to allow the Goths to retain their weapons.
Famine broke out in the lands settled by the Visigoths a year later, and Rome was able to supply them with neither the food they were promised nor the land. They herded the Goths into a temporary holding area. There was only enough grain left for the Roman garrison, and so they simply let the Visigoths starve. However, the Romans provided a grim alternative: the trade of children for dog meat. When Fritigern appealed to Valens for help, he was told that his people would find food and trade in the markets of the distant city of Carcianople. Having no alternative, the Goths trekked across the Balkan landscape in a death march, losing the sickly and old along the path.
When they finally reached Marcianople’s gates, they were barred out by the city’s military garrison and denied entry. Rioting ensued and the Visigoths begun raiding the countryside for food. Valens, after a victorious campaign in Persia, was forced to trek directly from the Persian Wars to a battle with the Goths.
The Battle of Adrianople erupted on August 7, 378 AD. Acting on a false message, Valens was completely unaware of the Goths’ numbers. To add to the blazing August heat the Goths set the fields ablaze, and managed to box the Roman infantry in the center of the battlefield so as to have to fight only one Roman army at a time. The Roman forces were slaughtered; the Emperor Valens died during the fighting.
The new emperor, Theodosius I, made peace with Fritigern in 379 AD, and this peace held essentially unbroken until Theodosius died in 395. In that year, the Visigoths’ most famous king, Alaric, took the throne, while Theodosius was succeeded by his incapable sons: Arcadius in the east and Honorius in the west.
Over the next 15 years, occasional conflicts were broken by years of uneasy peace between Alaric and the powerful German generals who commanded the Roman armies in the east and west, wielding the real power of the empire. Finally, after the western generalissimo Stilicho was murdered by Honorius in 408 AD and the Roman legions massacred the families of 30,000 barbarian soldiers serving in the Roman army, Alaric declared war. With Alaric and his army at the gates of Rome, Honorius still refused to come to terms, so Alaric sacked the city on August 24, 410.
Alaric
“The world sinks into ruin. Yes! but shameful to say our sins still live and flourish. The renowned city, the capital of the Roman Empire, is swallowed up in one tremendous fire; and there is no part of the earth where Romans are not in exile.” So wrote St. Jerome after Alaric, king of the Visigoths, sacked the imperial city of Rome.
Alaric actually spent his early years in the employ of Rome. It had become common practice with the emperors to employ foederati; Germanic troops under Roman command. Rome’s provincial population, crushed under a load of taxation, could no longer furnish soldiers in the numbers needed for the defense of the empire. Moreover, the emperors, fearful that a successful general of Roman extraction might be proclaimed Augustus by his followers, preferred that high military command should be in the hands of one to whom such an ascent was impossible such as the Goths.
In 394 Alaric served as a leader of foederati under Theodosius I in the campaign in which he crushed the usurper Eugenius. Theodosius died in 395, leaving the empire to be divided between his two sons Arcadius and Honorius, the former taking the eastern and the latter the western portion of the empire. Among the Visigoths, settled in Lower Moesia, the situation was ripe for rebellion. In recent wars they had suffered disproportionately high losses, according to rumor a convenient way of weakening the Gothic tribes. Their rewards after the campaign had also been lacking. So they raised Alaric on a shield and proclaimed him king; leader and followers both resolving (says Jordanes the Gothic historian) “rather to seek new kingdoms by their own work, than to slumber in peaceful subjection to the rule of others.”
About 400 AD Alaric made his first invasion of Italy. After spreading desolation through North Italy and striking terror into the citizens of Rome, Alaric was met by Stilicho at Pollentia. The battle which followed on April 6, 402 (coinciding with Easter), was a victory for Rome, though a costly one. But it effectually barred the further progress of the Goths.
Stilicho’s enemies later reproached him for having gained his victory by taking impious advantage of the great Christian festival. Alaric, too, was a Christian. He had trusted to the sanctity of Easter for immunity from attack.
In 408 AD, following internal dissent in the Roman senate and the death of Stilicho, Alaric returned. He led his forces through the Julian Alps and, in September 408, stood before the walls of Rome and began a strict blockade.
No blood was shed this time; hunger was Alaric’s weapon. When the Senate, in treating for peace, tried to terrify him with their hints of what the desperate citizens of Rome citizens might accomplish, he gave with a laugh his celebrated answer: “The thicker the hay, the easier mowed!” After much bargaining, the famine-stricken citizens agreed to pay a ransom of more than two thousand pounds in weight of gold, besides precious garments of silk and leather and three thousand pounds of pepper. Thus ended Alaric’s first siege of Rome.
At this time, and indeed throughout his career, Alaric’s primary goal wasn’t to pull down the fabric of the empire but to secure for himself, by negotiation with its rulers, a regular and recognized position within its borders. Honorius, however, was one of those weak emperors who are equally unable to make either war or peace. When negotiations with him failed again, Alaric marched southward and began in deadly earnest his third siege of Rome. On August 24, 410, Alaric and his Visigoths burst in by the Salarian gate on the northeast of the city. She who had been mistress of the world now lay at the feet of foreign enemies.
The sack of Rome now complete, Alaric now desired to invade Africa, but his ships were dashed to pieces by a storm in which many of his soldiers perished. He died in Cosenza soon after, probably of fever, at the early age of thirty-four, and his body was buried under the riverbed of the Busento. The stream was temporarily turned aside from its course while the grave was dug wherein the Gothic chief and some of his most precious spoils were interred; when the work was finished the river was turned back into its usual channel and the captives by whose hands the labor had been accomplished were put to death that none might learn their secret.
