Alaric the Goth Read online

  ALARIC

  the

  GOTH

  AN OUTSIDER’S HISTORY

  of

  THE FALL OF ROME

  Douglas Boin

  W.W. NORTON & COMPANY

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  CHAPTER ONE Seventy-Two Hours

  CHAPTER TWO The Trailblazer

  CHAPTER THREE Stolen Childhoods

  CHAPTER FOUR Opportunity

  CHAPTER FIVE The Mystery of Conversion

  CHAPTER SIX Love, War, and an Awakening

  CHAPTER SEVEN The Lion and the Fox

  CHAPTER EIGHT Into the Labyrinth

  CHAPTER NINE The Crash

  CHAPTER TEN Alaric’s Dying Ambitions

  CHAPTER ELEVEN Smoldering Ruins and a Lost Key

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Works Cited and Further Reading

  Illustration Credits

  Index

  PREFACE

  A talented immigrant is denied citizenship by an unjust empire and, in retaliation, unleashes a surprise attack on one of its beloved cultural capitals, Rome. His journey from ambitious boy to disillusioned adult takes four decades. But by the time he dies, in the fifth century A.D., he will be remembered as the foreigner who forced the most powerful politicians of his day to think twice about who they called a “barbarian.” He changed history, and yet his version of it has never been told. His name was Alaric, and this is his story.

  Born at the river that divided two lands, he survived a border policy that separated immigrant children from their families, saw lightning success as a soldier, and became the widely respected leader of his people, the Goths. He also watched as his dream of achieving the basic dignity of citizenship slipped away during a time of political paralysis—a frustration that turned him into a champion for his people and an enemy of the Roman Empire.

  Time has not looked kindly on what he and the Goths wrought. From the medieval period to today, each new trend that departed in some way from society’s norms has been stigmatized with the Gothic name. Haunting architecture, disturbing horror stories, and an intimidating blackletter typeface acquired the adjective from hostile critics. A reclusive post-punk sound celebrates its moodiness, as does a modern subculture that embraces the dark, gloomy, and macabre. If being called “Roman” has always been considered traditional or classic, to be “Gothic” is different and usually a bit barbaric.

  As a historian, I’ve always been fascinated by the origins of stereotypes and gross generalizations. The use of derogatory words and insensitive imagery excludes many people from the full life of a community, relegating their stories to the margins of their time and erasing them from later generations. There’s something deeply unsettling in watching how the reputation of an entire group can be so effortlessly, insidiously caricatured, and I’ve long suspected that the Goths’ name was distorted in similar ways.

  Contrary to what the Romans believed, the Goths did succeed in making lasting contributions to world history. They established legal customs that shaped the histories of modern Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy. In their fight for human decency, they torched the bigotry that lay at the heart of antiquated notions of citizenship. And in an eerily prescient way, they championed the values of religious tolerance when many Christians at the time pursued heretics, imposed draconian moral laws on society, and outlawed the freedom of religious expression.

  The public record of Alaric’s life is frustratingly thin. Whole decades of his existence have simply vanished, and what little we do know about him comes to us secondhand. But for the past four years, I gathered every scrap of evidence that could tell me about him or his family, every artifact that could bring me closer to his time: from manuscripts brushed with sparkling ink to butchered rabbit bones, the leftovers from a Gothic dinner.

  Much of what survives comes from the lives of people who likely never expected to find themselves in the pages of a history book: an elderly widow who lived alone in her mansion, a little girl sold into slavery, a farmer’s son who rose briefly to emperor. Sometimes these individuals are known only by a single name: Marcella, Passia, Maximinus. They may not seem like natural or helpful starting points for investigating Alaric’s life. But we can learn a lot from their experiences.

  We can reconstruct the story of how Alaric’s family settled at the frontier and, with the aid of archaeology, see how a Gothic boy spent his days at the border. We can say when young Alaric enlisted in the army and why. We can even recount in remarkable detail the political intrigue of fourth-century Rome. From this collection of odds and ends, we steal a glimpse of a real person. From the rich context of the time emerges an impression of Alaric and, with it, a world we thought we knew but never imagined from his perspective.

  Alaric and his people were not the only ones living on the Roman Empire’s margins during the fourth and fifth centuries. Some of these other foreigners are infamous and still frightening. The Vandals, on their march from northern Europe to their new home in North Africa, left a trail of destruction synonymous with their name. Other groups sound familiar because of their leaders. Attila, from the steppes of central Asia, is probably the most recognizable of the people known as the Huns. But it was the Goths, led by Alaric, who masterminded the most devastating assault against the city of Rome in its more than thousand-year existence. Their story intrigued me the most.

  For centuries, the Goths in the Danube valley reaped the benefit of close contact with their neighbors. Yet Rome’s border had always been a contested place, one where open hostility flared and xenophobia festered. Alaric himself hailed from beyond the Danube River in what constituted one of the northeastern frontiers of the Roman Empire. Although the people from this area are often called “Visigoths” as a way to distinguish them from the Ostrogoths, who came to rule Italy, no such division existed in Alaric’s time. That distinction was invented later. Even the backstory to Alaric’s title, “king,” is more complicated. The word was the cry of his adoring fans, not a formal proclamation that came with scepter and throne.

  Alaric himself chose at a young age to enlist in the army, perhaps to further his career. He succeeded marvelously. Becoming a trusted soldier who served on the battlefield with a revolutionary emperor, he bridged two worlds and spoke two languages—that of his fellow soldiers and the language of power, Rome’s. These tools and talents helped him move up the ranks, tantalizing him with the hope of a lucrative government salary in the growing center of politics and diplomacy, the eastern capital of Constantinople. Alaric’s view of his adopted land soured at the end of the fourth century as rampant bigotry in Roman cities, combined with a lackluster commitment on the emperor’s part to reward the Goths for their service, radicalized him. By the turn of the fifth century, he had convinced his followers to exact revenge.

  The anatomy of his plot to attack Rome unfolds against the backdrop of some of the most significant events in world history: the rise of Christianity, the growth of the Persian Empire, and the crumbling of a once-united Mediterranean. There’s a darker history here, too, as fanatical Christians stoked the flames of civil war and turned the Roman Empire into one of history’s first Christian states. In the wake of their triumph, they interpreted Alaric’s three-day siege as a sign of the end of days and, with the help of Scripture, transformed seventy-two hours in Rome into a narrative of a disaster of biblical proportions. Within decades, they had weaponized fear—of another catastrophe, of foreigners—to resist their rapidly changing world, while the only political order they ever knew tilted away from Rome and toward new global horizons.

  This period was no savage “dark age” o
f urban collapse. Nor was it a comforting “age of spirituality,” a time of fevered conversion when people flocked to the church. Pervasive bigotry, state-supported Christian violence, and irrational xenophobia were the coin of the realm during Rome’s later years. Those, in fact, were the shocking values awaiting Alaric and the Goths when they made first contact with the empire. This was an age of extremism, a time when moderates everywhere lost political ground and radical beliefs about religious identity, state borders, and cultural exchange polluted the air, spreading unchecked across three continents. The political, cultural, and social disintegration of the Roman Empire might have been shocking but not wholly surprising to those of Alaric’s age. Their generation had witnessed dysfunction and disunity their entire lives, and one of the most divisive issues was the question of citizenship and whether foreigners would have a fair shot at becoming Romans.

  It’s time to think deeply and differently about the lives of marginalized people too often invisible in our history books. That’s why the marquee name in this history of the later Roman Empire is not a Roman but an immigrant, a man the Romans would have understood as a “refugee,” a profugus. Alaric ultimately did find his voice in a spectacular act of violence. But when told from his point of view, Rome’s fall appears less scary than it usually sounds. This Gothic tale is a hard lesson in the realities of growing up.

  ALARIC

  the

  GOTH

  CHAPTER ONE

  Seventy-Two Hours

  Whoever attacks one city attacks them all.

  —LIBANIUS OF ANTIOCH

  August 24 began as an ordinary day in the Eternal City. As the month-long summer holiday of races and festivals neared its end, market stalls reopened. Proprietors disassembled their storefront slats, and there was a welcome return to routine. Long ago, the Romans had honored this month with the eternal name of their first emperor, Augustus. This current August 24 fell in the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Honorius, the forty-second man to hold the title. Much later, a Christian monk would propose a less pagan way of counting time, inspired by Jesus’s birth, and the year would be called A.D. 410.

  Marcella was at home on the night of the attack. While other Romans were enjoying their luxurious dinners, she had chosen to be surrounded by her books. A marvelously rich life was rolled up in the scrolls and sewn between the hardback covers of the volumes stacked on the shelves of Marcella’s library. Now nearly eighty, she had dared to think differently from an early age.

  While other Romans her age displayed their books as marks of status, she surrounded herself with old thinkers like Plato to satisfy her hunger for big questions, like what was good and what was just and what happened to the soul after death. Most of the authors she favored were long dead, but curiosity drove her passion to explore. The arresting tales of a hermit who warred with demons in the Egyptian desert had inspired her to tend to her own spiritual health. Cushioned by generations of her family’s wealth, married, then widowed after only seven months, Marcella had come to see the uselessness of riches, just like Saint Antony had. She turned away suitors and never remarried. A community of Christian women came to revere her as a mentor. One of those young girls was with her the night she was abducted.

  The neighborhood of the Aventine Hill, where Marcella had her home, overlooked Rome’s greatest stadium, the Circus Maximus. Several times a month, roars from the crowd barreled through the district’s streets lined with cypresses and umbrella pines. Businessmen and politicians came in their togas and tunics to steam and soak in the local baths. Wealthy men dined at the hill’s exclusive clubs, meeting in underground banquet halls, where they were initiated into the mysteries of Mithras, a pagan star god whose life story promoted an appreciation for esoteric astrology. Converts to Christianity, still a relatively young religion, gathered at houses of worship nearby.

  But on the night of August 24, 410, whatever security had been stationed at the city’s perimeter failed. The wooden doors and portcullises at the city’s larger gates were supposed to be shut and locked, nightly. Soldiers were under orders to secure them, with night watchmen patrolling in shifts. A resident of Rome would have been reassured by the sight of flickering torches in the alleyways, carried by the fire brigade on lookout throughout the night. But none of the systems meant to protect the city functioned that night, which Roman historians calculated as “one thousand one hundred and sixty-four years since the city’s foundation,” when intruders stormed the city through the Salt Gate, a route that had once been popular among foreigners.

  A thousand years earlier, a tribe of Italians called the Sabines had followed this same road into Rome when they came to trade their cereals and crafts for salt. By Marcella’s day, the Sabines counted among the many indigenous people whose names the Romans had memorized, then quickly forgotten. But everyone still knew and used the Salt Gate. The basalt paving stones of its road followed the tawny hills of Umbria into northeastern Italy, toward the Adriatic coast and beyond, where it met the craggy landscape of the Balkans—connecting the Roman Empire to the frontier.

  This time, the Salt Road brought a far different group of foreigners into Rome: men who intended to rob and kidnap its comfortable citizens and set homes and public buildings on fire. They had timed their attack on the city with meticulous precision, their chief goal to sow as much fear and terror as they could.

  The quiet of Marcella’s villa was a luxury very few could afford in this cosmopolitan city of perhaps a million people. She must have heard the commotion below the hill, loud and more brutal than the stadium games, before the assailants broke into her house, grabbed her from her bedroom, and marched her to a cold marble church outside the city walls. What happened next across the city and the empire has been described in countless books as three days of panic, widespread uncertainty, and high-level negotiation. Marcella died within days. The news of her tragic passing elicited a letter of condolence from the great biblical scholar Jerome of Bethlehem, who wrote to a younger friend of Marcella’s to express his remorse at the sudden loss of one of “the most celebrated figures in her native city of Rome.”

  The fires sent many other Romans scrambling, which may have been the attackers’ aim: to smoke out the residents of the city, shock the citizens out of their apathy, and punish them for their government’s injustices. The city’s fire brigade sprang into action, a force of men eight thousand strong carrying their buckets, ladders, poles, and blankets, yet unaccustomed to disasters on this scale. As the fires spread and smoldered, family members went missing from burning homes. Fortunes were lost.

  By dawn of the next morning, August 25, residents were waking up to the extent of the destruction. The invaders had not limited themselves to Marcella’s tony neighborhood, the Aventine Hill. Many quarters of the city had suffered a punishing, coordinated attack. More disturbing still, the assailants were at large. For the next tense two days, those ruthless gate-crashers—how many of them remains unclear—held the proud city and its people hostage.

  Sixteen hundred years later, Marcella’s final moments seem to bring an entire era of world history to an end. One bishop at the time used the tragedy to preach about the dangers of being surrounded by the world’s “savage barbarians.” Jerome, in his epistolary eulogy for Marcella, lamented the stunning reversal that had knocked the Romans’ soaring ambitions from the city’s towering heights: Capitur urbs quae totem cepit orbem. “The city that once captured the hearts and minds of the world has been captured!” Just six short words in Latin, even in translation, his exclamation reads like a sobering newspaper headline. For some churchmen of the fifth century, this one event, the sack of Rome, pushed half of their mighty empire into its grave. For others in the safety of the east, including nervous but vocal Christian preachers like Timothy Aelurus, the attack confirmed their suspicions about the coming of the Antichrist and the imminent end of the world.

  Roman citizens throughout the empire felt the shock. As wealthier Italians fled to their se
cond homes in Africa and cargo boats sailed from the Roman harbor, the news slowly spread across Europe, Africa, and Asia, where Rome had its many territorial holdings. In the coming days and weeks, people “in the farthest parts of the earth” were setting aside “days of public grief and mourning,” said Bishop Augustine of Hippo, writing from a small city west of the great African port of Carthage. Some of Marcella’s friends are known to have joined the African congregations.

  Few Romans would have expected such a spectacular assault. The last documented incident of foreigners invading the city had occurred nearly eight hundred years before, in 390 B.C., when a “gaggle” of patriots had unexpectedly saved Rome.

  “Choosing a night when there was a faint glimmer of light,” as the Roman writer Livy narrated the history of the event, a pack of hairy, bedraggled soldiers from Gaul had stormed the capital’s most sacred citadel, the Capitoline Hill. Cloaked in darkness, stealthily navigating the dimly lit streets, “they did not even wake the dogs, an animal peculiarly sensitive to nocturnal sounds.” As the Gauls approached the hill, it seemed that nothing could stop the annihilation of the city—nothing, that is, except the birds.

  At the sound of the approaching footsteps, honking geese, kept on the temple grounds and sacred to the goddess Juno, raised the alarm. Their noisy cries roused the Roman army, sending soldiers to their battle positions. The Capitoline birds would forever after be honored as the heroes of that first and, for centuries, only foreign attack on the city.

  A lot had changed in those eight centuries. The quaint Roman Republic ballooned into an empire of sixty million people. Where one imperious Caesar had previously been too many, offending the cooperative sensibilities of Rome’s republican government, two Caesars eventually became the norm, an important source of political stability for a government that ruled on three continents. Rome, the city the ancient writer Plutarch said had been founded as an asylum—the Latin word translates to a “sanctuary for refugees”—grew into a bastion of unrivaled wealth and power. By the third century A.D., the Roman people were espousing the virtues of being a “cosmopolitan,” the idea stitched together from the Greek words for “global” (cosmos) and “citizen” (polites).