Alaric the Visigoth, King of All

On 24th August AD 410, Rome's starving inhabitants threw open the Salarian Gate, allowing the besieging Visigothic horde to flood in. Thus fell the Eternal City, for the first time in nearly eight hundred years.

Leading the Visigoths was a man named Alaric, or more accurately 'Ala-reiks', which in the Germanic Gothic language means 'King of All'.
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He and his people had spent nearly 4 decades wandering, chased, embattled, derided. His journey had taken him all the way through the Eastern Roman Empire and now into the Western Empire to strike right here at its ancient heart.

Yet he had grown up a stone's toss from the Roman world, had lived in peace with them for many years, had even served the empire faithfully for a time.

How had it all come to this?

​To answer that, we must understand Alaric.

The Visigoths plunder Rome, with Alaric looking on. Artwork by Joseph-Noël Sylvestre.

Origins

​Alaric was born around AD 370, on Peuce, a large, arrowhead-shaped island in the delta of the River Danube - the fault line between the Eastern Roman Empire and Gothic 'barbaricum' (modern Romania and beyond).

​The Goths of this era were a collection of tribes and tribal confederations, the largest of which were the Thervingi and the Greuthingi. So close to the empire, one can imagine his tribal elders holding court around the fires, telling the Gothic young of the might of the Romans, and of their great city of gold and marble one thousand miles distant: Rome - eternal, invincible.

The Roman Empire in the late 4th century AD. Note Peuce Island and, of course, the city of Rome.

For generations before Alaric's time, the Goths had what can best be described as an awkward relationship with the empire. They traded with the Romans, and sometimes they served alongside the legions as foederati (allies). But they also raided south of the Danube, and so too the legions waded north of the Danube to violently punish this Gothic aggression.

Despite all this, their world was stable. Then everything changed in the mid-370s with the arrival from the eastern steppelands of a ravening nomadic people. When the Huns came, Alaric's world was shattered.

The Huns were unstoppable.

Eastern Roman Emperor Valens (bust from the Capitoline Museum, Rome).

The Gothic warriors could not cope with the Huns' unorthodox and deadly way of horse combat. Arrow showers and rapid, false retreats was a skill no European people could counter. One by one, the Gothic and other Germanic tribes were destroyed or subjugated by the Huns. Desperate, the Greuthingi and Thervingi amassed at the Danube's northern banks opposite the Roman river frontier fortress town of Durostorum (modern Silistra, Bulgaria) and begged the Roman officials there to permit them to cross, to escape the fury of the Huns. Alaric would have been with them - a boy, confused and frightened by the sight of his elders gripped by terror like this.

The emperor of the time - Valens - realised he had no option. If he said no, the Goths would likely break across the river anyway - with the Huns at their backs and in fear for their lives. So he allowed them entry, thinking he might perhaps recruit their many warriors into his depleted legions.

​Vast refugee camps were thrown up on the imperial side of the river. But the Roman officers who presided over them were greedy, and began profiteering when food supplies ran short. A certain Count Lupicinus began selling the starving Goths dog meat in return for their children, whom he then sold into slavery for personal profit. Whatever kind of impression Alaric had of the Roman Empire prior to this, it was surely blackened almost irredeemably by Lupicinus' actions.

Understandably, the Goths rose up in revolt. A revolt borne of anger, of insult. They rampaged around Thrace, breaking and pillaging imperial cities. They also dealt the empire probably its greatest defeat in centuries at the Battle of Adrianople, where they crushed the legions and killed Emperor Valens himself.

This 'Gothic War' gripped all of Thrace for six years. No Roman or Goth ever felt safe during these times. The war finally ended in AD 382 when both sides, exhausted, and realising that this was an unwinnable conflict, agreed a peace treaty. The new emperor, Theodosius I, granted the Goths a series of arable settlements on Roman land (around northern Thrace), known as the 'Haims'. A tense co-existence followed.

Many Goths were recruited into the legions and the ambitious amongst them forged careers in the emperor's service, some even rising to serve in his sacred council. 

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The 'Missorium' of Emperor Theodosius I. The guards and advisors either side of the throne wear their hair in a distinctive style that suggests they were Goths.

Alaric grew in repute amongst his fellow Goths.

After only a few years, the peace deal began to fray. The treaty had never 'fixed' the Goths' anti-Roman sentiment, and Alaric himself had never been able to reconcile the things he had witnessed and experienced in his youth or seen since. He, like many like-minded Goths, felt angered that his people's sovereignty had been sold by those who had agreed the 382 deal - a deal he had had no say in personally. Around this time - reaching his late teens - he cemented a position of prominence amongst the Goths, and became the figurehead for his people's underground disquiet.

Come AD 388, the warriors of the Gothic Haims were mustered for the coming war between the Eastern Empire and the usurper who had seized the Western throne, Magnus Maximus. While encamped one night during the westwards march with the Eastern legions, Alaric led a desertion of a significant portion of the Gothic allies. They melted into the woods and marshes. The campaign Alaric then waged against the empire was much more shrewd than the Gothic War of 376-382. It was a guerrilla campaign, targeted at the empire's weaknesses.

For three years, he proved a deadly thorn in Emperor Theodosius I's side, hiding in Thracia's vast expanse of hills and woods, gathering in more and more followers - men of the Bastarnae tribe, Hun mercenaries, even Romans who were disaffected by the emperor's spiraling and violent pro-Nicene Christian zeal.

The Roman poet Claudian wrote disparagingly of Alaric as "a little-known menace", but he and his force dealt the empire some serious blows, including blockading and almost capturing Emperor Theodosius at the Hebrus River during his journey home from the Western Empire in the spring of AD 391.

The Roman Diocese of Thrace, circa AD 391. Note that a few Gothic 'Haims' remained loyal to the imperial throne, but many had gone over to Alaric's rebellion.

Stilicho, the up and coming Roman general of the time.

Finally in AD 391, Stilicho - an Eastern general of the highest repute - cornered Alaric and his forces on the baking hot plains of Thrace. The soldiers braced for battle, but there was one last chance: talks, terms, a way to end the day without blood being spilled.

Stilicho stepped forward from his legionary lines. Alaric strode from the Gothic front to meet him. A cloud of emissaries and diplomats followed both. Details of the parley that took place are sketchy. We know only that Roman political rivals present served to almost spurn this chance of agreeing terms. But terms were agreed.

Alaric agreed to stand his rebel army down. He also conceded to make his forces available to the emperor, to fight alongside the legions whenever they were needed. In return, he demanded that his wandering nation - a nation that would come to be known as the Visigoths* - should be exempt from all other imperial tethers, including taxes. And that the Romans recognise him as their leader - leader of all those Goths and others who had flocked to support his cause.

​The King of All had arrived in earnest.

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A note on the term 'Visigoth'

The Visigoths of Alaric's time never actually called themselves 'Visigoths'. This was a post-hoc term used by Cassiodorus, writing in the 6th century. He used it to distinguish the descendants of Alaric from the other major Gothic grouping of his time, the Ostrogoths.

One theory is that the Ostrogoths mean the 'Eastern Goths' and the Visigoths meant the 'Western Goths'.

​It should be noted, however, that there was a smaller Gothic tribe from Alaric's time known as the Vesi - a word which translates roughly as 'Worthy'. This may be the etymological explanation for the term Visigoth.

And his Visigothic army was called upon soon, for the Eastern and Western Empires were at loggerheads once more, thanks to a disputed succession in the West. A second civil war was brewing. This time, Alaric stayed true to the terms he had personally agreed in the 391 treaty. He and his Visigothic army fought like lions in the climactic and ruinous Battle of the Frigidus River in AD 394 - a clash that ended in the favour of the Eastern Empire and settled the civil war. This should, one would think, have calcified the bond between the Romans and the Visigoths? Alas, no.

The aftermath changed the Roman world forever. Emperor Theodosius died of dropsy, leaving a realm of broken legions, a bankrupt economy, and his two idiot sons on the thrones of East and West. Power, as they say, abhors a vacuum. So it was that the ambitious men of the empire began wrestling to control the boy emperors. Some sought to use Alaric and his Visigoths in their political games, and this quickly destroyed the bonds that had been forged in the civil war campaign.

Alaric was made promises of a position of authority in the imperial military - promises that were reneged upon. Also, the Visigothic people themselves began to reflect on what had happened at the River Frigidus: some ten thousand of them had been slain. Spiteful gossip arose: that they had been used as expendable spear fodder in the front lines of that conflict. The accord of 391 dissolved, and the Visigoths became hostile to the empire once more.

For the next decade and a half, Alaric and his wandering nation roved across the Roman Empire from West to East and back again, raiding and plundering, taking on new followers, and making battle with the legions - most often with his old nemesis, Stilicho.

​In time, Stilicho came to respect Alaric, and understood that the Visigoths were simply too powerful to destroy or subjugate. He worked hard to educate the Western Emperor, Honorius, and the Roman Senate on this reality. Eventually, they realised he was right, and so they loathingly accepted the Visigoths' presence in Gaul. They even accepted high-ranking Visigothic families into their Italian cities and into their halls of government.

The Battle of the Frigidus, 5th & 6th September AD 394.

When, in AD 408, a coup was launched upon Stilicho by a political rival, these Visigothic families were seen as Stilicho's allies. Stilicho was beheaded, and the Gothic families were massacred. Enraged once again by the empire's bloody duplicity, Alaric marched upon Italy, surrounding Emperor Honorius' capital of Ravenna. Promised vast sums of gold and silver in tribute, along with some 40,000 freed Gothic slaves, and offered the high command of the Roman army, he withdrew. When these terms were then reneged upon, Alaric knew he had to make the biggest statement of all, and so he marched on Rome herself - the city of legend that his elders had once talked of around the Peuce Island campfires.

The so-called 'sack' of Rome was not the frenzy of flames and looting that one might imagine. Despite all Alaric had suffered at the empire's hands, he understood - just as Stilicho had - that his people and the Romans had to find a way to live together. Damage to the city was limited to senate house (which was burnt down) and the Salarian Gate. Pillage was limited to easily movable objects. More, the Visigoths respected Rome's Christian temples as places of sanctuary.

The 'Alaric Bridge' over the River Busento, Italy.

This was to the final major act of Alaric's incredible life. Following the sack of Rome, he became suddenly ill and died.
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Legend has it that his loyal warriors diverted the River Bucentius (the modern Busento, Italy), and buried him in the exposed riverbed, before returning the waters to their normal flow, so that nobody would ever be able to desecrate his remains.
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Read all about Alaric's incredible rise to power, in my new novel: LEGIONARY: DEVOTIO

​Gordon Doherty is the author of the Legionary series, available at all good online stores!

The tenth & final volume 'DEVOTIO' is a story of heroism, adventure and great personal sacrifice set in the Late Roman Empire.

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