Santa Sabina As Such Things Go, Alaric's Sack of Rome in 410 Was
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Santa Sabina As such things go, Alaric’s Sack of Rome in 410 was professional, almost gentlemanly. The Visigoths were Christians, after all, albeit heretical ones. The basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul outside the Walls were named places of sanctuary, and their treasures left untouched. The barbarians even escorted a few holy women to safety. But it was still a sack – bands of Visigoths moved from building to building, plundering all moveable wealth. When they suspected a house’s inhabitants of concealing treasures, they tortured them until the secret was revealed or the hapless victims died. A number of eminent Romans, including the emperor’s sister, were taken captive. Many young women were raped or taken as concubines. And, despite Alaric’s orders to the contrary, fires broke out where the pillaging was most intense. The neighborhood around the Salarian Gate, where the Visigoths broke through, was put to the torch. Part of the Roman Forum was destroyed. And many of the lavish residences on the Aventine Hill, across the Circus Maximus from the imperial palace, burned to the ground. A few years later, a wealthy priest named Peter began to build a church over the rubble on the Aventine. This building, dedicated to Santa Sabina in 432, survives virtually intact, a unique witness to the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The story of Alaric’s Sack – and thus the story of Santa Sabina – begins three thousand miles east of Rome, in central Asia. Throughout premodern history, the vast arc of the steppe – the band of grassland that runs from Mongolia to Hungary – was populated by tribes of nomadic pastoralists. Sometime in the fourth century, one of these tribes, the Huns, began to migrate westward. No one knows where they came from or why they moved. Some scholars speculate that the Huns began as a splinter of the Xiongnu, a large tribal confederacy centered in modern Mongolia. Others suggest origins near the Aral Sea, in modern Kazakhstan. For our purposes, it matters only that the Huns were children of the steppe. Central Asia is a land of climatic extremes, where temperatures oscillate more than one hundred and fifty degrees between the baking summers and bitter winters. Survival in this landscape depended on hardiness and mobility. Tribes moved their herds frequently, following the swiftly-depleted short grass. Men lived in the saddle, sometimes riding for whole days at a time, sustained only by blood sucked from small cuts in their horses’ necks. They hunted with composite bows, constructs of laminated wood, horn, and sinew that could kill at three hundred yards. In 375, the Huns suddenly appeared in the steppes north of the Black Sea, modern Ukraine. There, they encountered the Goths, the Germanic people that had given Rome so much grief in the third century. Of late, despite periodic raids across the Danube, the Goths had maintained a relatively amicable relationship with Rome, particularly after they converted to Arian Christianity in the mid-fourth century. By the time the Huns appeared, the Goths had established several proto-kingdoms along the western and northern shores of the Black Sea. The Huns destroyed all of these kingdoms in a matter of months. The Goths had never encountered anything like these warriors from the other side of the world. At the beginning of a battle, the Huns circled the enemy lines on their small, tough horses, shooting volley after volley with their composite bows. Since their arrows punctured armor at 250 yards – well beyond the killing range of Gothic or Roman archers – they could wreak havoc with virtual impunity. Once the enemy lines had become disorganized, the Huns charged, using throwing spears and lassos to complete the rout. Powerless before the Hunnic onslaught, the Goths fled south by the tens of thousands toward the Roman border, where they petitioned for sanctuary within the Empire. To the imperial administration, this seemed like a godsend: the Goths were proven warriors; and if settled along the frontier, they might prove a useful bulwark against this new threat from the east. And so, in 376, around 100,000 Goths crossed the Danube into Roman territory. Trouble began almost immediately. The food supplies guaranteed by the imperial administration proved inadequate, and the officials charged with supervising the Goths demanded such exorbitant prices for grain that some parents were compelled to sell their children to Roman slave-traders. Finally, after months of maltreatment, the Goths rebelled and began to raid nearby cities. Two years of indecisive skirmishing followed. The Goths lacked the military technology to take walled cities; and the Romans lacked the manpower to effectively crush their raiding parties. Finally, in the summer of 378, the emperor Valens gathered a large army and set out to destroy the Goths. The ensuing battle, which took place outside the Thracian city of Adrianople, changed the course of Roman history. Valens mismanaged things from the beginning. On the morning of the battle, in sweltering August weather, he forced his troops to march for seven hours over broken terrain to reach the barbarian camp. On arriving, the Romans discovered that the Goths had arranged their heavy wagons into a crude but effective stockade on a low hill. Unbeknownst to the Romans, the Gothic cavalry was foraging far from the camp; and for the next several hours, the Gothic chieftain Frittigern sent a series of emissaries to delay the onset of battle until the cavalry could return. Valens, however, lost patience, and ordered his troops to attack the Gothic camp. The assault on the wagons was poorly organized, and failed. Worse, just as the Romans retreated in disorder to the bottom of the hill, the Gothic cavalry returned. Lancers tore into the Roman rear; and within a few minutes, the retreat became a rout. Thousands were ridden down as they tried to escape. Valens was trapped in a farmhouse and burned alive. When the dust settled, 20,000 Roman soldiers and most of the officer corps lay dead. The Roman military never recovered. Rome had, of course, suffered catastrophic defeats before; but several factors made the Battle of Adrianople uniquely devastating. The most immediate of these was the structure of the late Roman army. Diocletian and Constantine had gradually divided the troops into two unequal parts: the limitanei (or border guards) and the comitatenses (or campaign soldiers). The limitanei, permanently garrisoned along the frontiers, swiftly degenerated into ill- paid, ill-trained, and ineffective reserve forces. The comitatenses, on the other hand, were organized into field armies that, though relatively small, were highly mobile and consistently effective. The drawback of these elite troops was the fact that they were expensive to train and difficult to replace in large numbers. The 20,000 who died at Adrianople, though numerically a small part of the Roman army, represented a very large fraction of the available comitatenses, and a loss that the cash-strapped Empire of the late fourth century could never fully repair. In the chaos that followed the Battle of Adrianople, Theodosius, a Spaniard noted for his military ability, became emperor. Theodosius immediately set out to subdue the rampaging Goths. Lacking the time and resources to replace the lost comitatenses, he began to hire federates – bands of Germanic mercenaries who were brigaded with the legions but fought under their own leaders. Eventually, this would create a situation in which the state was dependent on a largely mercenary army it had difficulty controlling; but in the short term, the barbarians fought effectively, and the Goths were defeated. Theodosius allowed the Goths to remain in the Empire, settled them along the Danube, and began to recruit Gothic war bands into the army as federates. The Gothic chieftain Alaric first came to prominence as the leader of one of these federate bands. In 394, after he helped Theodosius win an important victory, an assembly of chieftains proclaimed Alaric king of the Visigoths, or West Goths. A short time later, when Theodosius died and was succeeded by his two very young and very incompetent sons, Arcadius and Honorius, Alaric began to seek employment in the regular army and a permanent place in the Empire for his Visigoths. But when he was ignored by the imperial bureaucracy, he led his troops on a series of raids through the Balkans. After a few years of pillaging, the imperial government decided it was easier to grant Alaric a military command than to hunt him down and kill him. They soon had cause to regret this decision, since Alaric almost immediately resumed raiding, this time in Italy. He now demanded that the imperial government make him supreme commander of the Roman military, and grant the Goths a large swath of territory in the Balkans. When these demands were refused, Alaric besieged Rome to force the government’s hand. Although the emperor no longer resided there – for some years, Honorius had governed from Ravenna in northeastern Italy – Rome remained the largest and most famous city in the Empire. So when Alaric massed his troops outside the Aurelian Walls, stormed the Salarian Gate, and – for the first time in 700 years – Rome fell to a foreign invader, the world was stunned. Merchants and refugees swiftly carried the news to every corner of the Empire. St. Jerome, then living in Bethlehem, famously wrote: “the whole world has perished in one city.” In Constantinople, the eastern emperor, Theodosius II, declared three days of mourning. And in the remote town of Hippo in North Africa, St. Augustine began to write his majestic City of God, intended to demonstrate the irrelevance of Rome’s decline for those who belonged to the eternal community of the church.