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Barbarians Within the Gates of Rome: A Study of Roman Military Policy and the Barbarians, ca.375-425 A.D.
"Excellent." --The Reader's Review
"Thomas Burns takes us thoroughly through this moment of crisis, giving us a precise analysis of the principal players in this period of transition." --Military Illustrated
"The book is well-written and throws new light on the events in the West a short while before the Fall of the Empire. Highly recommended " --The Journal of Indo-European Studies
"With this impressive study Burns has greatly enriched late antique scholarship." --Religious Studies Review
"This is a substantial and well documented book which has reminded me that the importance of reading is not so much to absorb facts, but to take in new ideas." --Besprechungen und Anzeigen
"What Burns has accomplished here is a thoroughly interesting and compelling study of late-medieval piety in one diocese. It may well serve as a model for other local historians willing to engage in this important inquiry." --Speculum
A major work on Roman policy toward the barbarians during one of the most exciting and challenging periods in the history of the Roman Empire, when barbarian soldiers became part of the forces defending the Roman frontier and gradually its rulers. By the close of these five decades, the Western Empire--hence Western Civilization--had changed forever.
"Thomas Burns takes us thoroughly through this moment of crisis, giving us a precise analysis of the principal players in this period of transition." --Military Illustrated
"The book is well-written and throws new light on the events in the West a short while before the Fall of the Empire. Highly recommended " --The Journal of Indo-European Studies
"With this impressive study Burns has greatly enriched late antique scholarship." --Religious Studies Review
"This is a substantial and well documented book which has reminded me that the importance of reading is not so much to absorb facts, but to take in new ideas." --Besprechungen und Anzeigen
"What Burns has accomplished here is a thoroughly interesting and compelling study of late-medieval piety in one diocese. It may well serve as a model for other local historians willing to engage in this important inquiry." --Speculum
A major work on Roman policy toward the barbarians during one of the most exciting and challenging periods in the history of the Roman Empire, when barbarian soldiers became part of the forces defending the Roman frontier and gradually its rulers. By the close of these five decades, the Western Empire--hence Western Civilization--had changed forever.
448 pages, Hardcover
First published March 17, 1995
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April 19, 2022
After reading Burns' Rome and the Barbarians, I put Barbarians Within the Gates of Rome at the top of my to-read pile. Burns has one foot in archeology and the other in history, so he can provide a very unique and insightful perspective on the general geopolitical situation that defined the Rhine and Danube frontiers of the late Roman Empire. The premise of this book is exciting because the period between 375–425 A.D. is relatively undocumented and can be contentious. Having someone like Burns provide an in-depth history of those 50 years is very promising, given his reputation. This is especially so because he is directly involved with archeological efforts in southern Germany and Hungary, and so more intimately familiar with that era's society — what they wore, where they lived, how they died, et cetera.
To better anchor my reflection of Barbarians Within the Gate of Rome, I followed this book up with The Late Roman Army, by Patricia Southern and Karen Dixon. The latter is more of a reference book, but it's quite good and it covers many of the same themes that Burns does in his book. Because it borrows more from other historians, The Late Roman Army is a baseline to judge how far, and how convincingly, Burns departs from it.
Burns first discusses the nature of the border provinces and how they were defended. This part is innocuous enough. During or at some point around the Crisis of the Third Century, the border provinces begin to depopulate. Why this happens is a bigger question. Is it because of the deteriorating security situation along the frontier during and after the 2nd century? Or, is it because the Romans are no longer staging large armies designed to conquer and occupy additional territory, and therefore as the size of the army in any one place decreases the number of civilians who can live off military supply chains also decreases? The size of Roman fortifications along the Rhine and Danube certainly shrink and become more defensive, meaning more likely to occupy what is tactically advantageous ground and less likely to follow the classic square fort of the Republic and early Imperial armies.
These border security armies are also increasingly recruited strictly from the local population, families often being obliged to provide new recruits each generation. At a growing rate, these border families are German tribesmen who are allowed to settle on the Roman side of the frontier in exchange for their labor as farmers and their service as soldiers. How these "barbarians" came to be settled could depend, but generally they could either come as allies (laeti) or as pardoned enemies (dediticii). This was a common practice and had been done in more limited fashion by emperors as early as Augustus. It became more widespread during the 4th Century A.D. as the Roman Empire adopts a defense-in-depth strategy that turns the border provinces into a defensive line to trap and defeat foreign warbands before they can reach the Mediterranean communities.
In conjunction with these defensive-oriented border armies, there are large field armies on which relatively little is known: where they were based, how often they moved, how they were supplied, et cetera. The status of the field armies is important because it was common for border units to be stripped of their manpower to replenish the ranks of the field armies, which suffered losses just as, or more, commonly from civil war than from battles with foreign enemies. Furthermore, if a foreign invasion was large enough to spill out from the border provinces immediately affected by the intrusion, a field army could be brought over to defeat this enemy force.
Much of the logistics behind the border force, and perhaps to one degree or another the field armies, was "hardcoded" by the Diocletianic and Constantinian reforms which organized multiple provinces into distinct military-economic zones. The military-industrial complex is increasingly centralized, with state factories taking over the production of much of the army's equipment. Taxes are often paid in the shape of foodstuffs and other outputs that go to supplying these outposts, fortifications, and field armies. The organization of these supply lines is formalized, with fortified supply depots sitting along roads to the frontiers. These walled, defended depots could be used to feed border defenses and field armies, while depriving the same supplies from marauding enemies.
It seems to me that the reorganization of the empire along lines that sought to centralize and better control economic output has important implications for the incentives facing the people who administer them, but I will return to that later.
After taking us on a tour of the archeology and history of the late Roman Empire's border provinces, introducing us to the border policies of emperors from Constantine I to Valentinian I, we enter the period which defines the book's main focus. In 378, Valens and his army suffered a crushing defeat at Adrianople, leading to the destruction of the eastern field army. Valens was by no means a poor military commander and had plenty of reason to feel confident, as he had spent the previous 20 years successfully campaigning against the Goths and other Germanic tribes, often on the opposite side of the Danube. In fact, Valens and his brother Valentinian I were the last Roman emperors to lead armies across the ancient riverine frontiers.
How the disaster at Adrianople came about is the subject of much debate and research. What seems like the commonly accepted facts are that the arrival of the Huns in Eastern Europe had pushed the Goths to migrate into Roman empire in larger numbers than the Romans were accustomed to. The Romans have a hard time regulating their passage into the Balkans, and so Gothic refugees slip in with weapons and other means to commit war. They are peaceful at first, and at the mercy of Roman commanders tasked with feeding and looking after them until their settlement elsewhere in the empire could be successfully processed. This processing period is more difficult than usual because of their size, and either food runs out or the Roman commanders abuse their power by restricting the amount of food going to these refugees. Some Goths sell their wives and daughters to the Romans in exchange for something to eat. It's only a matter of time before conditions lead to a revolt.
The Thracian border provinces do their job of containing this enemy force well, writes Burns. Valens arrives with the eastern field army. He is meant to wait for Gratian, emperor in the west, who is coming with a field army of his own. Combined, they can defeat this Gothic threat easily. Valens, perhaps seeking to solidify his position as older and therefore senior Augustus, decides to engage the Goths on his own. His army is destroyed and Valens loses his life. The victorious Goths spread out to plunder the countryside. Even so, the border defenses do as they're designed and contain him in the northern Balkans. Several mountain passages are closed to avoid spillover into neighboring provinces, and disparate raiding bands are isolated and progressively engaged and eliminated by the newly ascended Theodosius I. Within a few years, a treaty is concluded and surviving Goths are settled along the Danubian frontier in Thrace — much like other defeated barbarians had in the past, as dediticii.
Adrianople is often treated as the beginning of the end, but Burns argues that the defeat did not lead to a bigger catastrophe and that the threat produced by the battle had been mostly neutralized by the Roman defensive system. The story of the Roman Empire during the next 30–40 years is not one of an empire buckling under the weight of foreign invasion, but rather a history of civil war.
As soon as Theodosius concludes his treaty with the Goths, Magnus Maximus brings his British army to the European continent and begins a civil war against Gratian and his Caesar, Valentinian II. Much of Gratian's army defects and the Augustus is executed. Valentinian II flees to Theodosius, who marches west and manages to put a temporary bandage on the problem by making the two of them co-emperor. Still, in the following years, Theodosius is forced to deal with the problem permanently and defeats Maximum at the Battle of Save. Only 4 years later, Valentinian II dies and Eugenius attempts to usurp power in the west. He is finally defeated by Theodosius at the Frigidus, in 394. The Battle of the Frigidus is particularly significant because both armies suffered heavy casualties, and effectively the remnants of the eastern field army and much of the western field army are destroyed. Furthermore, many highly skilled Roman commanders, like Arbogast and Bacurius, die.
After, and aside from, Adrianople, these civil wars are by far the most intense in terms of combat. Barbarian migrations into Roman land continue, but there is no crisis. While Magnus Maximus was cementing his rule in the west and Theodosius maneuvered against him, another Gothic party that crossed the Danube in 386 was defeated by the Roman commander Promotus. Also noteworthy is that at this time Theodosius not only has to contend with a usurper in the west, but was fighting a war against the Persians over Armenia. He concluded the latter, the next year, with a peace treaty that actually proves to be quite enduring, effectively lasting more than 100 years. Anyway, in 388 the Franks invaded Gaul and were defeated in 389 by Arbogastes. Around ten years later, Eutropius led troops against Hunnish raiders and was successful enough against them to be made consul the following year, the first eunuch to achieve that distinction. In other words, despite the fact that successive large-scale civil wars are being fought, the frontiers appear to hold up well.
A year after his Pyrrhic victory at the Frigidus, Theodosius I dies. He leaves two underage sons as co-rulers, Honorius in the west and Arcadius in the east. This is where Burns' narrative starts to get spicy. Before I go into that, it's worthwhile to consider the overall picture. The Roman field armies are extremely depleted. Much of its leadership is dead. Who's left now maneuver against each other. In the west, the general Stilicho extends influence over Honorius. Rufinus does the same with Arcadius in the east. The civil war is now between them and the fight is over resources in the Balkans, where the border between the two halves of the empire are not well defined and contentious.
We return to the Goths. Specifically, we turn to Alaric. At this time, Alaric is the leader of a group of Goths still pillaging Thrace. They were apparently not part of the group who had made peace with Theodosius, and he may have been the leader of the group who ambushed Theodosius in Macedonia in 391. Either way, Alaric joined the Roman Army under Theodosius' command before the Frigidus, as Alaric fought there. Alaric returns to the Balkans. Some believe that Alaric's presence in the Balkans was not peaceful and that he pillaged and sacked to supply his army. Burns disagrees.
In his Roman Corinth, Donald Engels suggests that the archeological data shows irrevocable, widespread damage to buildings dating to the 390s and he associates it with Alaric's sack of the city in 395. Burns does not discuss the archeological evidence, but argues that Alaric was in the Balkans under orders of Rufinus, caretaker of the young Arcadius. What he means by this is that Alaric was considered an exponent of Roman authority, was considered to be part of the Roman Army, and had access to the various industrial centers and supply depots organized for border defense duties. He suggests Rufinus had no choice but to do this since with the destruction of both Roman field armies at the Frigidus there was no other army with which to defend Greece from Stilicho. Anyway, an army with legal access to Roman supplies does not need to pillage and sack. How then do we explain the archeological evidence? This is left unanswered.
What I think is the implication that Burns is really driving at, and which I think is more agreeable, is that the events to come involving Alaric — the invasion of Italy and the sack of Rome in 410 — must not be interpreted as a barbarian invasion. Alaric was a Goth, but he was a generation of leadership after Adrianople and legally formed part of the Roman Army at various points in his career. Alaric was not a usurper or contender of imperial power, but he was seeking a legitimate imperial title. Peter Heather makes a similar case in The Fall of the Roman Empire. Having a legitimate title mattered because it gave you access to Roman supply nodes, which Alaric could use to feed and pay his men. Outside of quibbles over the character of Alaric's stay in the Balkans, Burns' point is convincing. The most important strategic events post-Adrianople revolved around domestic politics, not foreign invasion. In fact, until 405, foreign invasions are almost irrelevant.
To go one step further, Burns contention then is that the eventual collapse of the frontiers was not caused by the direct defeat of these frontier forces. Rather, the frontier forces were depleted and distracted by the much more important civil conflicts. Theodosius, Stilicho, and Alaric alike recruited from the frontier garrisons. It is likely that Theodosius settled the Goths in northern Thrace to replace frontier soldiers he conscripted into the field armies he led against Magnus Maximum and Eugenius. It was the stripping of Noricum's and Raetia's defensive garrisons of their manpower that probably allowed Radagaisus to invade and cross the Alps into Italy in 405. Even so, Radagaisus was defeated and decapitated by Stilicho the very next year, his army absorbed into the western field army — not very successful, all things considered.
It is only in 406/407, when the Vandals, Suebi, and Alans crossed the Rhine, that the Germans found more than initial success. But that coincided with the usurpation attempt by Constantine III, who like Magnus Maximum brought the Roman army in Britain over to the continent. Constantine III fought and defeated the Vandals along the Rhine. It was only when Constantine made his move on Italy that this invading army was able to slip through Gaul and into Spain. It was domestic politics that drove Rome's fate, not the barbarians.
Here, to close a long review, I come back to Burns' survey of the frontier's organization. Remember that provinces are organized into dioceses, which in many ways are self-sustaining. These dioceses are responsible for supplying the border defenses. Within these dioceses are well-organized stockpiles of resources and sources of revenue.
Burns points out that after the Battle of the Frigidus the established, experienced leadership of the Roman Army quickly depleted. Bacurius and Arbogast died at the battle. Rhicomeres died on the way there. Timasius was purged after the death of Theodosius I. Gainas, another important commander who would go on to kill Rufinus in the east, was himself killed around 400. Stilicho and Alaric were survivors with armies to back them, with few competitors. Stilicho died in 408 and Alaric in 411. These commanders needed replacing and the armies need reconstituting.
One aspect of Alaric and his army that Burns abstracts a bit from is its status as a private army under Alaric's command. In a traditional Roman army, including during the Late Roman Empire of Valentinian and Valens, it was customary for individual units within garrisons or field armies to be moved around the frontiers. Although we have historical evidence, like Ammianus Marcellinus' account of when Julian's men in Gaul revolted and raised him to the purple out of a refusal to be moved east to fight against the Persians under Constantius II, that Roman armies were becoming more "local," the archeology shows that these redeployments were actually still quite common up the late 4th century. No one could have conceived of removing a part of Alaric's army and sending it elsewhere. They were Alaric's men, loyal to him, and loyal only to Rome because Alaric found it more profitable to operate within the rules of the game.
In a letter to a local Romano-Gallic aristocrat named Euodius, Sidonius Apollinaris writes a poem at Euodius' request. This poem is meant as an epitaph to a silver basin, which Euodius is presenting to Queen Ragnahilda, wife of the Visigothic King Euric. He notes that the basin will be more valued by the Visigoths than the poem. Euodius is presenting the queen with the gift in an attempt to gain their favor to support his local interests. This letter was written after the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476. It was written in a world of fractured, widely distributed power. It is an extreme away from the monopolization of force that had been achieved by the Romans in Gaul for more than 400 years. This was not the Roman Gaul of 400, but the period between ~410 and 470 was definitely one of transition. More to my point, the distribution of power was becoming for diverse and the market for force more competitive.
It's interesting that the fracturing of the Western Roman Empire happens almost along diocesan lines. Italy and the Alps remain the core of the western empire throughout its decline, and later become the Kingdom of the Ostrogoths. Britain becomes effectively legally independent by 409. As Burns writes, the Goths who sacked Rome are eventually settled in southwestern Gaul and are given legal access to the empire's centralized and organized military resources of the southern Gallic diocese. The pattern is repeated elsewhere. It seems that as the central government lost its monopoly on force, local elites began to carve out their stake in the revenue- and supply-generation game. What seems special about Alaric was that he was one of the first leaders with a private army to accomplish this.
Burns argues that the fast loss of leadership between 390–410 made leadership cadres scarcer, giving them more leverage in the bargaining process with the emperor. Furthermore, leaders had an incentive to capture part of the supply network. Power continued to grow diffuse until, eventually, central authority was irrelevant. The barbarians did not grow strong and defeat Rome. Rather, Rome grew irrelevant and it was the vacuum left behind that allowed for the rise of the Germanic kingdoms.
To better anchor my reflection of Barbarians Within the Gate of Rome, I followed this book up with The Late Roman Army, by Patricia Southern and Karen Dixon. The latter is more of a reference book, but it's quite good and it covers many of the same themes that Burns does in his book. Because it borrows more from other historians, The Late Roman Army is a baseline to judge how far, and how convincingly, Burns departs from it.
Burns first discusses the nature of the border provinces and how they were defended. This part is innocuous enough. During or at some point around the Crisis of the Third Century, the border provinces begin to depopulate. Why this happens is a bigger question. Is it because of the deteriorating security situation along the frontier during and after the 2nd century? Or, is it because the Romans are no longer staging large armies designed to conquer and occupy additional territory, and therefore as the size of the army in any one place decreases the number of civilians who can live off military supply chains also decreases? The size of Roman fortifications along the Rhine and Danube certainly shrink and become more defensive, meaning more likely to occupy what is tactically advantageous ground and less likely to follow the classic square fort of the Republic and early Imperial armies.
These border security armies are also increasingly recruited strictly from the local population, families often being obliged to provide new recruits each generation. At a growing rate, these border families are German tribesmen who are allowed to settle on the Roman side of the frontier in exchange for their labor as farmers and their service as soldiers. How these "barbarians" came to be settled could depend, but generally they could either come as allies (laeti) or as pardoned enemies (dediticii). This was a common practice and had been done in more limited fashion by emperors as early as Augustus. It became more widespread during the 4th Century A.D. as the Roman Empire adopts a defense-in-depth strategy that turns the border provinces into a defensive line to trap and defeat foreign warbands before they can reach the Mediterranean communities.
In conjunction with these defensive-oriented border armies, there are large field armies on which relatively little is known: where they were based, how often they moved, how they were supplied, et cetera. The status of the field armies is important because it was common for border units to be stripped of their manpower to replenish the ranks of the field armies, which suffered losses just as, or more, commonly from civil war than from battles with foreign enemies. Furthermore, if a foreign invasion was large enough to spill out from the border provinces immediately affected by the intrusion, a field army could be brought over to defeat this enemy force.
Much of the logistics behind the border force, and perhaps to one degree or another the field armies, was "hardcoded" by the Diocletianic and Constantinian reforms which organized multiple provinces into distinct military-economic zones. The military-industrial complex is increasingly centralized, with state factories taking over the production of much of the army's equipment. Taxes are often paid in the shape of foodstuffs and other outputs that go to supplying these outposts, fortifications, and field armies. The organization of these supply lines is formalized, with fortified supply depots sitting along roads to the frontiers. These walled, defended depots could be used to feed border defenses and field armies, while depriving the same supplies from marauding enemies.
It seems to me that the reorganization of the empire along lines that sought to centralize and better control economic output has important implications for the incentives facing the people who administer them, but I will return to that later.
After taking us on a tour of the archeology and history of the late Roman Empire's border provinces, introducing us to the border policies of emperors from Constantine I to Valentinian I, we enter the period which defines the book's main focus. In 378, Valens and his army suffered a crushing defeat at Adrianople, leading to the destruction of the eastern field army. Valens was by no means a poor military commander and had plenty of reason to feel confident, as he had spent the previous 20 years successfully campaigning against the Goths and other Germanic tribes, often on the opposite side of the Danube. In fact, Valens and his brother Valentinian I were the last Roman emperors to lead armies across the ancient riverine frontiers.
How the disaster at Adrianople came about is the subject of much debate and research. What seems like the commonly accepted facts are that the arrival of the Huns in Eastern Europe had pushed the Goths to migrate into Roman empire in larger numbers than the Romans were accustomed to. The Romans have a hard time regulating their passage into the Balkans, and so Gothic refugees slip in with weapons and other means to commit war. They are peaceful at first, and at the mercy of Roman commanders tasked with feeding and looking after them until their settlement elsewhere in the empire could be successfully processed. This processing period is more difficult than usual because of their size, and either food runs out or the Roman commanders abuse their power by restricting the amount of food going to these refugees. Some Goths sell their wives and daughters to the Romans in exchange for something to eat. It's only a matter of time before conditions lead to a revolt.
The Thracian border provinces do their job of containing this enemy force well, writes Burns. Valens arrives with the eastern field army. He is meant to wait for Gratian, emperor in the west, who is coming with a field army of his own. Combined, they can defeat this Gothic threat easily. Valens, perhaps seeking to solidify his position as older and therefore senior Augustus, decides to engage the Goths on his own. His army is destroyed and Valens loses his life. The victorious Goths spread out to plunder the countryside. Even so, the border defenses do as they're designed and contain him in the northern Balkans. Several mountain passages are closed to avoid spillover into neighboring provinces, and disparate raiding bands are isolated and progressively engaged and eliminated by the newly ascended Theodosius I. Within a few years, a treaty is concluded and surviving Goths are settled along the Danubian frontier in Thrace — much like other defeated barbarians had in the past, as dediticii.
Adrianople is often treated as the beginning of the end, but Burns argues that the defeat did not lead to a bigger catastrophe and that the threat produced by the battle had been mostly neutralized by the Roman defensive system. The story of the Roman Empire during the next 30–40 years is not one of an empire buckling under the weight of foreign invasion, but rather a history of civil war.
As soon as Theodosius concludes his treaty with the Goths, Magnus Maximus brings his British army to the European continent and begins a civil war against Gratian and his Caesar, Valentinian II. Much of Gratian's army defects and the Augustus is executed. Valentinian II flees to Theodosius, who marches west and manages to put a temporary bandage on the problem by making the two of them co-emperor. Still, in the following years, Theodosius is forced to deal with the problem permanently and defeats Maximum at the Battle of Save. Only 4 years later, Valentinian II dies and Eugenius attempts to usurp power in the west. He is finally defeated by Theodosius at the Frigidus, in 394. The Battle of the Frigidus is particularly significant because both armies suffered heavy casualties, and effectively the remnants of the eastern field army and much of the western field army are destroyed. Furthermore, many highly skilled Roman commanders, like Arbogast and Bacurius, die.
After, and aside from, Adrianople, these civil wars are by far the most intense in terms of combat. Barbarian migrations into Roman land continue, but there is no crisis. While Magnus Maximus was cementing his rule in the west and Theodosius maneuvered against him, another Gothic party that crossed the Danube in 386 was defeated by the Roman commander Promotus. Also noteworthy is that at this time Theodosius not only has to contend with a usurper in the west, but was fighting a war against the Persians over Armenia. He concluded the latter, the next year, with a peace treaty that actually proves to be quite enduring, effectively lasting more than 100 years. Anyway, in 388 the Franks invaded Gaul and were defeated in 389 by Arbogastes. Around ten years later, Eutropius led troops against Hunnish raiders and was successful enough against them to be made consul the following year, the first eunuch to achieve that distinction. In other words, despite the fact that successive large-scale civil wars are being fought, the frontiers appear to hold up well.
A year after his Pyrrhic victory at the Frigidus, Theodosius I dies. He leaves two underage sons as co-rulers, Honorius in the west and Arcadius in the east. This is where Burns' narrative starts to get spicy. Before I go into that, it's worthwhile to consider the overall picture. The Roman field armies are extremely depleted. Much of its leadership is dead. Who's left now maneuver against each other. In the west, the general Stilicho extends influence over Honorius. Rufinus does the same with Arcadius in the east. The civil war is now between them and the fight is over resources in the Balkans, where the border between the two halves of the empire are not well defined and contentious.
We return to the Goths. Specifically, we turn to Alaric. At this time, Alaric is the leader of a group of Goths still pillaging Thrace. They were apparently not part of the group who had made peace with Theodosius, and he may have been the leader of the group who ambushed Theodosius in Macedonia in 391. Either way, Alaric joined the Roman Army under Theodosius' command before the Frigidus, as Alaric fought there. Alaric returns to the Balkans. Some believe that Alaric's presence in the Balkans was not peaceful and that he pillaged and sacked to supply his army. Burns disagrees.
In his Roman Corinth, Donald Engels suggests that the archeological data shows irrevocable, widespread damage to buildings dating to the 390s and he associates it with Alaric's sack of the city in 395. Burns does not discuss the archeological evidence, but argues that Alaric was in the Balkans under orders of Rufinus, caretaker of the young Arcadius. What he means by this is that Alaric was considered an exponent of Roman authority, was considered to be part of the Roman Army, and had access to the various industrial centers and supply depots organized for border defense duties. He suggests Rufinus had no choice but to do this since with the destruction of both Roman field armies at the Frigidus there was no other army with which to defend Greece from Stilicho. Anyway, an army with legal access to Roman supplies does not need to pillage and sack. How then do we explain the archeological evidence? This is left unanswered.
What I think is the implication that Burns is really driving at, and which I think is more agreeable, is that the events to come involving Alaric — the invasion of Italy and the sack of Rome in 410 — must not be interpreted as a barbarian invasion. Alaric was a Goth, but he was a generation of leadership after Adrianople and legally formed part of the Roman Army at various points in his career. Alaric was not a usurper or contender of imperial power, but he was seeking a legitimate imperial title. Peter Heather makes a similar case in The Fall of the Roman Empire. Having a legitimate title mattered because it gave you access to Roman supply nodes, which Alaric could use to feed and pay his men. Outside of quibbles over the character of Alaric's stay in the Balkans, Burns' point is convincing. The most important strategic events post-Adrianople revolved around domestic politics, not foreign invasion. In fact, until 405, foreign invasions are almost irrelevant.
To go one step further, Burns contention then is that the eventual collapse of the frontiers was not caused by the direct defeat of these frontier forces. Rather, the frontier forces were depleted and distracted by the much more important civil conflicts. Theodosius, Stilicho, and Alaric alike recruited from the frontier garrisons. It is likely that Theodosius settled the Goths in northern Thrace to replace frontier soldiers he conscripted into the field armies he led against Magnus Maximum and Eugenius. It was the stripping of Noricum's and Raetia's defensive garrisons of their manpower that probably allowed Radagaisus to invade and cross the Alps into Italy in 405. Even so, Radagaisus was defeated and decapitated by Stilicho the very next year, his army absorbed into the western field army — not very successful, all things considered.
It is only in 406/407, when the Vandals, Suebi, and Alans crossed the Rhine, that the Germans found more than initial success. But that coincided with the usurpation attempt by Constantine III, who like Magnus Maximum brought the Roman army in Britain over to the continent. Constantine III fought and defeated the Vandals along the Rhine. It was only when Constantine made his move on Italy that this invading army was able to slip through Gaul and into Spain. It was domestic politics that drove Rome's fate, not the barbarians.
Here, to close a long review, I come back to Burns' survey of the frontier's organization. Remember that provinces are organized into dioceses, which in many ways are self-sustaining. These dioceses are responsible for supplying the border defenses. Within these dioceses are well-organized stockpiles of resources and sources of revenue.
Burns points out that after the Battle of the Frigidus the established, experienced leadership of the Roman Army quickly depleted. Bacurius and Arbogast died at the battle. Rhicomeres died on the way there. Timasius was purged after the death of Theodosius I. Gainas, another important commander who would go on to kill Rufinus in the east, was himself killed around 400. Stilicho and Alaric were survivors with armies to back them, with few competitors. Stilicho died in 408 and Alaric in 411. These commanders needed replacing and the armies need reconstituting.
One aspect of Alaric and his army that Burns abstracts a bit from is its status as a private army under Alaric's command. In a traditional Roman army, including during the Late Roman Empire of Valentinian and Valens, it was customary for individual units within garrisons or field armies to be moved around the frontiers. Although we have historical evidence, like Ammianus Marcellinus' account of when Julian's men in Gaul revolted and raised him to the purple out of a refusal to be moved east to fight against the Persians under Constantius II, that Roman armies were becoming more "local," the archeology shows that these redeployments were actually still quite common up the late 4th century. No one could have conceived of removing a part of Alaric's army and sending it elsewhere. They were Alaric's men, loyal to him, and loyal only to Rome because Alaric found it more profitable to operate within the rules of the game.
In a letter to a local Romano-Gallic aristocrat named Euodius, Sidonius Apollinaris writes a poem at Euodius' request. This poem is meant as an epitaph to a silver basin, which Euodius is presenting to Queen Ragnahilda, wife of the Visigothic King Euric. He notes that the basin will be more valued by the Visigoths than the poem. Euodius is presenting the queen with the gift in an attempt to gain their favor to support his local interests. This letter was written after the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476. It was written in a world of fractured, widely distributed power. It is an extreme away from the monopolization of force that had been achieved by the Romans in Gaul for more than 400 years. This was not the Roman Gaul of 400, but the period between ~410 and 470 was definitely one of transition. More to my point, the distribution of power was becoming for diverse and the market for force more competitive.
It's interesting that the fracturing of the Western Roman Empire happens almost along diocesan lines. Italy and the Alps remain the core of the western empire throughout its decline, and later become the Kingdom of the Ostrogoths. Britain becomes effectively legally independent by 409. As Burns writes, the Goths who sacked Rome are eventually settled in southwestern Gaul and are given legal access to the empire's centralized and organized military resources of the southern Gallic diocese. The pattern is repeated elsewhere. It seems that as the central government lost its monopoly on force, local elites began to carve out their stake in the revenue- and supply-generation game. What seems special about Alaric was that he was one of the first leaders with a private army to accomplish this.
Burns argues that the fast loss of leadership between 390–410 made leadership cadres scarcer, giving them more leverage in the bargaining process with the emperor. Furthermore, leaders had an incentive to capture part of the supply network. Power continued to grow diffuse until, eventually, central authority was irrelevant. The barbarians did not grow strong and defeat Rome. Rather, Rome grew irrelevant and it was the vacuum left behind that allowed for the rise of the Germanic kingdoms.
March 7, 2013
A history buff's book. Very detailed and well reserched. The author is expecting you to know some Roman history, and his take on the policy is very euridite. However, it is not a book for the lay person and does need dedication to finish the book.
A scholary book for historical students of late Roman Empire history
A scholary book for historical students of late Roman Empire history
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