Eharding on the fall of the Roman Empire, Part IX/XII Radagaisus, the Crossing of the Rhine, Constantine III, and Alaric's Sack of Rome
In 404/5, Sozomen, the only one of the Big Three fifth century church historians to rely very heavily on the highly reliable lost history of Olympiodorus, reports that the Huns devastated Thrace, the first report of such a thing since the 376-382 Gothic War. The late Medieval chronicler Nicephorus Callistus (who might have had access to lost sources) names Uldin as participating in these raids (Maenchen-Helfen, World of the Huns, p. 63) -plausible enough if he were allied with Stilicho (he would fight for the West in 406). Evidence from coins indicates that it was very likely this event, combined with the prior raids of Alaric, the later attack of Uldin on Castra Martis, and the earlier rebellion of Gainas, that brought about the end of the villa economy in the Balkans to an even greater extent than the raids of the Goths during the 376-382 Gothic war. Scores of villas were violently destroyed, never to be rebuilt again. Due to an extreme undersupply of Roman military recruits, the Eastern government began building Potemkin forts on the Danube frontier to discourage the raids. By this time, the size of the Roman army had clearly fallen to well under 400,000, well below its Constantine-era peak of 581,000, only fear of the Huns to his East keeping the Shahanshah Yazdegerd from exploiting the Roman peril. Despite the shift to hard money and the obvious military cuts, is not altogether clear that government spending as a share of gross imperial product shrank between the age of Constantine and that of Stilicho- the bureaucracy and church had grown, and barbarian allies weren’t free. Neither, for that matter, was rebuilding the military, which, according to all indications, Anthemius did begin to do. He was appointed consul and praetorian prefect by Arcadius in 405. The year following, he rose to the rank of patrician, that is, de facto chief executive. If the Golden Gate and its inscription (“Haec loca Theudosius decorat post fata tyranni/Aurea saecla gerit qui portam construit auro”) really do date to soon after the defeat of Magnus Maximus (there is a reasonable amount of evidence to think this is the case), the course of Anthemius’s famous wall may have been originally planned by Theodosius I, but the construction delayed due to fiscal problems until Anthemius’s ascent. Regardless, Anthemius’s wall around the Second Rome to ward off the Huns and Goths, much like Aurelian’s around the City of Rome to ward off the Alamans, represents a very obvious shift from frontier defense to defense in depth.
In late 405, the pagan warlord Radagaisus, a Goth from outside Roman-held territory, crossed the Alps and, seeing the Roman Balkans as occupied by Alaric and undefended against the Hunnic menace, invaded Italy. This invasion was very likely a product of the process of Huns moving their main base of operations West into the Tisza valley. DNA evidence confirms that the highest European of concentration of the Y-haplogroup Q1a2-M25, found in ancient remains from the Tian Shan to Altai mountains and in a Hunnic grave in Transylvania, is among the Transylvanian Szekelys. Gothic settlements in Western Romania are abandoned en masse and the hoarding of gold coins in Moldova comes to an end around this time, while the hoarding of gold coins becomes increasingly common in Transylvania after this point, further adding evidence to a shift in the Hunnic base of operations. Gibbon attributes this Hunnic movement to the establishment of the Rouran Khaganate in Mongolia under Shelun, and though the mobility of Asiatic steppe nomads cannot be denied, this seems like a stretch. The Huns had undeniably begun to move their operations West both after their failure in and due to the attraction of becoming mercenaries for the Romans. The Western Roman government grew clearly desperate. By February 406, the government was actively offering slaves (especially slaves of soldiers, barbarian allies, and conquered peoples) liberty and travel money for taking up arms against Radagaisus, and offering freemen a promise of ten solidi if they join the military, seven of those solidi promised to be paid out after the crisis was over. Huns and Alans were also recruited from across the Danube to fight Radagaisus’s Goths.
On the heels of the invasion, Britain’s military leadership rebelled from under Stilicho in the summer of 406 under the usurper Marcus, presumably due to complaints about the military of Britain and Gaul becoming smaller and less funded. The fact the British usurpation did not mint coins while it stayed in Britain, and would only begin to mint coins once it had access to the mint in Lyon in 407 is a testament to the devastated economic state Britain was in at the time. Such military uprisings would generally be avoided in the East. Augustine of Hippo, the third of the four Great Western Fathers of the Roman church, claimed Radagaisus’s army numbered more than a hundred thousand. Though this is a clear exaggeration, supposing troop strength of ~25,000 for Radagasius’s Goths, something well within the realm of possibility for a Völkerwanderung spurting out from the collapse of Gothic settlement in Wallachia, Transylvania, and Western Romania, it’s very easy to see how the Western Empire might have found it difficult to defeat this mobile chief.
And in the end, the extraordinary measures taken by Stilicho did delay Italy’s fall to unromanized Germans for over a century and a half. The Gallic Chronicle of 452 reports
With many cities already devastated, Radagaisus died. The fact his army was divided into three parts through various chiefs opened up some opportunity for the Romans to fight back. In outstanding triumph Stillico wiped out the army of the third part of the enemy after the auxiliaries of the Huns were used to surround them.
Thanks to help from Huns and Goths aligned with the Romans, including the general Sarus, who had switched from Alaric to Stilicho in 402, another Hadrianopolis was again avoided. After several months of raiding the Po Valley with little opposition, Radagaisus was killed and much of his mobile chiefdom was enslaved by the Western Empire after Radagaisus failed to seize Florence in August 406. 12,000 of his men, according to Olympiodorus, were incorporated into the Western army. Stilicho had won a second victory against Gothic invaders in Northern Italy.
It was either in this year or in the past year that Stilicho, according to Olympiodorus (whose history we have only fragments of), Sozomen (who reports only fragments of Olympiodorus), and Zosimus (who seems completely confused on the importance of the Gothic invasion of 405/6, but places the agreement before Radagaisus’s invasion), asked Alaric for an alliance against the Eastern Empire to help the West reconquer the central Balkans -a traditional recruiting base for the Roman army largely free of estates held by Roman Senators and a desired residence of Alaric’s Goths. After the defeat of Radagaisus, Stilicho moved to Ravenna to make plans for the invasion. Alaric agreed, moving his forces “from the barbarous regions bordering on Dalmatia and Pannonia” into today’s Albania. In order to hamper Eastern intelligence-gathering, Stilicho declared all Italian ports to be closed to Eastern merchants, according to the Theodosian Code.
On the last day of 406, according to Prosper of Aquitane, some thousands of Vandals, Alans, and Sueves (the last being some kind of southern Germans; these give their name to today’s Swabia, Gregory of Tours simply claims them to be Alamans), presumably, as with Radagaisus, under pressure from Hunnic expansion in the Tisza valley, took advantage of Stilicho’s use of troops from the Rhineland for the battle against Radagaisus and for his presumed planned campaign against the East in order to cross the Rhine in the vicinity of Mainz and launch an entirely unauthorized invasion of Roman Gaul.
For the next few decades, the Sueves would ravage Hispania, forcing the Romans to use the Goths to destroy them, a decision which led to the Roman transfer of Hispania to the Goths in 461. The Vandals, on the other hand, would first make Hispania their refuge, then, between the 430s and 530s, the hot and rich lands of Algeria and Tunisia. The Alans were resident in Ukraine only a generation before, while the Vandals were former inhabitants of today’s southern Slovakia and the upper Tisza Valley in Hungary, forced South during the fourth century by climate change. This is the region of the short-lived late fourth century North Carpathian Group, which shows signs of dramatic population contraction and signs of massive settlement destruction at the beginning of the fifth century. As a paper on the subject notes, “From the first third of the 5th century, eastern Slovakia became almost uninhabited”. Southern Poland experienced similar disruptions as a result of Hunnic pressure, though not all simultaneously. Jordanes claims the Vandals and Alans of the Great Invasion were those “dwelling in both Pannonias by permission of the Roman Emperors” and had left Roman Pannonia due to fear of the Goths. If the first claim is true, the second is plausible, but, other than Radagaisus’s Gothic invasion obviously having to pass through Roman Pannonia, there’s no obvious reason to believe either, due to the questionable supposition of Romanized Vandals and Alans developing an independent leadership and a desire to move along the Danube and Rhine into Gaul, rather than more logically into Italy, especially for a people long habituated to Roman civilization. More likely, the Vandals and Alans of the Great Invasion were directly from the very much unromanized Slovakia, Moravia, and Silesia, all but perhaps the last highly vulnerable to Hunnic expansion into the Tisza Valley. Due to logistical reasons, Halsall, pointing to the extremely obvious logistical challenges of the journey of the Vandals and Alans, suggests the barbarians were bribed by the Empire to move westward and northward, and only when (at least, according to Gregory of Tours, quoting Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus) they were defeated by the Franks did they decide to move into the Empire itself.
Stilicho, committed to the defense of Honorius and having an excellent understanding of manpower strength, viewed the British uprising and the barbarians in Gaul as substantially lesser threats than the armed forces that the Eastern Empire, Alaric, and his rivals in Ravenna could muster. The barbarians who had entered Gaul were, after all, already reduced in strength due to Frankish attacks to the north of their crossing that killed the Vandal king. Though he could not attack the Eastern Empire under such conditions, his foremost task now became not the quelling of the barbarians in Gaul or the defeat of the British usurpation, but the defense of Northern Italy against the East, Alaric, potential Italian usurpers, and the barbarians.
Stilicho (or so says Jordanes) thus sent some Vandal forces loyal to his government from Pannonia to Gaul to restore control; seeing that Western Roman power in the region was gone, they joined the invaders. According to Prosper, Saxons from Niedersachsen, seeing the Roman Empire’s vulnerability, joined in the invasion of Gaul in 407. In response to the crisis, the Briton Constantine III, inspired by similar actions of Constantine the Great a century before, seized power in Britain during Honorius’s third visit to Rome, while the Emperor was celebrating the victory over Radagaisus, and moved into Gaul with up to 100% of the six thousand or so soldiers then present in Britain to repulse the barbarians ravaging northern Gaul in February of 407. Of all the losers of the fifth century (there were many), it is Constantine III who became almost certainly the biggest contributor to the downfall of the Western Roman Empire in every area.
By bribing Western-aligned Germanic tribes and rapidly gaining the support of the Gallic and even Hispanic establishments, Constantine III became more or less secure as ruler of Gaul by late 407, only threatened in his control by the barbarian raiders, which, according to Zosimus, he mostly killed in a battle. He began to try to reconcile with the rump state controlling Italy and Western North Africa by leaving it the portions of Gaul bordering Italy. Stilicho, fearing a threat to his power, decided to focus on countering Constantine III and, according to Zosimus, relying on Olympiodorus, was now prohibited by Theodosius’s son Honorius, the nominal Western emperor, from engaging in a war on the East. That same year, the Empire forbade traditional festal banquets in Roman Tunisia, which had been publicly funded as recently as 399, and ordered the removal of images from all remaining active non-Christian temples. General Sarus was ordered by Stilicho to capture Constantine III in Gaul in early 408, while landowners Didymus and Verinianus arose in Hispania to fight in favor of Stilicho’s Italo-Tunisian government. Stilicho did not himself engage in direct battle against Constantine III due to fear of having his power in Italy be crushed by the movements of the East and his Ravenna rivals. The decapitation attempt failed, despite Sarus winning a strong preliminary battlefield victory, due to Constantine III having ordered barbarian reinforcements, most likely originally intended to quell the Hispanic uprising. Constantine III followed up on his strategic victory by taking Arles and starting to mint coins there, as well as at Trier, a mint that had been closed since 395. The uprising of Didymus and Verinianus was soundly defeated by Constantine III’s general Gerontius, a Briton.
Though documentation here is as poor as regarding the Late Bronze Age collapse in the Eastern Mediterranean, as the sources that have been handed down to us -the Gallic chronicles of 452 and 511 (heavily mauled by later editing), St. Patrick, Constantius, Zosimus, Gildas, Procopius, Bede, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle- are always either information-rare or garbled to the extreme, it was around this time that the Odenburg-Neuss line was abandoned, the border of the Empire moved to the Boulogne-Cologne line, Armorica was abandoned to anarchy, and the lands North of the English Channel fell out of the control of Constantine III.
It is here, in Britain, that the Dark Ages begin first and hardest. All British hoards ending with coins of Constantine III contain only coins minted prior to the death of the Eastern Emperor Arcadius in May 408. It was not infection that led to the death of this organ, but autoimmune disorder. More than 350 years of Roman civilization vanished with the legions’ withdrawal like snow in the rain. Mere economic weakness certainly wasn’t new to Britain. Some of its regional pottery industries were declining and had generally become less innovative. Bronze coins had, over the previous decade, become rarities. But never before and never again would Britain experience anything like what it saw in the decades following 408. To find realistic parallels to the extent of the civilizational decline the Britons who were alive between the withdrawal of the legions and the coming of the Saxons must have seen, one would have to look to the collapse of the Indus Valley Civilization in India and Pakistan around 1900 BC or the collapse at the end of the Early Bronze Age in Syria and Palestine around 2200 BC. While the former analogy might be more appropriate in regards to both cause (state collapse) and ultimate result (takeover by migrants from the Koppen Dfb zone), the latter is more appropriate in regards to near-term archaeological effect. Nothing in the Late Bronze Age collapse is comparable. In the aftermath of the withdrawal, bricks and mortar, quarried stone, tile, nails, the usage of coins as money, writing, villa-based agriculture, large-scale cross-Channel trade, even wheel-made pottery, all disappeared from Britain after a period of increasingly decadent imitation. Due to the collapse of both coin imports and Roman law, clipping of silver coins, previously rare and punishable by death, became widespread. The clipping was, however, only up to the head of the emperor, suggesting continued respect for imperial authority. Gold coins were not clipped at all. At least at first, imitation silver coins were still made (see Higham and Ryan’s textbook The Anglo-Saxon World -yes, dear reader, I am aware of the universal unreliability of textbooks, including this one, but this one at least tries to make an effort- p. 50), but even these eventually fell out of production and circulation. Coin hoarding skyrocketed. Hundreds of Roman settlements from Hadrian’s Wall (which, to at least some degree, remained in use right down to the full withdrawal of the Roman military from Britain) to the English Channel were abandoned over the next few decades. Burials started appearing within the walls of old Roman cities. London was completely abandoned. The people in the outlying settlements, however, remained -changes in pollen composition appear to have been mild. Despite the Britonic people in southeastern Britain having been almost as Roman in character as any other in the Empire, in the absence of a government and an army attempting to maintain Roman laws and institutions, and without even the benefit of conquest by semi-civilized barbarians, the people, especially in the previously most Romanized areas, fell into total anarchy.
If there is better experimental evidence in favor of the “Inference, made from the Passions” of Thomas Hobbes, writing 1200 years after the collapse, I have yet to see it.
There Is Alwayes Warre Of Every One Against Every One Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man. For WARRE, consisteth not in Battell onely, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the Will to contend by Battell is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of Time, is to be considered in the nature of Warre; as it is in the nature of Weather. For as the nature of Foule weather, lyeth not in a showre or two of rain; but in an inclination thereto of many dayes together: So the nature of War, consisteth not in actuall fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is PEACE. Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.
After more than two centuries of decline, the fall of the Western Roman Empire had at last begun.
At around the same time, in the first half of 408 (the timing comes from Jerome, the description from Sozomen; consult Maenchen-Helfen’s World of the Huns, p. 65 on this), came the first recorded attempt of a Hunnic chiefdom to attempt to capture cities in the Roman Balkans. Uldin the Hun, who had previously been a mercenary of both the Eastern and Western Empires, briefly captured Castra Martis near the Lower Danube in 408, but he was quickly defeated due to his allies flipping to the Romans and the Scirii who backed his assault were absorbed into the Eastern Empire as tenant farmers. The Isaurians operating around the Taurus range, who were considered by the Romans semibarbarians, posed a similar threat to the Eastern Empire as the Huns at this time, raiding throughout eastern Anatolia and Syria.
Like Roman rule in Britain, Stilicho’s political fortunes would also end in 408. Had Stilicho the boundless energy of an Aurelian or a Constantius III, the delegative abilities of a Diocletian, the political skill of a Constantine the Great, or even the determination of a Constantius II or a Theodosius, it is doubtful that this would have been inevitable. In response to the lack of either military or financial aid to his mobilized Goths, Alaric and his Goths moved into present-day Austria and demanded four thousand pounds in gold in the spring of 408 –somewhere around ten solidi per soldier, essential to fund the Goths’ future expeditions. Stilicho persuaded the Senate that paying up would be less costly than a risk of another Hadrianopolis, especially given the rebellion of Constantine III, which had greatly reduced the number of forces under the Italian government’s disposal.
The death of Arcadius, on May 1, 408, took perhaps a month to reach Rome. After some debate about whether Stilicho or Honorius would go to Constantinople to negotiate with the Eastern oligarchy, Honorius agreed that Stilicho should go on the basis that it was safer for the Emperor. Stilicho, fearing negative repercussions from the Western Senate, did not go East. Instead, he was overthrown by military coup in August 408 for proposing that Alaric lead the Western army’s campaign against Constantine III. The families of Germanic forces loyal to Stilicho were killed, resulting in the Western army collapsing and Alaric being greeted with thousands of defectors -according to Zosimus, thirty thousand, or probably a majority of the Italian field army. Honorius at this point decided to give Italian landowners a substantial tax cut.
Seeing his enormous leverage after the killing of Stilicho, Alaric asked for more aid, resulting in Honorius attempting to raise an army against him. In response, Alaric invaded Italy in November 408, besieging the largest city in it. Unlike at Hadrianopolis, this time there was no chance the other half of the Empire would commit sufficient numbers of its own forces to destroy the Gothic menace.
Lacking ready access to Roman forces in Gaul and facing severe financial and manpower constraints, the government feared risking another Hadrianopolis too much to resist. After months of siege, the Roman Senate decided to pay off Alaric with five thousand pounds of gold and thirty thousand pounds of silver, resulting in him lifting the siege. Fearing Alaric, Honorius on December 10 removed the restrictions on Eastern merchants that Stilicho had imposed. It was around this point that Jerome wrote
I shall now say a few words of our present miseries. A few of us have hitherto survived them, but this is due not to anything we have done ourselves but to the mercy of the Lord. Savage tribes in countless numbers have overrun all parts of Gaul. The whole country between the Alps and the Pyrenees, between the Rhine and the Ocean, has been laid waste by hordes of Quadi, Vandals, Sarmatians, Alans, Gepids, Herules, Saxons, Burgundians, Allemanni and — alas! For the commonweal!— even Pannonians. For “Assur also is joined with them”. The once noble city of Moguntiacum has been captured and destroyed. In its church many thousands have been massacred. The people of Vangium after standing a long siege have been extirpated. The powerful city of Rheims, the Ambiani, the Altrebatæ, the Belgians on the skirts of the world, Tournay, Spires, and Strasburg have fallen to Germany: while the provinces of Aquitaine and of the Nine Nations, of Lyons and of Narbonne are with the exception of a few cities one universal scene of desolation. And those which the sword spares without, famine ravages within. I cannot speak without tears of Toulouse which has been kept from falling hitherto by the merits of its reverend bishop Exuperius. Even the Spains are on the brink of ruin and tremble daily as they recall the invasion of the Cymry; and, while others suffer misfortunes once in actual fact, they suffer them continually in anticipation.
The Burgundians, a group, like the Thuringians further North, famous for their horses in the late fourth century, were likely also pushed by Hunnic expansion -Socrates Scholasticus mentions their land being devastated by the Huns beginning prior to 430.
Honorius continued to refuse to deal with Alaric, instead deciding to align with Constantine III, who was by early 409 facing a rebellion by Gerontius, who declared some individual named Maximus emperor in Tarracona and began minting coins in Barcelona.
Meanwhile Gerontius, from being the most efficient of the generals of Constantine, became his enemy; and believing that Maximus, his intimate friend, was well qualified for the tyranny, he invested him with the imperial robe, and permitted him to reside in Tarracona. Gerontius then marched against Constantine, and took care to put Constans, the son of Constantine, to death at Vienne. As soon as Constantine heard of the usurpation of Maximus, he sent one of his generals, named Edovicus, beyond the Rhine, to levy an army of Franks and Alemanni; and he sent his son Constans to guard Vienne and the neighboring towns.
–Sozomen, summarizing Olympiodorus
In April of this year, Honorius issued a law ordering private persons in Tunisia who had bought lands around border fortifications from the barbarians meant to guard the border to either maintain the border fortifications or transfer them to either barbarians or veterans. Honorius, or so says Zosmius, also attempted to send five legions from Dalmatia consisting of six thousand men to garrison the City of Rome, but Alaric’s Goths ambushed them and only just over a hundred got into the city. Alaric was also reinforced by another contingent of the Balkan Goths, led by his brother, Athaulf, who would become King of the Goths after his death. After seeing the unwillingness of the Ravenna government, Alaric then returned to Rome and, by threatening to destroy the port of Ostia, forced the Senate to set up a new emperor, Priscus Attalus, the praefectus of the City of Rome, in December 409. Attalus quickly converted to the Christian religion, but was not recognized in Tunisia, the leadership of which backed Honorius. Though Alaric proposed capturing the province using Gothic fighters, Attalus refused. Attalus’s Roman forces attempted to capture the province, but did not succeed. Constantine III’s attempted intervention in Italy to aid Honorius against Alaric (according to Sozomen, this intervention in Italy was an attempt to seize power from Honorius) failed due to the slaying of Alavicus, commander of the troops of Honorius who supposedly sided with Constantine III.
Negotiations between Alaric and Honorius resumed, but Honorius refused to appoint Alaric as a Roman master of soldiers. Alaric then withdrew his demands for payment in gold and appointment as a master of soldiers, requesting simply that his Goths be allowed to settle present-day Austria as well as receive food aid for his men. Honorius refused. Alaric then moved toward closer to Ravenna to strengthen his hand in the negotiations, but Honorius was bailed out by four thousand soldiers from the Eastern Empire. Deciding Honorius was in a secure position and that Attalus was useless, Alaric deposed Attalus in July 410 and advanced toward Ravenna to finally negotiate an agreement with Honorius. At this point, however, Alaric was attacked by Sarus. Disappointed in the attack, Alaric became convinced that negotiation had failed and decided to sack Rome, which he and his Goths did on August 24, 410, looting the city for three days and causing some notable damage. Coin usage in the City of Rome after this date dramatically slows down. The symbolic significance of this event increases all the more once one realizes that in just three years, the Eastern oligarchy led by Anthemius would finish its Theodosian walls, thus expanding Constantinople’s walled area to a size greater than that of Rome. Constantinople would remain the most populous city in the Mediterranean for at least a century. The Christian response against the representatives of the religion of Old Rome to this catastrophe was plain and simple:
In truth, Rome, which was founded and increased by the labors of these ancient heroes, was more shamefully ruined by their descendants, while its walls were still standing, than it is now by the razing of them. For in this ruin there fell stones and timbers; but in the ruin those profligates effected, there fell, not the mural, but the moral bulwarks and ornaments of the city, and their hearts burned with passions more destructive than the flames which consumed their houses.
Again, they say that the long famine laid many a Christian low. But this, too, the faithful turned to good uses by a pious endurance of it. For those whom famine killed outright it rescued from the ills of this life, as a kindly disease would have done; and those who were only hunger-bitten were taught to live more sparingly, and inured to longer fasts.
And since Christians are well aware that the death of the godly pauper whose sores the dogs licked was far better than of the wicked rich man who lay in purple and fine linen, what harm could these terrific deaths do to the dead who had lived well?
Alaric then moved his forces into Calabria in a failed attempt to invade the grain-rich, if long stagnant, island of Sicily and died. It is at roughly this point Hughes’s Stilicho book, good as it is in explaining the events of the period, ends and I am forced to switch back to other sources. The Gallic Chronicle of 452 records for this year that
In this storm the forces of the Romans were stretched thin to their foundations beyond their strength. The British lands were devastated by an incursion of the Saxons. The Vandals and Alandi laid waste to a part of the Gallic lands. What had remained was besieged by the usurper Constantinus. The Suevi occupied the greatest part of the Spanish lands. Finally Rome itself, the head of the world, was laid open in the most disgraceful manner to the plundering of the Goths.