The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade (11 page)

This was indeed the question, and Theodosius would have answered that as long as the citizens of the empire searched for truth by many means, they would have no single loyalty to hold them together. Already the division of the empire into two or three parts had sounded the death-knell for any chance that the empire would be held together by any identity as Roman citizens; already the Western Roman Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire had begun to assume different characters.

Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, opposed the applications; his answer to Symmachus laid out the exclusive theology that made Christianity so useful to the emperors.

Ambrose was a hard and uncompromising man, but he understood what was at stake.
The altar of Christ alone
: it was the only hope for unification that Theodosius had left, and it was a powerful hope.

Yet this power for unity was not without its complications for Theodosius. In 390, the year after the first of the Theodosian Decrees was issued, he ran afoul of the church he was trying to make use of, and Ambrose excommunicated him—the first time that a monarch was ever punished by the Christian church for a political action.

The action was a fairly straightforward, if cruel, act of retaliation. Over in Pannonia, a Roman governor had run into troubles at a tavern; drinking late one night, he had “shamefully exposed” himself, and a charioteer sitting next to him at the bar had “attempted an outrage.”
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The routine drunken pass turned into an incident when the governor, embarrassed, arrested the charioteer and threw him in jail. Unfortunately, he was one of the most popular contestants in a chariot race to be run the next day, and when the governor refused to release him in time for him to compete, his fans rioted, stormed the governor’s headquarters, and murdered him.

Theodosius cracked down immediately and put to death everyone who had a hand in the riot—a purge that swept up a number of people who had simply been standing around watching. Ambrose was appalled by this injustice. When Theodosius next arrived in Milan to check on the affairs in the western part of his domain, Ambrose refused to allow him to enter the church either for prayer or for the celebration of the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, the rite that separated believers from unbelievers.

The Christian historians who record this merely say that Theodosius then confessed his sin, did penance, and was restored. But what passes almost as a footnote is the fact that it took Theodosius eight months to do so. Standing on the steps and looking at Ambrose’s unyielding face, Theodosius must have realized that his decrees were having an unintended consequence. The single, catholic church held his empire together because it was greater than the state, greater than any national loyalty, greater than any single man.

It was greater than the emperor.

Theodosius’s eight months of reflection were eight months in which, in all likelihood, the future of Christianity hung in the balance. Had Theodosius been able to think of any better strategy, he could simply have refused Ambrose’s demands. But in doing so he would have had either to turn his back on the Eucharist—which would have condemned his soul—or to deny Ambrose’s authority—which would have revealed that the Christian church was, in fact, not bigger than the emperor. “Educated as he had been in the sacred oracles,” concludes the Christian historian Theodoret, “Theodosius knew clearly what belonged to priests and what to emperors.”
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What belonged to emperors was not sufficient to hold the empire together. Theodosius finally went back to Milan, subjected himself to Ambrose’s religious authority, accepted the several months of penance that Ambrose prescribed, and was readmitted to the fellowship of the church. He then ordered all Roman temples closed and abandoned so that Christians could knock them down and build Christian churches instead. He commanded that the fire once guarded by the Vestal Virgins in the Roman Forum be officially dowsed. He announced that the Olympic Games would be held one final time before their permanent cancellation.

Finally he announced that any act of worship made in honor of the old Roman gods would be an act of treachery against the emperor himself. The church might be greater than the emperor, but the emperor could still corral its loyalty and direct it to his own ends.
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I
N
392,
AFTER FOUR YEARS
of Arbogast’s “help,” Valentinian II killed himself in Milan. He was twenty-one.

His death immediately lit the fuse of civil war. Valentinian’s sister Galla, now Theodosius’s wife, insisted that her brother could not have killed himself. Theodosius was obligated to investigate, and Arbogast realized that the emperor’s first action would most likely be to remove him from power. Before Theodosius could act, Arbogast went to the Roman Senate and promised that he would help the senators restore the Altar of Victory and protect the Roman religion from extinction. Together, the senators and Arbogast chose a new western emperor: a harmless and malleable Roman official named Eugenius, who was a Christian but inclined to be supportive of the rights of the old state religion.

Theodosius, receiving news of this action, refused to recognize Eugenius as a valid emperor. Instead, he named his own eight-year-old son, Honorius, to the western throne. He then prepared for battle, hiring additional troops—
foederati
, Gothic troops under the command of their own warleader, Alaric—to beef up his own army. He marched west with Stilicho, his general and son-in-law, and met the army of Eugenius, Arbogast, and the Roman senators at the Battle of the Frigidus, September 5, 394.

Orosius insists that Theodosius gave the sign of the cross just before plunging into battle, and three different Christian historians record that a divine wind blew up and rammed the arrows of the western army back into their own bodies.
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Sozoman adds that during the fight, a demon appeared at the church where Theodosius prayed just before the battle, taunting the Christian cause and then fading away as Theodosius’s army began to win the victory. Stilicho and Alaric, leading two wings of the attack, were largely responsible for crushing the western Roman army. Eugenius was killed that same day; Arbogast, seeing the destruction of his army, killed himself the next day. It was, says Orosius, a battle of “pious necessity.”
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10.1: The Battle of the Frigidus

The accounts may not be terribly helpful in chronicling the exact progression of the Battle of the Frigidus, but the stories of divine winds and demons show that the historians knew what was at stake. This was more than another battle between competing emperors; it was a battle between two entirely different ways of understanding the world. When the battle ended, Theodosius controlled the entire empire: the east as senior emperor, the west as regent for his young son Honorius. It was the last time the Roman empire would be united under a single ruler.

Theodosius died in 395, the year after the battle. At his death, his two sons from his first marriage divided the rule as co-Augusti. Arcadius, eighteen, took the throne of Constantinople; Honorius inherited the west. As Honorius was only ten, Theodosius left instructions that Stilicho, the half-Vandal general, should act as his guardian. He also left his five-year-old daughter, Placida (daughter of his second wife, the young and beautiful Galla), to be raised by Stilicho and his Roman wife, Serena. Stilicho, too barbarian to be emperor in name, was now emperor in practice.

To the east, Arcadius, mild and easily intimidated, was ruling with the help of the army officer Rufinus. Rufinus was head of the emperor’s personal guard, the highest military official in the east and the final decision-maker in the empire. Like Stilicho, he held ultimate power. “The whole empire being vested in Arcadius and Honorius,” writes Zosimus, “they indeed appeared by their title to possess the sovereign authority, although the universal administration of affairs was under Rufinus in the east, and under Stilicho in the west.” Unlike Stilicho, Rufinus had no barbarian blood; he could nurse the ambition of someday becoming emperor.
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Both sides of the empire were now threatened by a previous ally of Theodosius: Alaric, commander of the Gothic regiments at the Battle of the Frigidus. Alaric had hoped to become a regular Roman commander—
magister militum
—after Theodosius’s death. Instead, neither emperor offered him this honor. Alaric blamed this, rightly, on his Gothic blood. His troops were already seething with discontent; a disproportionate number of Goths (over ten thousand) had fallen at the Frigidus, and they suspected that they had been used as human shields for the regular regiments.

Rather than continuing to struggle for Roman privilege, Alaric took control of his Gothic army and made himself its supreme commander and leader. In doing so, he managed to create a newborn nation and become its first ruler: king of the Visigoths.
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The historians of the late Roman empire (Jordanes and Cassiodorus, most prominently) divided the Goths into two separate groups: the Ostrogoths, who lived to the east, and the Visigoths, farther west. But these names didn’t represent nations; they were simply a way to geographically distinguish between the Goths who lived closer to the Black Sea and the Goths who lived farther away. Before the time of Alaric, there was not really a Gothic nation. There was, instead, a shifting collection of Germanic tribes that sometimes fought together and sometimes against each other.

Alaric’s Gothic army was united not because the soldiers belonged to a certain tribe (although they all shared the same, vaguely Germanic blood), but because they had drawn together into a cohesive military unit. When Alaric made himself their king, they became for the first time something more than an army. They became a self-constituted nation, bound together not by a single tribal heritage but by a single purpose. This new confederacy took its name from the land where many of them had once lived—the western Gothic land—but it included “Visigoths,” Goths from farther east, as well as members from other tribes farther north. Historians call this “ethnogenesis”: when a confederacy, united together by necessity or geography, makes itself into a nation by giving itself a name, a history, a royal lineage.
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Thanks to the outside pressure of Roman disdain, Alaric’s Visigoths had become an independent people who now existed right in the middle of Roman land. They were resentful and hungry, and they had a strong leader with military experience—and so their first act as a nation was to raid the surrounding Roman provinces, taking what they thought they deserved and making a path towards Constantinople.
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The eastern emperor Arcadius and his general/puppet-master Rufinus were not well equipped to resist. Most of the Roman army was farther west, with Stilicho. Appealed to, Stilicho provided soldiers to head off Alaric. Either because of the threat of a pitched battle or (more likely) because Stilicho carried on some behind-the-door negotiations with him, Alaric sloped off and instead started to ravage the countryside of Greece.

The Roman soldiers then continued on to Constantinople; apparently Stilicho had ordered them to go join the eastern army, as a favor to the eastern emperor Arcadius. When the troops reached the walls of the city, Arcadius came out to greet them, with the general Rufinus trailing behind him. The contemporary Roman poet Claudian records the events that followed: as Rufinus followed the emperor along the serried ranks of soldiers, the troops

The official story from the west was that the soldiers acted out of impulse. But Claudian insists that the Gothic soldier who first stabbed Rufinus leapt forward crying, “It is the hand of Stilicho that smites you.” He isn’t alone in attributing the plan to Stilicho; Zosimus, who finds the men behind the throne unadmirable on both sides of the empire (“In the respective cities,” he complained, “the money from all quarters flowed into the coffers of Rufinus and Stilicho”), agrees that Stilicho ordered the assassination.
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If Stilicho did give the order, it was the first step in his attempt to extend his power over the entire empire. However, another courtier of the weak Arcadius immediately rose to fill the power vacuum: the eunuch Eutropius. According to Zosimus, Eutropius was no more admirable than the dead Rufinus. He was “intoxicated with wealth, and elevated in his own imagination above the clouds.” And he was more dangerous than Rufinus because he now knew his enemy. “He recollected,” Zosimus says, “that Stilicho was master of every thing in the west; and therefore…he persuaded the emperor to convoke the senate, and by a public decree to declare Stilicho an enemy to the empire.”
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Eutropius was not emperor; he could not attack the western power with armies. He had to use law instead. As he did so he brought the duality of the Roman empire into full view. The empire had held together under dual emperors and twin capitals, and it still existed as a single domain in name. But the crack that would divide it in two had become visible: Stilicho, guardian of the west, was now an outlaw in the east.