How did the Huns, Goths, and Vandals help bring down the Roman Empire - and sack the city of Rome itself, not once but twice?In this second episode of our special series on the Fall of the Western Roman Empire, Tristan Hughes is joined by Professor Peter Heather to explore the dramatic wave of invasions that shook Rome in the late 4th and early 5th centuries. From the arrival of the Huns to the sacks of Rome by the Goths in 410 and the Vandals in 455, we trace how the advance of innumerable barbarian tribes brewed decades of tension, betrayal, and bloodshed which helped bring the empire to its knees.MORE:Fall of the Western Roman Empire:https://open.spotify.com/episode/2fKMe2jrV1oZKzRSws83w4The Goths:https://open.spotify.com/episode/5PbZnN3xtQbLkcn2dPZPy2Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor and producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on
Chapter 1: What sets the stage for the fall of the Roman Empire?
The year is 370 AD. A cloud of dust appears on the horizon, dark against the noonday sun. The thunder of hooves reverberates across the vast carpet of the Great Steppe, a boundless expanse of scrub and grassland spanning from the plains of Hungary to the deserts of Mongolia.
The primal screams of warhorses, bred for their agility in battle, merge with the guttural cries of their riders, creating an unrelenting cacophony. These riders are the Huns. A fugitive nomadic people driven from their homeland by the capricious whims of Mother Nature. Bent on pillage and bloodshed, they descend westward into the gothic lands of Eastern Europe. They are the oncoming storm.
A barbarian storm. And Rome is not ready for the havoc they will unleash. This is the Ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and welcome to the second instalment in our mini-series on the fall of Rome. In our last episode we traced the underlying origins of Rome's decline and examined whether the empire was the victim of slow decay in the 3rd and 4th centuries.
If you haven't listened, do go back and dive in. Next week we'll be exploring the impact of plagues on Rome's collapse and the fate of Rome's last emperors.
Today, though, we're moving forward into the late 4th and early 5th centuries, to a time of great instability and upheaval, when Germanic tribes who inhabited the unconquered lands of northern and eastern Europe – Goths, Alans, Franks, Saxons – flooded into the empire.
Coming initially as refugees and then as invaders, these so-called barbarians would ultimately surround and lay siege to the walls of Rome. With the Eternal City sacked by the Goths in 410 and then the Vandals in 455, the Empire's heart was ripped out twice in a generation.
Rome did not fall in a day, but these sackings and the barbarian invasions which preceded them still stand as pivotal moments in that process. To understand how the city of Rome found itself torn to shreds by hordes of ravaging barbarians, we must begin our story with the Huns, those fearsome steppe riders we met at the start.
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Chapter 2: How did the arrival of the Huns affect the Goths and Rome?
They were described by Roman soldier and historian Ammianus Marcellinus as glued to their horses, little known from ancient records, and exceeding in every degree of savagery. Beginning in the 370s AD, the Huns poured out of the east and stormed into the lands of the Goths, casting a long and dark shadow over the shores of the Black Sea.
It is still unclear what drove them westwards, but what is certain is that it came as a devastating surprise to the Germanic peoples they overran and set off a domino effect of cataclysmic proportions. The Goths, pushed out of their ancestral heartlands by these Hunnic marauders, had no option but to flee.
Wrapped in sheepskin cloaks and carting wagons loaded with terrified women and children, the Gothic chieftains resolved to seek refuge within the bounds of the Roman Empire. And so in the year 376 they amassed in their thousands on the banks of the river Danube, its raging waters and natural frontier between the Roman Empire and the turbulent territories that lay beyond it.
They sought permission from the Emperor Valens to cross into his lands. They could offer little to the Romans in way of payment, being the refugees that they were, other than their own manpower to bolster the faltering ranks of the Empire's army. And yet this was an offer the Emperor simply could not refuse.
His army was incessantly engaged in the distant lands of Persia and was in dire need of a steady supply of recruits. Seeing the merits of settling the Goths inside the Empire, Valens granted their request and sent forth several Roman officers to help ferry these displaced peoples across the river.
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Chapter 3: Why did the Goths seek refuge in the Roman Empire?
As soon as news of the Emperor's ascent reached those occupying the Danube, they streamed across its waters. Onboard Roman naval ships, purpose-built wagon rafts and canoes carved out of the hollow trunks of Vulcan oak trees. Day and night they crossed, with some so desperate to escape the impending Hun raiders that they attempted to swim the rapids and drowned in the process.
The seeming resolution of this refugee crisis was said to have initially sparked great joy among the Romans, whilst we can imagine that for the Goths, the overriding feeling was relief. They had escaped their barbarian tormentors and were now seemingly protected by both the natural frontiers and military might of the Roman Empire. Yet very quickly things turned sour.
Over the next 35 years, these alleged refugees ran rampant throughout the imperial provinces, incensed by the reluctance of the Romans to grant them adequate lands. In 406 AD, Saint Jerome, a churchman stationed in the Levantine town of Bethlehem, lamented.
Since the Danube boundary was broken, war has been waged in the very midst of the Roman Empire.
By 408, the Gothic king Alaric had become so enraged by Roman indifference that he undertook to hold the city of Rome itself hostage. The apparatus of imperial power had long since deserted the empire's once mighty capital in favor of other cities such as Constantinople, Antioch, Trier, and Ravenna.
Yet Rome remained a potent symbol, and Alaric believed the threat of its capture would extract the concessions he desired from Rome's haughty elite. Over the course of two years and three grueling sieges, the fearsome Gothic warlord engaged in a tense back and forth with the emperor. But by late summer of 410, Alaric's patience had worn thin.
Infuriated by what he perceived to be Roman duplicity and unwillingness to commit to Alaric's demands, he ordered his warbands to sack the city. Rome's great public buildings were ransacked and burned, including the mausoleums of Augustus and Hadrian, resting places of emperors past. Even the tarnished bronze statues in the Roman Forum were not spared.
Hundreds of Roman citizens were captured and enslaved, including the emperor's sister Galla Placidia, while thousands more fled as refugees across the Mediterranean Sea to Africa, Egypt and Syria. News of the city's ruin rippled along the empire's trade routes and communication lines, leaving the Roman world reeling in shock and disbelief.
Saint Jerome, the churchman who in 406 rued the crisis the Goths had wrought, could hardly believe the number of refugees who arrived in Bethlehem by boat to take shelter from the barbarian storm.
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Chapter 4: What led to the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410?
And look how far we are now, we're doing this in person together. Let's delve straight into it. So the Roman Empire in the mid-fourth century, if we start at that point, first of all, what sort of Roman Empire should we be imagining?
You've got to imagine an extremely prosperous Roman Empire. That's, I think, the single most important point that people need to understand because it's the revolution in our understanding of the empire that has emerged over the last sort of 40 years. If you talk to any of my
Older colleagues now happily in their graves, but this would be the single most extraordinary thing that they wouldn't expect. Because of the archaeological evidence, we now know that the rural economy of the Roman Empire and its general population levels are at a maximum in the 4th century compared to any other point in the empire.
So that's, I think, it's not teetering on the point of collapse, in other words.
Because it survived the turbulence of the third century crisis and then is in this period where you have the rich archaeological record and also a rich literary record too. So as you say, it's not on collapse, it is thriving. Yes. I mean, it's a human society. It's not perfect, you know.
Historians are sometimes very weird. They think that if you detect any problem in any society, it's about to collapse. Well, you know, look around you. Human life is not perfect. There are some serious issues. For various reasons, they've had to divide political authority between two centers, one in the West and one in the East. And there is...
fairly constant tension and occasional conflict between those two centers. Occasional civil war is part of the deal by the late imperial period, but that looks systemic and sustainable, as it were.
There's nothing in that narrative which suggests that the thing is about to collapse. Simply put, as it splits between East and West at that point, is it clear that one of those powers is more powerful than the other, or is it quite balanced in the mid-fourth century?
In the mid-fourth century, it looks pretty balanced to me. Obviously, as the West starts to lose control of its territories, the East emerges very quickly as more powerful. But actually, if you look at
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Chapter 5: What role did the Battle of Adrianople play in Roman history?
So did you think, was there ever a chance that he was thinking, actually, these Goths, they're good soldiers. If I let one of the groups in, they could actually be auxiliaries for my army against Persia. It doesn't sound like he's thinking that way.
I don't think he's thinking that way. That's what the sources tell us he's thinking. But, you know, no emperor can ever say, well, sorry, we're stuffed. I have to let some of them in because I don't have enough troops in the Balkans. That is a not possible admission for a Roman emperor to make. You have always to be
in control of the situation against barbarians, because otherwise God is not with you and therefore you're not a legitimate emperor. What should have happened would be that you'd let half them in, break them up into small groups, settle them in separate parts of the Balkans, then draw on them for a smallish, reasonably sized number of recruits in dribs and drabs subsequently.
That's, I think, what he would like to do.
Does it feel then, do the Goths feel from the attitudes of the local Roman officials overseeing Valens' orders, that there is this mistrust there? There's a feeling that there's something not quite right, that maybe Valens is preparing to double-cross them. Do they get that feeling very early on, which is why tensions really do rise quickly?
I think they do, yes. One thing that occurs is that there are supply problems. Now, you could say trying to feed 100,000 people is very difficult anyway, but the Roman sources let it slip that Valens' officials had been busy moving all the food into defended cities, where the Goths can't get at it on their own account.
The Goths also know enough about Roman policy to know that letting them in in one Group is a real break with the past, and this may not be forever. So actually, the group that is admitted stays in contact with the group that's not admitted.
And it's pretty clear that Valens had also given contingent orders to his local commanders what to do if things start to look like they're getting a bit dodgy, and that the Goths, the group that have been admitted, are going to go into revolt.
because one standard trope you see in Roman frontier management in the fourth century is invite a slightly dangerous looking king to dinner and then eliminate them. And as tensions start to build up, the local Roman commander invites all the leaders of the admitted Goths to dinner and eliminates most of them. Fritigern comes out of this dinner party And this fascinates me.
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Chapter 6: How did Alaric and Stilicho influence the Western Roman Empire?
He's given quite a lot of concessions there.
Yes. I think it tells you that Alaric's perception is that the current malaise in the Western Empire is only going to be temporary. He could get far more than that in the short term, but that's not what he wants. He wants a long-term deal, and he thinks that that is the shape that a long-term deal might take.
And actually, he's not wrong because when his group is eventually settled in 416 to 418, when it finally does a deal, it's not Alaric anymore. He's dead by now. But the deal that's done is very similar to Alaric's minimum offer, not his maximum offer. So no generalship, no payments in gold that we know about, land well away from the Italian political heartland, i.e.
southwestern Gaul, and occasional military service.
It's an interesting point that you raise, how we of course are doing this with the benefit of hindsight. We know that 70 years after this, roughly 70 years... the Roman Empire in the West will fall. Oh, it will completely transform. But they don't think that. They think the Roman Empire will continue. So it's interesting to learn. Been there for 500 years. Well, exactly. That's the thing.
You wouldn't expect it to change. No, you wouldn't. Between now and Stuart England or Tudor England. But it does also beg the question, doesn't it? You highlighted how the political centers at that time in Italy, not Rome, it's Milan and Ravenna. So when Alaric does decide to sack Rome, I mean, how important an event is it?
Symbolically, is it devastating, but actually politically not that big a deal? I think that's exactly what it is, actually.
It's a huge symbolic moment. Rome is a cultural capital. There's a huge scholarly argument about whether emperors visited Rome on three or four occasions for a month in the first century, i.e. they never went there.
Yeah, a holiday place.
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