Eharding on the fall of the Roman Empire, Part X/XII: Constantius III, the settlement of the Visigoths, and the migration of the Vandals
Amazingly enough, the Ravenna government would actually mostly end up recovering from the 405-410 catastrophes thanks to the exceptional leadership of Constantius III (not to be confused with Constantine III), born in Nish, Serbia, the last successful major Western Roman general and (briefly) emperor, during the decade of the 410s. All four-five of the usurpers active in 410-413 would be unsuccessful. The permanent settlement of the Goths in southern Gaul, however, would be very successful for them. I now switch back to Heather.
Gerontius, the leader of the usurpation against Constantine III in Hispania, invaded Gaul and attempted to capture Constantine III in Arles in 411. However, a pro-Honorius general, Constantius, the second of the major Late Roman warlords that would dominate the Western Empire and the only successful one, proceeded to attack Arles, leading Gerontius, seeing the majority of his men deserting to Constantius, to flee back into Hispania and die of suicide during a coup (Sozomen tells the lurid tale). From this point on, Roman Hispania would have very few sources for it other than the Chronicle of Hydatius, available from Oxford University Press with notes, translation, and commentary by Richard Burgess. Hydatius writes
When the provinces of Spain had been laid waste by the destructive progress of the disasters just described, the Lord in his compassion turned the barbarians to the establishment of peace. They then apportioned to themselves by lot areas of the provinces for settlement: the Vandals took possession of Gallaecia and the Sueves that part of Gallaecia which is situated on the very western edge of the Ocean. The Alans were allotted the provinces of Lusitania and Carthaginiensis, and the Siling Vandals Baetica. The Spaniards in the cities and forts who had survived the disasters surrendered themselves to servitude under the barbarians, who held sway throughout the provinces. After a three-year usurpation, Constantine was executed within Gaul by Honorius’ dux, Constantius.
This last event was in August of 411, and was, according to Gregory of Tours, quoting Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus, spurred on by the usurpation of Jovinus in Gaul, who had made an alliance with the Burgundians, Alamans, Franks, and Alans. According to Sozomen, however, who ends his history about this point, Constantine was forced to open Arles by the the ambush and defeat of his army to the East of the Rhone by forces loyal to Constantius. Since the Goths were still in Italy at this time, Peter Heather (“The Huns and the End of the Roman Empire in Western Europe, p. 26), suggests that it was then that the ten thousand Huns requested by Honorius to defend the City of Rome against Alaric finally arrived.
No sooner had Constantine III been killed than Sarus, the Alans, Priscus Attalus, and the Burgundians proceeded to back yet another usurper, Jovinus, who began minting coins at Trier, Lyon, and even Arles in 411. This was when the Burgundians annexed the region around Worms. Despite the damage Trier sustained during the first two decades of the fifth century, Jovinus would not, in fact, be the last Roman to mint in Trier –Honorius, the usurper John, and, lastly, his successor, the child emperor Valentinian III would all continue to mint silver coins there. Avitus did not mint from Trier; he minted from Arles. Combined with evidence of coinage flows to Roman southern Germany during the period following Constantius III’s restoration of imperial authority, this suggests that other than the loss of Britain, Armorica, and parts of Hispania, the period 405-415 was not a cataclysmic one for the Western Empire. The Age of Aetius, on the other hand, appears to have degraded it rather severely, almost certainly due to massive losses in revenue from key provinces.
The wandering Goths moved out of South Italy and invaded Gaul in late 411 or early 412 (Kulikowski, Imperial Tragedy), resulting in Honorius giving much of Southern Italy, which had been devastated by the raids of Alaric, a large temporary tax cut. The wandering Goths ultimately ended up killing Sarus in Gaul. At around this time, the Ravenna government was confronted by -you guessed it- another usurper, this time Heraclian, the very man who had killed Stilicho, who rebelled in Tunisia in mid-412 and ended grain shipments to Italy.
It was by April 4, 413 that the New Wall of Constantinople initiated by Anthemius nine years before was completed; a law in the Theodosian code (15.1.53) specifying that the towers be used and repaired by the landowners “through whose lands this wall was duly erected” “in perpetuity” strongly suggests the severe shortages of men and money in the East had still not been entirely resolved. Just a year prior, the Eastern Empire had decreed a massive upgrade in the lower Danubian patrol boat system (Theodosian Code 7.17) of two hundred new and upgraded boats.
SOURCES: Theodosian Code, Paulinus of Pella, Orosius, Rutilius Namatianus, Gallic Chronicle of 452
The wandering Goths in Gaul led by Athaulf were persuaded by Constantius to support the Western empire in Ravenna, thus resulting in Jovinus’s beheading in the first half of 413. Heraclian’s revolt was also defeated by a mutiny and he was executed in March 414 (the sources say March 413, but Ian Hughes suggests this would compress the events into an unreasonably short timeframe), but not before the Goths captured Narbonne due to anger at the Romans failing to supply them Tunisian grain. The Goths and Romans continued to bicker throughout 414, resulting in the Gothic leadership, now headquartered in southern Gaul, once again attempting to make Priscus Attalus a puppet emperor. The plan failed due to Constantius III marching on Arles and enforcing a blockade of Narbonne, thus resulting in the Goths moving into northern Hispania and being forced, according to the reliable historian Olympiodorus, to buy grain from the Vandals in southern Hispania. The Gothic leadership experienced a bloody coup in Barcelona in August 415 and, after, according to the less than completely reliable historian Orosius, a failed attempt to cross into Morocco, once again agreed to be allies with the West. Honorius would celebrate this in a triumphal procession in the City of Rome in May of 416.
At this point, complicated history ends and I can once again afford to breeze through events without causing confusion. I here occasionally use two other Ian Hughes books, Gaiseric: The Vandal Who Destroyed Rome and Aetius: Attila’s Nemesis to fill in the gaps of the 420s-440s.
The Indian Summer in the West between the ascent of Wallia as King of the Goths in 415 and the Eastern Empire’s war against John in 425 was the only time in the fifth century prior to Odoacer (if we count him as a Roman) that the Western Romans made any major territorial recoveries outside defeating usurpations. The Goths won back most of Hispania for the Western empire in a series of battles with the Alans, Vandals, and Sueves from 416 to 418, including completely destroying the Siling (a word that might be related to Silesia) Vandal mobile chiefdom in Southern Hispania. The Goths’ campaigns against the barbarians that had crossed the Rhine in 406 resulted in a curious reversal of fortune. Formerly, the Alans (according to Hydatius) had been ruling over both the Vandals and Sueves; now, the Vandals under Gunderic began to rule over the numerically inferior, but, due to their skill in horsemanship, more physically imposing Alans. When the Alan king, Addax, was killed, the survivors submitted to Gunderic, king of the Hasding Vandals. As a reward for their service, the Visigoths were at last permitted by the Western empire in 418 to settle in the lands bordering the Garonne from the Atlantic to Toulouse. In this year, Honorius gave another temporary tax cut to Italian provinces. The Gothic king, Wallia, also died during this year and was succeeded by Theoderic I, who would go down fighting for the Romans against Attila. In 419, the Sueves that crossed the Rhine in 406 aligned with the Western Empire to fight a victory in Northwest Hispania against the Vandals. This resulted in the Vandals moving into Southern Hispania and Hispanic Galicia becoming the undisputed heart of Suevic settlement. Maximus, the usurper against Constantine III who had been resident among the barbarians in Hispania, once again attempted an usurpation sometime in 419 or 420 and was killed in 421. In Gaul, even Armorica, according to Rutilius Namatianus, began to be restored to the Western Empire by a certain Exuperantius by 417.
Despite the untimely death of Constantius, the last of the great Western Roman generals, in September 421, in 422, the Romans and the Visigoths renewed their campaign against the Vandals in Southern Hispania, which failed. The same year, the Eastern Empire began paying tribute to the Huns, now unified by Rua, for the very first time -350 pounds of gold per year, and began forcing the landowners formerly allowed to use the walls of Constantinople to quarter field army troops on the ground floors of the walls. Honorius died in August 423, leaving behind no children. John, the head of the palace bureucracy, seized power in Italy without Eastern consent. His coinage, the last of any Western Roman usurper, was unusual in showing a bearded man and was primarily produced at Ravenna.
SOURCES: Theodosian Code, Minutes of the Senate of the City of Rome, Victor of Vita, Jordanes, Marcellinus Comes, Gallic Chronicle of 452, Possidius
The successor to Honorius, Valentinian III, the son of Constantius III, was again another figurehead (aged five), coming to the imperial throne through Eastern imperial aid in 425 after a war between the East and the usurper John, during which John was deposed and killed at Aquileia. The year prior, the Christians of the Persian Empire declared their church hierarchy independent from that of the Roman Empire.
In 426, the Visigoths besieged Arles, but the Western Empire repelled them. Hearing of the Roman-Visigoth war, the Vandals captured Hispanic Cartagena, and with it one of the largest collections of Roman ships in the Mediterranean. They then proceeded to raid the Baleares. In 427, the Romans expelled Huns from Pannonia.
They also began (logically) another civil war, with Felix, the Italian military commander, sending forces against Boniface, the North African military commander, who had fought in the wars against the Visigoths in the 410s and was at this point was being relentlessly criticized by the Great Latin Father Augustine for neglecting his duty to secure North Africa from Moorish raids. Felix’s expedition failed, and another expedition was sent in 428, which succeeded in capturing Carthage from Boniface. Aetius, the commander in Gaul, battled the Franks the same year. It was also in this year that the king of the Vandals, Gunderic, captured the city of Seville in the attempt to make it his royal capital and died.
At this point, despite all the troubles the Western Empire had faced over the past two decades, it would be unfair to say it had fallen, even though it was in a civil war. It had only definitely and permanently lost Britain and any civil war would obviously be temporary. The rest was either within the Empire’s control or could be realistically reconquered in a reasonable timeframe. In a decade and a half, this would no longer be the case.
Gunderic’s half-brother, Gaiseric, would go down as one of the most impactful military leaders in world history. George Washington, Che Guevara, Daniel Ortega, and Võ Nguyên Giáp combined could not match his extent of audacity, tactical acumen, and stunning triumph over Western imperialism. Of all the Empire’s enemies, only the Caliph Umar, whose conquests were quite similar in nature, if much more extensive, would be more formidable.
Both the Visigoths and the Vandals were, at core, opportunists. But it was the Vandals who would first rise to an independent position high enough to be an existential threat to the Western Empire. Why didn’t either the East or West stop this menace? Simple enough. The East was preoccupied with the Hunnic threat, while the West was confronted first by civil war, then by seemingly endless wars against barbarians in Gaul and Hispania. Born somewhere in the vicinity of today’s Slovakia (probably- the idea the Vandals who crossed the Rhine were the same as those long settled in Roman Pannonia, as Hughes supposes, has no good basis and is largely implausible) -about as far as it is possible to get from salt water in the European Union- Gaiseric would become the Germanic master of sea power. Having crossed the Rhine as a teenager on the last day of 406, Gaiseric had likely been witness to all the major events of post-406 Vandal history. In May 429, around the time of a peace agreement between Boniface and Felix, he began preparations for his mobile chiefdom –supposedly numbering, inclusive of women, slaves, children, and the elderly, around 80,000– likely much larger than the original group of Vandals that crossed the Rhine in 406- to cross the Strait of Gibraltar.
By entering the only part of the Western Empire not yet subject to Germanic raiding, Gaiseric intended to, by taking advantage of Boniface’s weakened forces, capture the City of Rome’s single most important food supplier -Tunisia. One month later, his entire mobile chiefdom was in Morocco. The total number of Vandals existing within Greater Germany in the fourth century was something on the order of half a million. Given the sheer (supposed) size of Gaiseric’s mobile chiefdom -almost certainly much larger than the group that crossed the Rhine on the last day of 406, given its apparent fear of the armies of Constantine III– it is, as far as I can tell, an open question whether the mobile chiefdom that crossed the Strait of Gibraltar included a substantial number of Roman citizen families enticed by Vandal promises to expropriate land from absentee landowners and give it to their fighting men. Either that, or there was substantial above-replacement Vandal fertility within the Empire.
After wandering East at a leisurely pace, the Vandal forces defeated the forces of Boniface in the vicinity of the Tunisian-Algerian border just under one year after they had crossed the sea. They proceeded to set up siege against Hippo Regius (modern Annaba, Algeria) with the help of their captured fleet. Augustine was “rescued from the ills of this life” in Hippo Regius three months after the siege was started. That same year, Felix was killed under the order of Aetius. After this, Aetius campaigned on the Upper Danube frontier against various Germans and local rebellions, then once again defended Arles from the Visigoths. The Vandals finally ended the siege of Hippo Regius after fourteen months, failing in their attempt to capture the city -a testament to the fortitude of Late Roman garrison troops- as a result of rumors of the Eastern Empire preparing a campaign against them.
It was also in this year that the Nestorians, who denied that Mary bore the Christ’s divine nature and were, under the earlier influence of Theodore of Mopsuestia, prominent among the Christians of the Persian Empire, were condemned as heretics at the First Council of Ephesus for excessive separation of the Christ’s human and divine natures. The Nestorians would become an important aspect of the Medieval Orient, but are almost extinct today.
Aetius won a victory against the Franks in Gaul in 432. The combined offensive of Boniface and the Eastern Empire against the Vandals in 432 failed (this would come to be a theme of future imperial campaigns against Gaiseric). Hippo Regius was finally abandoned by the Roman Empire and was looted by the Vandals. The Vandal kingdom would last for one hundred and two years, forty five of those years under the rule of Gaiseric. The Vandal century would only end with the beginning of the Roman Empire’s century and a half long reoccupation of Tunisia. Boniface went back to Italy that same year to fight a civil war with Aetius, forcing Aetius to flee to the Huns.
SOURCES: Hydatius, Theodosian Code (including the Novels), Minutes of the Senate of the City of Rome, Victor of Vita, Priscus (preserved in Constantine VII’s Excerpts on Embassies), Salvian, Gallic Chronicle of 511, Gallic Chronicle of 452, Justinian Code, Marcellinus Comes, Jordanes
Aetius finally defeated his last Italian rivals in 433 and gave the Huns parts of Roman Pannonia in exchange for their help, thus becoming the third major Late Roman warlord to dominate the Western Empire. The West would be free of coups for a whole two decades, which is the only positive thing one can say about this time. It is, as a consequence, precisely for these two decades the strongest case for the barbarians -that is to say, the chiefs of the Vandals, Visigoths, Sueves, Huns, Burgundians, and even Franks- not being the prime movers of the fall of the West is at its weakest. The “Cambridge companion to the Age of Attila” is not called the “Cambridge companion to the Age of Aetius”. For it is quite clear that even during this fifth of a century of Roman political stability, the Empire was militarily weakening and its temporal power swiftly retreating, and the leaders of the barbarians showed substantially more initiative at the time than the Roman government.
The Eastern Empire was still containing the Vandal threat in Tunisia. However, Hunnic threats to the East in 434 resulted in the Eastern army being withdrawn (this would not be the last time this would happen). The Eastern Empire was forced to raise its payments to the Huns to 700 pounds of gold per year. As a result, the Treaty of Hippo Regius between Aetius’s and Gaiseric’s governments, signed on February 11, 435, was relatively favorable to Gaiseric. It allowed his Vandals and Alans to legally reside within present-day Algeria while paying tribute to the Empire and gave Gaiseric a military post within the Roman Empire. Aetius was then immediately forced to deal with a rebellion of the Burgundians. In 436, Aetius again fought against a rebellion of the Burgundians, who were supported by the Visigoths’ beginning a siege of Narbonne. By 437, the Visigoth siege of Narbonne had at last been raised and the Burgundians were contained with the help of the Huns, however, the Franks captured Trier and Cologne that year. In response to the Gallic chaos, the Vandals began to renew their pirate raids. The pirate raids became more severe in 438, when the Vandals plundered Sicily. Aetius continued his victories against the Visigoths. In the East, the Theodosian Code, a compilation of the laws issued by the Roman Emperors from Constantine onward, was published. Some novel laws, or Novels, going up to those of the Western Emperor Anthemius, were later appended to the code and contain more individual detail than the original compiled laws, thus making them a vital source for historians of the Late Empire. The Visigoths won a victory against Aetius’s forces at Toulouse in late 438 or early 439, while the Sueves under their king Rechila, encouraged by the diversion of Roman forces to Gallic matters and the Vandals having left for hotter pastures, were expanding out of their Galician heartland into the region of Merida.
To Flavius Merobaudes, of spectabilis rank, member of the imperial council. To Flavius Merobaudes, a man equal in fortitude and doctrination, as excellent in doing praiseworthy things as he is in praising the deeds of others. (He is) experienced in administrative charges, famous for his eloquence, exceeding in his studies those who have more leisure. From the cradle he had the same care for virtue and eloquence; born with an ingenuity to fortitude and to doctrine alike, he exercised with both stylus and sword. And, not allowing the strength of his mind to languish in the shadow and darkness of mere scholarly leisure, when under arms he fought using words, and sharpened a speech when [serving] in the Alps. Therefore he is granted as a reward, not cheap foliage nor idle ivy as a Heliconian honour for [his] head, but a statue made of bronze, by which times of old used to honour men of rare example, who had been tested in military service, or were the best of poets. This [monument] Rome, together with the most august emperors, Theodosius and Placidus Valentinianus, lords of all things, set up in the forum of Ulpius, rewarding in a man of ancient nobility and new glory his military industry, as well as the poem by whose triumphant publication the glory of the empire grew. [on the side] Dedicated on the third day before the Kalends of August, when our lords Theodosius for the fifteenth time and Valentinian for the fourth time were consuls. (transl. Ulrich Gehn)