The Fall of the Roman Empire (4 page)

There he became reconciled with Placidia, and their friendship inspired in her the hope that he would suppress Aetius, whom she was beginning to find excessively powerful. And so the two Roman commanders clashed in civil war. In 432, Boniface was wounded, and later died. According to a legend giving a foretaste of medieval chivalry, the rivals had decided to struggle by single combat, and Boniface, with his dying breath, commended his wife to his victorious enemy as the only man worthy of her love.

His death meant that Aetius, with the help of his Hunnish soldiers, was at last in a position to exercise decisive influence on Placidia and the court. Before long, he was appointed commander-in-chief. It was said that envoys from the provinces no longer reported to the Emperor, a youth in his early teens, but were granted their Imperial audiences by Aetius himself.

It was a task of the most urgent priority to limit the Vandal Gaiseric's power. However, a joint army of the Western and Eastern Empires which was sent against him failed dismally, and serious alarm was felt at Rome.

Gaiseric was a leader of single-minded, ruthless will, whose enormous ability presented the Romans with a more intractable problem than any previous German had posed. We have a description of this man, whose mother had been a slave, from Jordanes, the sixth-century historian of the Goths.

. . . Of medium height, lame from a fall off his horse, he had a deep mind and was sparing of speech. Luxury he despised, but his anger was uncontrollable and he was covetous.

He was far-sighted in inducing foreign peoples to act in his interests, and resourceful in sowing seeds of discord and stirring up hatred.

Since peasant revolts inside Gaul were leaving its frontiers perilously vulnerable to the Germans, the Western government felt obliged to come to terms with Gaiseric. A treaty was therefore concluded by which the Vandals were granted federate status in large areas of what are now Morocco and western Algeria. But, this time, it was a federate status which was not far removed from complete independence.

Moreover, four years later, Gaiseric struck a new and devastating blow by invading Tunisia and north-eastern Algeria, the very centres of Rome's essential grain supply. Gaiseric also captured the African capital Carthage itself. It was the second city of the Western Roman world: and its loss made the dissolution of the Empire lamentably apparent. Three years later, the Western government signed a fresh treaty with Gaiseric. Under its terms, he kept the regions he had lately seized, while ostensibly (though not permanently) returning to Rome the more westerly regions of Morocco and Algeria that he had occupied earlier.

Gaiseric now ruled openly over his own sovereign state, which was torn away from the Empire altogether. He was unique among the 'barbarian' rulers in two other respects as well. He had established an authentic, unquestioning kingship; and he possessed the only German fleet - which terrorized the central Mediterranean and threatened Italy. Gaiseric contributed more to the downfall of the Western Empire than any other single man.

Aetius was powerless to stop him. Elsewhere, however, he scored certain successes. The Germans were temporarily forced back beyond the westernmost upper Danube. The peasant resistance movements in Gaul were suppressed. And when, in about 437, the Burgundians tried to penetrate Gaul from the Rhineland, Aetius defeated them utterly (an event prominent in German saga, where it figures in the
Nibelungenlied).
Then, in 443, he transplanted the entire Burgundian federated state to an area centred on Sapaudia, which is now Savoy in south-eastern France.

The Roman hold on Britain, on the other hand, never recovered from its usurpers, who had left for the continent with all their troops, abandoning the province to its fate; and finally, in spite of appeals to Aetius, its population found itself left to the mercy of Celtic neighbours and German invaders, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes.

These were also the years when the Huns, who had hitherto provided Aetius with many of his troops, began to be the enemies of the Romans - fighting first against the Eastern Empire, and then against the West. The historian Ammianus had seen them as deceitful, fickle, hot-tempered and greedy - savages of an exceedingly disagreeable kind.

. . . The people of the Huns exceed every degree of savagery . . . They all have compact, strong limbs and thick necks, and are monstrously ugly and misshapen. They eat roots of wild plants and the half-raw flesh of any kind of animal whatever, which they put between their thighs and the backs of their horses, and thus warm it a little.

Not even a hut thatched with reed can be found among them . . .They dress in linen cloth or in the skins of field-mice sewn together, and they wear the same clothing indoors and out until it has been reduced to rags and fallen from them bit by bit. They cover their heads with round caps and protect their hairy legs with goatskins.

They are almost glued to their horses, which are hardy, it is true, but ugly, and sometimes they sit them woman-fashion and relieve themselves in that position . . .

By the 430s these Huns had built up a huge Empire in eastern and central Europe, extending all the way from south Russia to the Baltic and the Danube. In 434 this entire territory was inherited by Attila and his elder brother. Known as the 'Scourge of God', Attila murdered his brother, and played an outstanding part in the events of the Roman world during his nineteen-year-reign. Blustering, irritable, arrogant, indefatigable in negotiation, he became the most powerful man in Europe. The Gothic historian Jordanes described his appearance and manner.

. . . A large head, a swarthy complexion, small, deep-seated eyes, a flat nose, a few hairs in the place of a beard, broad shoulders, and a short square body of nervous strength though of disproportioned form. The haughty step and demeanour of the king of the Huns expressed the consciousness of his superiority above the rest of mankind, and he had the custom of fiercely rolling his eyes as if he wished to enjoy the terror which he inspired.

During the 440s, Attila remained on friendly terms with Aetius, but ruthlessly ravaged the Eastern Empire, and forced it to conclude two treaties in increasingly unfavourable terms. Then, however, a new ruler of the Easter, Marcian (450-57), refused to pay his subsidies any longer, and Attila turned against the Western provinces in order to replace these sums by plunder.

He was given a pretext for intervening when the sister of Valentinian in, Honoria, resenting an Imperial order to marry a Roman she disliked, sent her signet ring to the Hunnish monarch, urging him to come to her rescue. Professing to interpret this as an offer of marriage, Attila demanded half the Western Empire as her dowry; and when this suggestion was turned down, he marched westwards into Gaul. There he was confronted by a combined force of Aetius' Roman army and the Visigoths, together with other federate Germans who had been persuaded by Imperial envoys that Attila was the common enemy of all mankind. And so in 451, as Gibbon declared, 'the nations from the Volga to the Atlantic were assembled'.

The battle that followed, fought on the Catalaunian plains west of Troyes in Champagne, was included by Sir Edward Creasy among the fifteen decisive battles of the world. The Visigothic king, Theodoric 1, was one of the many who fell. Yet Attila was defeated and withdrew from Gaul. This was the one and only defeat of his lifetime, and the greatest success of Aetius' career.

But Gaul's gain meant terror for Italy, which the Huns invaded in the following year, sacking Milan and other major cities. This time, Aetius had no Imperial army to send against him. But as Attila was about to cross the River Mincio, a tributary of the Po, Pope Leo 1 arrived from Rome and persuaded him to withdraw -a scene perpetuated in a picture by Raphael in the Vatican. Presumably the Pope gave a warning that there was famine and pestilence in Italy, so that Attila would not be able to feed his army off the land. At all events, the Huns abandoned their onward march, turned back, and left the country.

In 453 Attila, after his marriage banquet, burst a blood-vessel and died during the night. Thereupon, the Hunnish Empire fell abruptly apart. Attila's numerous sons, who had divided it up, began to quarrel violently among themselves. This encouraged their German subjects to band together and fight them.

In the ensuing engagement at the unidentified River Medao south of the Danube, the Huns were overwhelmingly defeated. From this time onwards, they were never a great power again. Yet the Romans, too, were still losing ground in central Europe, where Germans had pressed forward once more in the neighbourhood of Lake Constance.

But meanwhile Aetius had died. He had recently strengthened his position at court, when his son became engaged to the daughter of Valentinian III. Yet courtiers were now whispering to the Emperor that he would perish at the hands of his minister unless he himself struck first. One day, therefore, while Aetius was presenting a financial statement at the palace, Valentinian suddenly leapt from his throne and accused him of treason. He then drew a sword and rushed upon the defenceless man, who was simultaneously attacked by one of the Imperial chamberlains and fell lifeless at their feet.

As one of the Emperor's advisers subsequently warned him, 'you have cut off your right hand with your left'. For the sixth-century Byzantine chronicler Marcellinus had good reason to call Aetius 'the great safety of the Western Empire' - in so far as it still had any safety at all. With his murder its terminal crisis had begun.

THE END

Only six months after Aetius' death, two of his barbarian retainers avenged him on the Field of Mars at Rome by striking down his Imperial assassin, Valentinian III. In spite of that Emperor's personal insignificance, his death was, in its way, an event no less decisive than the murder of Aetius. For Valentinian possessed no male offspring, so that his stable dynasty, which had lasted for so long, was now at an end.

The West now had just twenty-one more years to live. And during that period there were as many as nine more or less legitimate Western Emperors, each from a different family. Most of them could claim only a minimum of power and six came to violent ends.

The death of Valentinian in was followed at once by a major catastrophe. The fleet of the Vandal Gaiseric had extended the range of his influence far beyond northern Africa; and now the King disembarked at Ostia, the port of Rome, and captured the city itself. He remained for fourteen days, extracting plunder far beyond Alaric's casual looting, and when he finally departed, the many thousands of prisoners whom he took away included the widow of Valentinian in and her two daughters.

Within the Imperial government itself, the pre-eminent figure was now the commander-in-chief Ricimer, who made and unmade Emperors continually during the next fifteen years. At last a German had become the supreme commander again. True, his German birth was still felt to disqualify him from occupying the Imperial throne in person. Yet, in so far as anyone was able to maintain control, it was himself. It was he who had to grapple with the problems of the rapidly dissolving Empire.

His most able protege was the Emperor Majorian (457-61), who momentarily checked German encroachments in both Gaul and Spain. But a campaign which he launched against Gaiseric failed disastrously since, off the Spanish harbour of Carthago Nova (Cartagena), Majorian's fleet of 300 ships was taken by surprise and totally destroyed.

Returning to Italy without an army, he was placed under arrest by Ricimer and put to death. Ricimer's successive estrangement from each of his Imperial appointees in turn was yet another of the many disruptive factors that made any return to stability impossible, and after Majorian's fall the process of collapse accelerated still further.

In 467, Ricimer accepted a candidate of the Eastern court, Anthemius, as Emperor, and a year later Gaiseric, who had been continually raiding Italy and Sicily, found himself under attack, as on earlier occasions, from a large joint expedition of Eastern and Western Imperial forces.

But the assault proved as great a fiasco as all the others, and Anthemius and Ricimer plunged into mutual recriminations which soon turned into civil war. In 472 Anthemius was defeated, and to escape arrest disguised himself as one of the beggars outside a Roman church; but he was detected and put to death. Almost immediately afterwards, however, Ricimer himself died as well, and his latest nominee for the post of Emperor scarcely survived him.

After an unsuccessful attempt by Ricimer's nephew Gundobad (who had followed him as commander-in-chief) to set up a Western ruler on his own account, the Eastern Emperor sent a relative by marriage, Julius Nepos, the commander in Dalmatia, to become the ruler of the West. But in the same year, 474, Nepos had to surrender the loyalist city of Arverna (formerly Augustonemetum, now Clermont-Ferrand), capital of the Auvergne region of Gaul, to the rising power of the Visigothic ruler Euric. The Visigoth controlled the greater part of Spain as well and had followed Gaiseric's pattern by declaring himself wholly independent.

In the following year, Nepos fled back to his Dalmatian base, having been deposed by a new military commander. This was Orestes, a Roman who had once been Attila's secretary. And now Orestes gave the vacant Imperial throne at Ravenna to his own young son Romulus Augustus, known by the diminutive form Augustulus.

The final scene of the tragedy was now beginning. For the last of all Roman armies in Italy, which consisted almost entirely of Danubian Germans and was under the command of a German named Odoacer, decided at this juncture to claim the federate status and grants of land which other German groups had gained over the past century, in the Balkans and Gaul and elsewhere. When their demand met with rejection, Odoacer was acclaimed by his soldiers as king. Seizing Ravenna, he declared Romulus to be deposed, and sent him off into retirement with a pension.

The soldiers duly got their land. But in this year 476, the Western throne ceased to have an occupant at Ravenna for Odoacer, reflecting on Ricimer's difficulties, concluded that it would be wiser not to keep an Emperor in his own neighbourhood any longer. The Senate was accordingly prevailed upon to send a deputation to the Eastern ruler Zeno. The envoys transferred the Imperial insignia into his hands, as the sole remaining ruler of the 'one and indivisible Empire'; and at the same time he was invited to entrust the administration of Italy to Odoacer. Zeno demurred, since Nepos, who had been the nominee of the East, was still alive in Dalmatia. Nevertheless, Odoacer continued to rule in Italy until 493, unrecognized by Constantinople but left undisturbed.